There Is A Sectarian Element In Our Support. Celtic Fans Must, And Will, Stand Against It.

My good friend Ross Taylor wrote an excellent piece this morning in which he lamented the shameful songs some of our supporters sung last night at Dundee. He said some of what I had intended to say myself, because having spent the last few days lashing the Ibrox support for their own disgraceful singing I was not going to stay silent on this.

I don’t want anything to do with these so-called fans.

They don’t speak for me and they do not represent Celtic.

Their sectarianism belongs in the gutter with those who sing songs of hate across the city. Anti-Protestant sentiment is every bit as loathsome as anti-Catholic hate and I abhor it and all decent Celtic fans abhor it.

Ours is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic support.

We are, as has often been stated, a club open to all and if a group of our fans want to start drawing up an exclusion criterion then so be it; but I warn those people that they are ones who will find themselves excluded and driven out.

They are not part of us. Their mentality is the antithesis of what we represent.

Think for a moment of what goes through the minds of these cretins, if indeed anything can be said to go through their minds.

I don’t mind the Papa Franceso chant; I find that one frankly bizarre and think that if these people want to sing about a religious leader that they should do it in the chapel, if most of them could find their nearest one.

But whilst it’s a factional song, that still makes it one you can either join in or not as you see fit and if you don’t mind looking ridiculous to anyone who thinks the whole thing is pretty stupid.

But these folk should get any notion of their thick heads that Celtic is a “Catholic club” because it never has been and never will be, and if you have somehow convinced yourself that it is then you, idiot that you are, you have already swallowed the “two sides of the coin” narrative and you are doing your bit to promote it.

A brazenly anti-Protestant song like Roamin’ In The Gloamin’ is nakedly sectarian and amongst others it discriminates against legions of our own fans and plenty of our ex-players, not to mention – and here comes the rub – our greatest ever manager.

You demented fuckwits.

Is that me spelling it out enough? Is that me making it clear enough?

That’s at the root of what you are doing.

Is it finally getting through to you, you bigoted, shit-kicking backward facing clowns?

You would discriminate against the great Jock Stein.

As to the On The One Road add-on “soon there’ll be no Protestant’s at all” – which is our own version of “up to our knees in fenian blood” – I marvel at the mentality of twisting a song about unity into an anthem of hate, and especially when it was made famous by a band named after a Republican hero who was also a Protestant.

A grasp on history isn’t the only thing that escapes these arseholes.

I know a lot of our own supporters have spent the day emailing the club on this, and asking that something be done about it.

If these goons won’t ditch the vile singing and stop trawling the gutter, then these people need to be removed from our support and the club will have the full support of every decent fan if it sets out to do precisely that.

I said yesterday that if the problems at Ibrox were, as they often claim, confined to a “small minority” then they would be easy to deal with. The yahoos amongst our own support do represent a small minority, and that means the rest of us won’t accept their vile behaviour for very long, and especially not if the club itself is determined to act.

The mainstream media has stayed out of this, for now, but all these idiots have done is give them a chance to conflate our problem with the one at Ibrox so that when they do decide to write about it they present it in the context of a joint problem … but this is our problem and they have their problem and Celtic fans will not be as silent as the fans across the city will.

The people who are speaking out right now are amongst our own, or at least people we would regard as our friends. Jim Spence and Roger Mitchell are not enemies of Celtic by any manner of means, and when they are talking about this we should be listening.

We have a problem here.

I do not believe that we will refuse to face up to it.

Indeed, we can’t afford not to and it’s not who we are anyway.

We are Celtic, and this is not Celtic.

At a time when much of the world is watching us, the world must know that and it will.