Celtic and the victims of abuse can finally move on. Others will wallow in their gutter.

There have been a handful of occasions over the past decade or so when I’ve written about the subject I’m going to tackle in this article.

This will be a very brief piece because the matter has already been covered extensively across the media and on certain fan forums over the last few years. I find it distasteful, at best, to even discuss it in the context of football—it’s not a football story.

Today’s news that the club has settled a number of historic abuse cases is welcome. It’s quite possibly overdue. It satisfies the requirement for justice for victims, but it does not—and will never—satisfy the immense anger and frustration felt by many of those victims.

Their abusers got away with it for too long, and certain people who enabled that abuse are still walking around today with their reputations largely intact.

I’m not going to sugarcoat how I feel about that.

There were people in positions of authority at Celtic a long time ago—including some who even went into business with the very people responsible for this—who, in my view, richly deserved to spend their own time languishing in jail.

And when these people finally shake off their mortal coil and depart this earth, there will be tributes paid to them that they don’t deserve. I won’t be joining in because I simply wouldn’t be able to stomach it.

These people were not representative of our club although they were self-styled custodians of it, but their first loyalty was always to themselves and their small circle of friends.

The idea that they ever truly cared about anything else has been rendered ridiculous by the passage of time and by events, both distant and more recent. Some of these people nearly brought this club to the brink of insolvency. This was an even greater offence against its name and history.

I understand that there are people who suffered and who now want vengeance. That is a perfectly human response to pain. What I don’t understand is how some of them could have aligned themselves with the scum of the earth—people who merely want Celtic to suffer because they hate our club.

I don’t accept that there was any need for them to embrace our enemies in the way they have. I don’t accept their justification for wallowing in the filth, for aligning themselves with bigots, racists, and sectarians in the manner that some of them have.

When I think about this, I think about Trump and the victims of Bill Clinton who sat beside him at that second debate against Hillary. I don’t care how right they believed they were—you do not sit beside a misogynist, a rapist and an abuser of women on an industrial scale, just to protest how another man treated you or what you think his wife knew or did not know.

None of those people retained a shred of credibility after that, and some of the people who suffered here have embraced similarly loathsome characters. They don’t have any credibility left either.

For too many years now, this has been the dark obsession of certain people. And, as with everything else they do, they indulged in numerous fantasies about how this was going to end. They had a vested interest in certain outcomes. I’ve researched all those possible outcomes thoroughly.

I always knew how this would end.

I always knew it would end in the manner it has—with a settlement on this scale.

For four or five years, since this issue’s been live, I’ve known the average out-of-court settlement in cases like this. It’s easy to find out. The people dreaming of American-style payouts and multi-million-pound awards per victim were howling at the moon, as they usually do.

Now, you may debate the rights and wrongs of this. You may debate, and are entitled to debate, what you think an appropriate level of compensation for a lifetime of suffering should be. But that doesn’t change how the law defines these things. It doesn’t change what the courts expect and grant in these cases, and therefore, it does not change what the average out-of-court settlement is.

It’s low. It’s pathetically low. It always has been.

That’s why, whenever I heard talk that Celtic was hoarding all this money to pay out massive sums, I dismissed it as largely ignorant rubbish—because that’s exactly what it was.

The idea that this was going to destroy our club in the way Rangers was destroyed was always ridiculous. It was sheer fantasy spun on the Ibrox fan forums and fed to them by people who I am certain knew better.

On the very few occasions I’ve written about this subject—such as when the club first opened talks to settle this—I was confident in predicting that there would be no payouts in the tens of millions.

It was never going to happen like that. The people arguing otherwise weren’t doing so out of any regard for the victims. They were doing so because that’s what they wanted to happen.

Likewise, blaming Celtic for dragging this out was and is a wholly false argument. It was not only lazy journalism for the most part but also a tactical ploy by the lawyers representing the victims.

Celtic’s insurers handled this—not Celtic.

It was the insurers and their legal team who most likely set out the defence.

And I still believe that had this gone to court, the outcome would have been 50-50.

Vicarious liability is incredibly hard to prove, and the fact that this was a class action made it even tougher to win. In some of these cases, the actual evidence would not, on its own, have stood up in a claim hearing.

That’s why the law firm responsible decided to try embarrassing Celtic in the media as much as possible—to force a settlement.

Their case was never as strong as they made it out to be.

And I bear no ill will towards them for that. That’s standard practice in any case like this. They’re representing their clients and using every means at their disposal, and that was one of the most expedient ways to do so. I found their statement today to be broadly in line with what one would expect from a legal firm that has won its clients a settlement—while reminding myself that a hefty chunk of that settlement is going into their own pockets and not those of the victims.

That’s something people don’t like to talk about or acknowledge; it’s not polite. But it’s a fact nonetheless.

What you’ll get over the next few days and weeks, no doubt, is an outpouring of hypocrisy from fans across the city, claiming that this somehow dodges justice.

But this is exactly what they’ve been calling for the whole time—for our club to get together with the other parties involved and settle this matter.

Now that we have, how are they going to spin it so that we’re somehow an evil institution for doing exactly that?

The simple fact is that a lot of people who never cared about the victims have been banging the drum for them all these years because they wanted Celtic to suffer. It was never about seeing justice done.

Justice has already been done, over and over again, in courtrooms, trials, and hearings. Most of the people responsible for these crimes have been convicted.

One of the most tiresome arguments from the vultures who have been feeding on this for years is that there has been some sort of institutional cover-up—that the media won’t talk about it and that the authorities don’t want to confront it. It’s absolute nonsense.

If the media weren’t touching it, how do these people even know about it? They know because the coverage has been relentless, wall-to-wall, every time a court case has come up. If there was some grand cover-up, how come so many people have gone to court and been convicted?

This has lived in the diseased imaginations of those who hate Celtic for far too long. Today is their reckoning as well as the victims’.

Because without this, their lives will be empty. They’ll have to find some new obsession, some new sick fantasy where Celtic is annihilated. Some of them are already clamouring for sporting sanctions—for what, exactly? That’s where the real motivation becomes clear.

If we had been docked points, or stripped of trophies, these people wouldn’t give a damn about the victims anymore. That would be their measure of “justice.” That would satisfy them.

Comparisons between this and their own former club’s actual sporting offences don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny and even bringing up sporting sanctions in a case like this is depraved in itself. What punishment would bring justice to the victims?

None. The only people who would benefit from that are those who see this as a chance to hurt our club. That is not justice. This is nothing more than cheap point-scoring at the expense of people who have suffered.

These are people who have climbed onto the backs of victims just to crow about how superior they are. Ask them about the cases involving their own club, and watch their outrage vanish as they trot out pitiful excuses.

Our club has settled with victims. Their club never will. You want to talk about a “separate entity” smokescreen? It doesn’t get much better than “Our club, built on the Survival Lie, isn’t the one that did that—that was the dead club.”

There was no concern for victims then. No moral outrage. No calls for their club to take responsibility. It’s the opposite of all those things. And that’s how you know these people never cared—never have and never will.

That’s why it’s so frustrating that some of the victims have aligned themselves with people who have an agenda that has nothing to do with justice.

I get angry writing about this subject—you can probably tell.

I agree with every voice raised today saying our club has done the right thing; it’s important too to realise that, in fact, this settlement has happened a mere seven years after a change in the law which allowed for redress in historic abuse cases.

Those who claim we’ve dragged this out for decades are full of it, or they don’t know the law. The change was introduced in 2017. Until then, there would have been no legal case to answer.

Celtic first spoke of the Boys Club as a separate entity, after legal advice to that end, in 2018.

The first cases weren’t filed until 2020.

The class action wasn’t set in motion until 2022.

Celtic made their first settlement offer in 2024.

Far from it taking decades, the club has settled this matter in a handful of years, and in fact these aren’t even the first cases where we did pay an out of court settlement.

I wish the law had been able to go after those who protected the abusers, the ones who knew and let it happen. Those people belong in jail, and I wouldn’t shed a single tear if they spent their last years in a six-by-eight cell.

Those people know who they are.

I don’t know how they carry the shame of it.

But I do know that shame does not belong on the shoulders of a single person at Celtic Park today. The disgrace is not theirs, but it has been their burden to carry.

Justice moves slowly. It always has, and it always will. And I’m glad that it does.

Because the core principle of our justice system is that the accused gets a fair hearing, and no individual or institution is condemned without due process.

Due process here has been complicated—by the law, the difficulty of establishing facts in some cases, the intransigence of insurance companies that don’t want to pay a penny, and all the other complexities that kept this stuck in the mud.

This was always much more complicated and difficult to navigate – and for all that, it moved more swiftly – than many people have tried to portray.

The media—utterly incapable of handling complexity or nuance—was never going to get it right. The Ibrox fan forums and the gutter rats who have used this as a stick to beat us were never interested in getting it right. And the legal firm representing the victims was always going to pursue this as aggressively as possible, even if that meant oversimplifying the issues and painting Celtic in the worst possible light.

Today, it’s over. We haven’t reached settlements in every case yet, but that will happen over the next few weeks. By the time it’s done, we will have finally put an end to a saga that has gone on for far too long. People should remember that this goes back 40 or 50 years, and many of the perpetrators are already dead—some of them, deservedly having spent their last years in prison.

For the victims, no measure of justice will ever erase what happened. And they are the only people who truly matter in all of this.

I can stomach a lot of things, but I cannot stomach hypocrisy. Those who claim to speak for the victims while using this to fuel their own hate are disgusting. They have cynically appropriated suffering to pursue their own dark ambitions.

This day should close the book on them, too.

It takes away their relevance. It removes their reason for being. This is their chance to get a life, to stop wallowing in the sewer. To look in the mirror and realise that their loathing for the rest of the world is really self-loathing.

Will they take that opportunity? I doubt it. You have to want to.

I won’t congratulate Celtic for putting this to bed, but I will say that this is a moment of relief for many of us. A moment of reflection on the nature of the world we live in.

And I wish the victims—every single one of them, even those who have aligned themselves with some pretty horrible people—nothing but the best for the rest of their lives. I hope, for most of them, this helps them rebuild their lives or at least make the best of what they can.

This is not a proud day. It is not a good day. It is a necessary day. And it has been necessary for a long time. This club can finally put this matter to rest, and the victims too.

This is justice. It is not perfect, but what in this world is?