Menace

 

                                                               Menace

This year marks the centenary of one of the most scurrilous documents ever produced by an organisation in Scotland. The sentiments it expressed would be labelled as racist and sectarian today and would doubtless cause a national outcry. It described one group in Scottish society as a ‘menace’ and labelled them as feckless drunkards, responsible for crime, financial imprudence and stated that they were out  to supplant the native Scottish population. It also suggested that it was part of a conspiracy to subvert Scotland’s Presbyterian values. The solution the document proposed was to give jobs in public works exclusively to native born Scots and look to deport many of incomers back to their own country.

Perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of the document was that it wasn’t produced by some far-right, racist cranks but by the Church of Scotland’s, church and nation committee and presented at the 1923 General assembly. The ‘menace’ they so vilified was of course the Irish Catholic population living in Scotland at that time. The report was entitled; ‘The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality’ and it took until 2002 before the Kirk formally apologised and acknowledged that it was racist, sectarian and far from the teachings of Christ they profess. The Convenor of the Church and Nation Committee in 2002 said he was ‘ashamed at how badly we got it wrong,’ and took steps to work with the Catholic church in Scotland to combat bigotry together.

Of course, we must be careful to judge people against the context of their times. The 1920s saw the emergence of overtly racist and fascist ideologies across Europe and America. The eugenics movement, which was born in the late nineteenth century, had been embraced by many by the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity. They believed the use of methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion would rid society of individuals deemed by them to be unfit. These ideas seem absurd today as we have a better understanding of the effects of poverty and deprivation on human behaviour, but they held considerable sway in the 1920s and would sink to their nadir in the moral cesspit of Nazi Germany.

In the Scotland of a century ago though, it still should still have been possible to conclude that drunkenness and crime wasn’t confined to the Irish community and that cramming people into the slums of industrial cities would impact on the behaviour of some. One Kirk minister even argued that the higher proportion of Catholics in prison was clear evidence that they were more prone to criminal behaviour. No notice was paid to the social conditions many of them endured a century ago.

As recently as 2001, Catholics made up 28% of the prison population of Scotland despite being just 16% of the population. The causes of this are easy to discern as the 2011 census tells us that 23% of Catholics live in deprived areas whilst the average for Scotland is 12%. Crime and all manner of social ills fester in poverty. The real issue as always, isn’t religion, but deprivation. The fact that societal attitudes kept the children of the Irish diaspora in the poorer section of society, merely exacerbated the problems of poverty, poor health and lower life expectancy.

Education was for many the chief driver of self-improvement and social advancement. The founder of Celtic FC, Brother Walfrid, was so keen to get Catholic children into school that he literally fed them. He knew that education was the way out of the poverty trap and that even after the 1872 education Act, which made primary education mandatory, many children didn’t attend school because they had some form of work to attend.

The great travesty of the 1872 Education Act was the manner in which it was implemented in Scotland. The powers that be specified that religious education in the new Board Schools would be of a kind designated by the Church of Scotland. The struggling Catholic school sector stayed out of the Board system because of this and Catholic parents were forced to pay rates to build and maintain schools which for reasons of conscience they would never use. Simultaneously they tried to support their own schools as best they could. This injustice continued for 46 years until the 1918 Education Act brought them into local government control. Ironically the bigots in Scottish society saw the ascension of Catholic schools into the state system as ‘Rome on the rates’ apparently blind to the injustice which had gone before.

James Breen was a leading Catholic educator of the first half of the twentieth century. He worked at Our Lady’s High in Motherwell among other schools, but is best remembered as heat teacher of St Patrick’s High school in Coatbridge. The town was 52% Catholic then and Mr Breen noticed that local banks never employed any trainees from his school. He visited every major bank in the town and shamed them into ending their petty embargo. He also recalled a group of his pupils visiting an engineering works in the town, thinking it wise to have them think of a skilled trade. The boys, dressed smartly in their uniforms, returned to school having been spat on by some of the workers in the works.

There is mountain of anecdotal evidence about such barriers being put in people’s way, especially from the older generation. Some occupations, such as the police force, were notoriously difficult places for Catholics to advance. Much has changed over the years and most Scots find those attitudes from the past to be embarrassing and medieval. There is however, still a blindness to anti-Catholic sentiments when they are expressed in public arenas such as Orange Parades or football matches. Could we envisage for a moment a society where thousands sang about being ‘up to our knees’ in Muslim  or Jewish blood?  Yet it passes without comment when Catholics are the target of such vitriol.

There seems a reluctance to antagonise or challenge the last bastions of bigotry in our country and to delude ourselves that it’s just uncouth football fans posturing and both sides are as bad as each other. A few journalists over the years have had the moral fibre to call out the unacceptable poison in our midst but the majority shy away from the belligerent minority who keep it going. The challenge is for the tolerant majority in all communities to make such behaviour socially unacceptable. The sporting and law enforcement agencies should also do as much as they can to eradicate bigotry but laws alone will never end it, that takes a change of mindset and attitude which some will never attain. Generational problems need generational solutions and we should start by educating our children about the evils of prejudice.

Scotland has been on a journey in the century since the Kirk produced its infamous report entitled, ‘The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality.’ Religion has ceased to be an important facet in the lives of many Scots but echoes of the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic rhetoric of 1923 are still heard, albeit at a much lower-level. Those who sang the overtly racist, ‘Famine Song’ in recent years, which invited those of Irish extraction to ‘go home’  are the tail end of an intolerance which has a long history in this land. Once that sort of nonsense is ended for good, we’ll know that the ‘menace’ of bigotry is at an end. Sadly, it seems a hard dragon to slay, but we keep trying anyway. We owe it to our children to build a better country than that.