The Scottish Government intends to do SFA about anti-Irish racism.

I want to show you something that dropped into my comments earlier this week, and you may have missed it because a lot of people don’t read the comments, just the articles. But this is important, and I asked for permission to publish it.

It was a message that one of our regular contributors sent to the Scottish Government on the issue of the Ibrox fans and their behaviour, and I’m going to publish his email to them first. Then I’m going to show you what they sent back to him. I want you to read it, because it matters.

This is from a long-time friend of the site, Henry Monaghan, and it was sent to the First Minister’s Office.

Dear First Minister, first of all let me say that I am an SNP supporter and intend to vote SNP at the upcoming elections

Given that, I am very disappointed to see that once again a complete term of the Scottish parliament is approaching and once again nothing has been done to tackle the age-old scourge of anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic sectarianism.

I say nothing because the singing at Ibrox on the 8th of March, encouraged by the playlist of the Ibrox club and the week previously in the same fixture, beamed around the world, shows that Scotland has no plans for dealing with the ingrained scourge that has blighted Scotland for centuries.

Now as we approach yet another season of sectarian hate marches all over Scotland, that heighten the abuse and bile that Scotland’s Catholics and Irish citizens face every year, I find myself wondering if we would tolerate it against any other race or religious group in the country.

As a new joint working group is announced to combat anti-Semitism, I wonder what it will take for a government to seriously deal with the far more vocal and volatile anti Catholic and anti-Irish hatred that plagues Scotland to a bigger degree than any other reported hate crime in Scotland.

Why give my vote at every election hoping for a political party to take this problem seriously and then see it buried while once again other hate crimes seem to be taken more seriously and have politicians jumping through hoops to be seen to join in with it?

No ethnic or religious group should suffer abuse and violence in 2026 in this country but there certainly seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to governmental action.

Why are the Orange Order allowed to pollute our streets every year with their anti Catholic/Irish hatred, with the disgusting behaviour of the followers allowed to get away , literally, committing hate crimes, while police escort them in commission of said crimes?

Why are the (Ibrox) football club allowed every year to pollute the TV screens of the world with their fans obvious hatred of the Irish and Catholics of Scotland and nothing is done about it?

It shouldn’t take a riot by (their) fans to focus the eyes of the police and government on what the problems could be.

I am by no means saying that the fans of other clubs are innocent but the sheer amount of hate crimes committed by (the Ibrox) fans every week could be stopped in a couple of weeks by targeted arrests and shutting of stands that house (these) fans.

UEFA enforced it for a while and the sectarian and racist singing was virtually eradicated at Ibrox nearly overnight.

Why can the Scottish government not say to the SFA and SPFL that it is now time to tackle this scourge head on?

Instead, we get the ridiculous sight of the press, radio and TV commentators falling over themselves to play the “ones as bad as the other” playbook that we have seen in Scotland every year.

Honesty is finally required. The time to deal with Scotland’s most ancient hatred is now, not ignore it again and kick it down the road.

If 50,000 people where singing fuck the Jews, Muslims , Hindus or any other religious group or race every week and hate marches are organized against them under the guise of religious freedom then it would be dealt with instantly, no waiting. Instead, it seems to be “oh it’s only the Catholic and Irish, we can ignore it”.

The time is now, let’s get this dealt with before Reform Ulsterise and sectarianize Scottish politics as the Tories have done and which Labour flirted with, or the SNP will lose the votes of many Irish descendants and Catholic voters, as we see no advancement in dealing with these issues.

Yours faithfully Henry Monaghan

I found myself nodding in agreement with virtually every word of that. We’ve written similar things on this blog before. We’ve had similar discussions on this blog before about what needs to be done and how it should be done.

Where Henry goes a step further is in suggesting that this be tackled as a societal issue and not merely a football one. I agree with that completely, which is why the reply he received to his excellent email is so disappointing and, in fact, pretty shocking.

Dear Henry,

Thank you for your email to the First Minister regarding the scenes and chants being sung at the Glasgow derby match. The First Minister receives a large volume of correspondence, and as I work in the Safer Communities division I have been asked to reply.

The Scottish Government condemns all threatening, offensive or bigoted behaviour wherever it takes place. There is no place for racism of any form at football or anywhere else in society. The Scottish Government continues to support interfaith engagement and unequivocally condemns hatred which targets any of Scotland’s communities, including the Irish and Catholic communities.

As your email points out, more needs to be done. Issues seen at football have long been established and acknowledged. While the majority of football supporters are well-behaved, there is clearly still a significant problem which all of those with an ability to influence and to change must contribute to eradicating.

The Scottish Government has been consistently clear that issues at football should be addressed by those running the game. It has been encouraging to see the SPFL using sanctions for behaviour at the League Cup semi-finals and final in the last year. UEFA have made their position clear where racist singing is concerned, we believe that the SFA and SPFL should be taking their lead from this.

The right to peaceful public assembly and freedom of expression are important rights that the Scottish Government is committed to uphold. The right to peaceful public assembly and expression should never be used to justify any form of hateful, violent, intimidating or otherwise criminal behaviour.

We are clear that there is no place for criminality or hate crime on our streets, and fully support Police Scottish Ministers, special advisers and the Permanent Secretary are covered by the terms of the Lobbying (Scotland) Act 2016. Scotland to take appropriate and proportionate action in response to such behaviour. Police Scotland has powers available under the Public Order Act 1986 to deal with any disorder arising and to ensure that public safety and order is maintained, the Scottish Government supports Police Scotland to take appropriate and proportionate action when necessary and when crimes are reported.

Yours sincerely
Stephen Coulter
SCD : Community Safety Unit

That is boilerplate rubbish. It is standardised garbage language used to pass the buck.

The Scottish Government takes no responsibility for any of this?

In short, it is either a police matter or a football matter.

It is not, apparently, a Scottish Government matter, and that is absolutely horrific to read. This level of obfuscation, this effort to shift blame onto others, is not what you expect or want from those representing the government of the day.

I find a lot of that message hypocritical. Some of it is frankly insulting. The section on supporting freedom of speech is laughable, because no government in Western Europe allows hate speech in any meaningful sense. No government in this part of the world allows bigotry to be inflicted on a community to the extent that this one does.

We keep hearing how July marches are cultural expressions. They are sectarian and racist displays.

They put one section of society above others. That is their purpose, after all. They claim the streets on behalf of one social group, and no other social group would be allowed to do that. No other social group would be expected to accept it either.

Hate speech legislation came into force just over a year ago.

Have the authorities used it to prosecute anybody yet? I don’t know, because Police Scotland does not seem interested in enforcing the law.

Before that, we had the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, an appalling piece of legislation that criminalised fans only. If you sang songs of hate at a game, the authorities could punish you, although I don’t recall police wading into crowds to pick people out.

If you sang songs while walking down the street after games, the authorities could punish you, and many people were.

But if you’d sang hate songs during an Orange Walk you were fine.

What a joke this country is.

The final insult here is the attempt to pass this on to football and congratulate the governing bodies for taking a stand.

The governing bodies have taken a stand on flares and smoke bombs. The governing bodies, those same governing bodies praised in that letter, have been stonily silent for decades on the subject that Henry’s email is actually addressing.

The First Minister himself said in the aftermath of the game that it was high time Scotland reckoned with this issue.

Well, it does not appear that Scotland wants to reckon with this issue, and the Scottish Government certainly does not appear to want to reckon with it.

I cannot say this enough times or more clearly: Scottish football will never, ever act on this stuff by itself. That is why it took UEFA to step in 20 years ago to force action where none would otherwise have been taken.

It is absolutely clear that Scottish football would rather pretend this does not exist than do anything that forces it to confront the problem. And so, we remain stuck in this weird limbo where something that would never be tolerated against any other group is tolerated here.

Henry’s point stands, and it’s a point we’ve made here over and over again. No other group in this country lacks the protections that the Scottish Irish and the Scottish Catholics presently lack in practice.

They can pass this on to football all they want but this is a legislative problem.

It is a problem in the law. A problem with the lawmakers.

If Scottish Catholics and the Scottish Irish had the same legal protections as everyone else, or if the authorities actually enforced those protections in our case in the same way they enforce them everywhere else, then you would come much closer to eliminating this problem for good.

What we saw at Ibrox that day, and what we had to listen to for 90 minutes, amounted to an ongoing hate crime carried out by tens of thousands of people. It astonishes me that nobody has acted on that, and that this government appears to have no intention of acting either. And it’s not even just that they have taken no action.

It’s that nobody wants to tell the truth about what happened that day. Nobody wants to say out loud what caused the problems that afternoon.

Sooner or later, someone has to grasp this nettle. Football will not do it. The SFA and the SPFL have no will to tackle this problem.

If they did, they would have tackled it years ago.

For the Scottish Government to keep insisting that football should sort out its own problems, when football so plainly does not want to, is cowardly at best and connivance at worst.

The Scottish Government could legislate this issue almost out of existence right now by introducing strict liability and making it crystal clear what it covers. Their failure to do that is a failure to hold football to account.

Football will not get its house in order unless it is made to. It really is that simple, and that has been known for a long time.

But Henry emailed the Scottish Government and asked what they intended to do, not only about issues within football, but about the wider issue across society. That reply tells you that they intend to do nothing.

They will palm it off to the police, as though the Scottish Government has no influence over Scottish policing. They will palm it off to football, as though football is its own little empire, somehow separate from the law of the land. It is not.

I’ll tell you one way this could be resolved, even short of strict liability; Make institutions responsible for the hate crimes that go on in their house.

In short, if an entity wants to march down the street and chant anti-Catholic and anti-Irish songs, then that institution itself should be liable for prosecution under the current hate crime law, starting with its board of trustees.

If a football club allows tens of thousands of supporters to sing songs every week about being up to their knees in blood, then the institution and those who run it should be liable under hate crime law.

Then you don’t even need to involve football’s authorities. You don’t need to rely on Police Scotland wanting to act. You only need to bring the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to bear.

If they are convinced that an institution is allowing this stuff to go on, then that institution gets prosecuted, and those on its executive become legally liable for what happens within that organisation’s remit. We’ll end this problem the day after the first court case.

We are never going to see anything like that happen unless serious pressure is brought to bear. The media does not want to know. You’ve seen the evidence of that yourselves. What these people have told the Catholic and Irish community in Scotland with that email is simple: you are on your own.

Of all the social groups in this country, we are the ones who do not get proper protection under the law in any practical sense.

That is something all of us are going to have to reckon with together at some point, and we need to think very carefully about the people we vote for if this is the attitude they take.

Because if this is the independent Scotland these people want to build, I want no part of it.

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