The Latest Lennon Scandal Reveals The Lie At The Heart Of The “Old Firm” Blame Game.

There is not a person in Scotland – at least not one who does not work at The Daily Record or at one of the mainstream titles – who is unaware that this weekend the Ibrox fans turned the hatred up to a hundred by singing songs wishing death on the Hibs player Martin Boyle as he lay prone and unconscious on the pitch at the game at Easter Road.

Whilst it’s impossible to say for sure whether or not those who do work in Scotland’s mainstream media heard what was being sung, they may as well all have been deaf because not one of them bothered to report it in any great detail, and even fewer gave it the unequivocal condemnation that it deserves. Jim Delahunt, thank you.

Almost everyone else played their pointless, sordid little game; hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil especially if that involves condemning anything to do with Ibrox.

As messed up as that is, as bad as those people are, I would almost rather have them than those who decided that they would discuss it, but only in a wider context, only if in doing so they could drag Celtic and our fans through the same filthy gutter. Because those people are the bigger problem.

I can’t stand those people, intellectually lazy or simply using us a shield so that Ibrox’s fan base escapes the scrutiny it deserves and the oppobrium it has earned.

Those people who continue to push this “Old Firm” cobblers, this “one side is as bad as the other” bullshit.

Those people and their whataboutery, which is what allows bigots to continue vomiting up their bile, poisoning the game and the culture and the country as a whole. Nothing does more to toxify the debate we need to have than them.

How unfortunate for them that their idiotic remarks to that effect have been put in a very different context by the statement from Dumbarton FC in relation to an incident which happened at East Fife’s ground over the weekend, an incident involving one of their staff.

The matter is being investigated and so it would be unwise to say much more but they reference not only an ongoing police investigation but the statement expresses support for a player and his family.

That player is believed to be Gallagher Lennon, son of Neil Lennon, and if social media claims are even close to being right, he was subjected to the kind of abuse no player ever should be, and his dad with him, by an employee of his own club.

And this is the thing, right here.

This is why this “Old Firm” garbage is as offensive to a lot of us as the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bile which is dumped on our heads morning, noon and night.

This isn’t even confined to the environs of Ibrox itself, this stuff is widespread, it’s everywhere and it’s all day every day and it’s bad enough having to deal with it, and to recognise the painful truth which is that even those not indulging it don’t particularly care. What’s worse, by far, is being told that we, in fact, are part of the problem. That really stinks.

I try not to hate people, but things would be different if I thought this was all mindless yobbery, but it’s not, this is an ideology built on hatred and supremacy and I am fully entitled to loathe those who follow such a creed and I make no apology for doing so.

I feel no sense of embarrassment or shame admitting that.

But I am damned if I’m going to have some clown like McManus tell me that I’m as bad as those people are just because I detest them for how they feel about me. I am not a poisonous person, I am what they force me to be, nothing more.

If they cease behaving that way I will cease despising them for it; it’s as Liam Neeson says in Michael Collins, “I hate them for making hate necessary.”

Lennon did nothing to justify the hatred that was poured on him over the years. His son has done even less. It’s enough for these bastards that he has that second name.

That sets off all the bells and whistles in their heads and for people like McManus to point his finger at us and claim that we’re all the same, that we’re “two heads of the coin” is more than just offensive, it’s an outrage, it’s hateful in its own right, in its ignorance, in its failure to join the dots.

Scotland’s Catholics, and especially those of Irish descent, are fully aware of the country in which we live, what it is and what it tracks back to. For the UK itself is a religious state, with a sectarian constitution and discriminatory policies baked right in.

Twice a year they burn Catholics in effigy on this island, and millions of its citizens celebrate at least one of those occasions with many of them perfectly aware of what it represents.

To be a Celtic fan at all is to inhabit an island surrounded by a sea of bitterness and spite. The reality of this is something we absorb early on and it never leaves us, and how can it when things like this are still commonplace and the media indulges in victim blaming?

But two incidents at the weekend cast the harsh light back into those corners where nobody wants it to shine. Those two incidents highlight Scotland’s Shame, and no damned former player and third-rate hack or anybody else is going to tell me that me and mine carry some of the responsibility for that.

This is where we live, and this will continue to be where we live as long as the gutless frauds and apologists and whataboutery merchants are blaming us for the behaviour of those who chant about being up to their knees in our blood.