Yesterday was a bit of a disaster in terms of getting online – I didn’t manage to get it sorted out until maybe eight o’clock last night – and so I missed the initial furore over Paddy Power’s appalling piece of excreta on Scott Brown’s coming testimonial match against the Republic of Ireland,
I read it at around ten and was pretty miffed when I went to bed. Not because of the article itself, although it is staggeringly ignorant, badly written, crass, offensive and at times incoherent. I was miffed that it echoed sentiments we hear often and which I’ve lamented on this blog many, many, many times.
Paddy Power’s website is filled to the brim with clickbait nonsense, very little of which ever found an audience. How proud they must be of yesterday.
How happy It must make them to have made a splash.
They are an Irish company. The writer appears to be a supporter of their national team, so I am loathe to call it a piece of anti-Irish hate. But there is hate in the article just the same, hate for our club foremost. It demands a response, as bitter as it makes me to even acknowledge it.
Did they know they were giving a voice to anti-Irish bigotry in Scotland, using its language, using its feeble arguments? If they did then the article is all the more scandalous, all the more outrageous. If they didn’t then the editorial team on that website and the writer in particular are too stupid to have jobs. The stink of Follow Follow and Vanguard Bears wafted off that article in sickening waves.
And their fans and their forums rejoiced at it. They circulated it far and wide. It could have come from one of their own bloggers, the bile in it was so extreme.
At the centre of it is a ludicrous sentiment; that Celtic is a Scottish club with no connection to Ireland at all. The complete lack of knowledge betrayed by that assertion is difficult to credit.
The point about the game being an “IRA fest” was scandalous and not only an insult to Celtic but, from a guy who supports their national team and is, thereby, presumably Irish himself, it speaks to a kind of self-loathing about his own county and its history that in Scotland we call The Cringe. Maybe that article was therapy for him. I hope it didn’t work.
Why is that some of us honour the sacrifices of his countrymen more than he does?
I could be wrong of course; perhaps he’s not Irish. And if he’s not then that’s even worse because it does make the article a piece of sectarian, anti-Irish hatred whether he realises that or not. Paddy Power certainly should have.
They are an organisation that likes to stir the pot. But this went way beyond their usual self-promotion and veered into a spiteful, ill-judged rant and an attack on all of us, and any Celtic fan who uses their services from this moment on is every bit as big a mug as they think you are. There are over a hundred online betting sites out there; Bet365 is a personal favourite of mine as regular readers will be aware. With so much choice on offer, why do business with an organisation that scorns you so openly?
Celtic ought to have a serious word in their ear as well, but that’s the club’s business.
That article scraped all the gunge from the bottom of the barrel and then went right through it, headed for China. Shame on the writer and the editorial team. Shame on Paddy Power for their echoing the sentiments of Scotland’s vilest sub-sect of the population.
Join the best Celtic Facebook Group there is right here.
Like our Facebook page and comment on and share the articles by clicking here.
You can also follow us on Twitter at @The_Celtic_Blog