Not Fade Away

 

Not Fade Away

May is almost upon us and it’s a month I look on fondly. Not only is the Scottish winter well and truly over but it is also the time when all the great issues in Scottish football are resolved and the trophies handed out. As a child, it was also the month of Mary and my memories of school include singing songs such as ‘I’ll sing a hymn to Mary’ and the ever popular, ‘Month of Mary.’ It was an optimistic month, a time to contemplate the imminent arrival of summer and warmer, lighter days.

May is also the month that a baby boy was born to John and Elizabeth Kerins in Ballymote, County Sligo in Ireland. The year was 1840 and population of the country had reached a peak of 8.2 million. It seems astonishing, but Ireland’s population then was more than half of that of England, which stood at 15.9 million. (Today Ireland has in total of 6.8 million while England’s population is almost nine times higher at 56 million.) For the poor, in a country treated as a colony and exploited by its more dominant neighbour, life was precarious indeed. Only the abundance of the potato crop allowed this high population to thrive but of course, that abundance was shattered by the arrival of a fungus like organism called Phytophthora infestans which caused great swathes of the potato crop to rot in the fields. As always, the poor were to suffer most.

A few contemporary records survive from County Sligo to give us a flavour of conditions in the county during the years of the great hunger.  On 24 March 1847 Reverend Michael Spelman wrote to the Relief Commission stating that the dead in his parish are being buried without coffins and requests coffins should be provided in future.

"In this single parish (Geevagh, Co.Sligo) comprising a population of 1,000 souls, no less than eighty-seven persons have actually died of starvation within the last twelve days. Many are buried without coffins. This fact is indisputable and as I feel convinced that numbers will have to be interred with no other covering but the rags they wore when living.’’

This lamentable scene was played out all over country. Sligo was to lose fully a third of its population to death or emigration in the famine years. Imagine if you will, a virtually full Celtic Park, that is the number of people who perished or left County Sligo in the hungry years. 57,790 people are recorded as having died or emigrated between 1847-52 from just one of Ireland’s 32 counties.

It is recorded in much detail that the British government’s response to a catastrophe unfolding in a part of the United Kingdom was callously inadequate. Ireland and Britain were unified under an 1801 Act of Parliament and it’s clear that the unified parliament in London treated the Irish as less than equals. Charles Trevelyan believed the famine to be God’s plan to reduce the surplus population and that to interfere would amount to a sin. His attitude to the Irish would be considered racist in today's terms and it was  ominous that a man holding such beliefs was put in charge of famine relief. Ships full of grain, oats and livestock continued to leave Ireland throughout the famine period  and evictions of poor peasants continued on a grand scale. It was a recipe for disaster.

There are no contemporary records to help us discover how John and Elizabeth Kerins managed in those dark times but they did  keep their two sons alive through this seminal period of Irish history. The family would have seen the horrors unfolding around them in rural Sligo and doubtless worried for their future. It is known that their youngest son, Andrew, moved to Scotland where he worked as a teacher. Like many, he would rely on the Church to supply him with an education denied to so many of the poor. The teaching orders of the church welcomed dedicated and hard-working young men like Andrew Kerins and he became a Marist Brother.

The Irish had arrived in Scotland in huge numbers, driven by hunger and destitution at home and drawn by the industrial revolution which promised the opportunity of work. From the docks and factories of Glasgow, to the jute mills of Dundee, they filled the most menial and lowest paid jobs. They helped build the canals, bridges and roads of Scotland and were exploited as cheap, disposable labour. They lived in the poorer quarters of Scottish towns and cities and suffered from the appalling social conditions of Victorian Scotland.

The overcrowded, insanitary slums of Glasgow they inhabited were among the worst in Europe. It is recorded that over 11,000 people died in Glasgow in 1888. Of these, almost 5000 were children under 5 years old. There was no NHS then, no social housing and only charity for those who fell on hard times. The Catholicism of the majority of the Irish in Scotland added another layer to the distrust and often naked hatred they endured. It was into such conditions that Andrew Kerins chose to work.

 

Yet despite the hardship and hostility, in the east end of Glasgow, in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, in Lochee by the Tay and scores of other places they carved out a life for themselves. The new sport of football offered them a way to integrate more into Scottish society and as Brother Walfrid proved in the foundation of Celtic, it offered a way of raising funds to alleviate the poverty and need he saw around him on a daily basis.

Celtic’s most famous captain, Billy McNeill, once said that there was a fairy tale aspect about the club. Who could have envisioned that on a bright, sunny day in 1967 that a club born into the poverty and squalor of Victorian Scotland’s poorest community would become Champions of Europe? As McNeill held that gleaming trophy above his head in the Lisbon sunshine, he was cheered by thousands who had made their way to Portugal to support Walfrid’s side. Many of those supporters would have been the grandchildren of the Irish who arrived in Scotland with nothing and endured much hardship and discrimination to make a better life for their children.

That is the triumph and significance of Celtic’s victory in 1967.  Celtic is a visual reminder of a people who refused to fade away, to integrate to the point of invisibility. The human spirit can fight back from hardship and oppression and that a people can rise and take their place in the world with dignity and pride.

So as May begins tomorrow and we remember the birth of Andrew Kerins on the 18^th of the month, it would be somehow fitting if the team he founded to brighten the lives of a downtrodden community once more fought back to become the champions we know they are.