FARE Had Its Eyes On Ibrox In Midweek. The Club Better Hope Their Ears Were Elsewhere.

Yesterday, I did a piece on Celtic fans defending the indefensible. I knew I was going to do this piece today when I sat down to write that yesterday, but one has nothing to do with the other except that I’m going to say this; the songs I wrote about yesterday and which were being sung by a tiny number of fans are an aberration.

Our fans, as a whole, do not do that stuff. Yet even those songs, as loathsome as they are, do not come close to the tirade of hate at Ibrox.

This is not about Whatabouttery.

I think we’ve got some getting our own house in order to do and I’ve said it.

Not just once but many, many times.

But this article is about Tuesday night and the “great atmosphere” everyone is banging on about, and how “Fortress Ibrox” is made by the fans. Yeah, and those same fans pollute the airwaves with a lot of what comes out of their mouths.

There was a lot of it on Tuesday, and the BT Sport microphones got it all.

I heard at least two rousing choruses of “Kill a fenian before I die”, one of their loathsome add-ons to the historically illiterate “Build My Gallows.”

As one guy said to me once, wasps killed more Loyalists than hanging did so what in God’s name is that song about?

There was a time, not that long ago, when the Ibrox fan-base refrained from this stuff because FARE was watching.

The steady creep of these vile and evil songs into their match repertoire has not been missed by anyone over here … the press occasionally tut-tuts its condemnation, but no more than that.

Let’s be honest, even without the add-on, many of their wee party tunes celebrate sectarian murder gangs, and I ask again what I’ve asked before; where is the Celtic fan equivalent of that? Songs about the IRA? Give me a break.

One song – one – The One Road, has a shameful “soon there’ll be no Protestants at all” add-on which makes me want to slap the shit out of anyone singing it. But even it stops well short of wishing to murder another human being.

There is no equivalent of a song which openly boasts about how they are “up to (their) knees in fenian blood.”

Andrew Smith of The Scotsman thought that a dozen or so of our fans singing about dead ex-Ibrox employees was worthy of a mention and a headline in the Ross County match report; the media’s dead silence on the Ibrox “party songs” doesn’t even surprise people anymore; it’s what we’ve come to expect from them.

Where they failed to act, UEFA stepped in before, and prior to kick-off on Tuesday there was an interesting piece on Phil’s site which suggests that those sections of the crowd which expressed their open desire to murder people might have gotten their club in bother.

Because for the first time in a while FARE was at the game … and in spite of one Ibrox fan rep pretty much begging his fellow fans to keep it clean – and how shocking that he has to, in this day and age – a large number of them clearly missed the memo.

If FARE knew what they were listening for, and put that in a report we’ll know soon enough. If they again act when our media plays the deaf card, I don’t think Ibrox should be the only place where serious questions are getting asked.