Nobody ever suggested that things were not difficult willis. It has been suggested that Scotland was a hostile place. The social section of that wikipedia entry details difficulties up to the 1840's. The blight was at its worst in 1847 and it was following that when mass immigration took place. Imagine all these low paid workers competing for jobs with folk who came from a foreign land, funny beliefs and prepared to do your job for less than you. You'd be hostile too. You'd demonise them and try and try and protect your right to your job....Right? That is all that article says. That frames where Celtic FC come from.
No quite simply because this is 2012, they were idiots then and people who believe its the polish who are out to get the Scottish now are idiots now, the era doesn't matter. If the Scottish can get over how bad things where during that period of Glasgows history i don't understand what gives Irish the right to drag it on for centuries when the history books clearly suggest that all of Glasgows underclass suffered at some point or another, not just Irish Immigrants. Pud feel free to delete my posts to remove clutter from this thread.
Nobody is dragging anything on. The article is about the history of the Celtic boardroom. The article accurately frames the situation in Glasgow at the time. The Irish community was met with hostility. History books will tell you this. You refute this and I don't know why. Saying "everyone had it rough" does not explain it.
Rebelbhoy seems some of the bears are having a difficulty with the truth. They are trying to gang up on you. It is the case that they cannot stand the truth. I suppose the fact that the Shipyards in Govan and Belfast were staffed by 95% Protestant and if a Catholic managed to get a job in either the existing workers made it so difficult that often the Catholic was forced out. This helped to ensure conditions were eased considerable for Protestants.
WTF? All this because they used the word hostile?? If you read the whole article you'd see it was about Celtic moving from a charity based local club to being over run with businessmen looking to make a quick pound.
What part of my original post gave any indication that i read any of the article, in fact I'm fairly sure i stated somewhere along the lines that the i never read the article and had no intention of reading it I WAS talking about their inaccurate history page. WAS being past tense
No we concluded that you know next to nothing about Scottish history, don't be sad though you know enough about Irelands.
did we conclude that? You posting links to things that are totally irrelevant aids this conclusion in what way? Come on Willis. Stop being stupid.
are you now suggesting that you made yourself look stupid so you could embroil yourself in an argument with me? How am i supposed to discern when you are genuinely being stupid from when you are just pretending to be stupid?
New edition of the e-zine out now. please log in to view this image http://www.talfanzine.com http://www.talfanzine.com/Ezine/Tal Ezine no.4.pdf
All four issues of the Ezine have now been uploaded to our page at: http://www.scribd.com/collections/3456183/TAL-Ezine There's also 14 back issues of the fanzine on that site. http://www.scribd.com/collections/2894881/TAL-FANZINE-ARCHIVE Some of the centrefolds are crackers
Read it if you like In Defence of the Green Brigade The Bigger Picture The first TAL Blog of the New Year certainly proved to be controversial due to its questions surrounding the political ‘bona fides’ of the rebel fantasist. There were some near-the-knuckle swipes taken at MacGiollabhain which might be viewed as gratuitous by some and for that reason we amended the blog accordingly. The quips about Phil’s mental health are digs he can take, he gives enough out, he should expect to get a few back. In the meantime, we will park questions about Phil’s political past and personal eccentricities to one side for now, as a reply from him appears unlikely. We can perhaps shed some light as to why we believe that his and, more importantly, the PLC’s vision of Celtic’s future, despite its allusions to our Irish heritage, will move us farther away from the ideals of Brother Walfrid and the club’s founding fathers than we have ever been at any point in our history. GLOBAL CAPITAL V LOCAL AUTONOMY Phil MacGiollabhain often waxes lyrical about how his grandfather’s people ran with the IRA flying columns and were founders of Fianna Fail in Mayo. Maybe it’s the Fianna Fail’er in him – that preparedness to forego principle in favour of political expediency – that brings him along the well-trodden path of other ‘rebels-turned-rascals’ attempting to politically sanitise and socially cleanse the Celtic support? In his thinly veiled attacks on the Green Brigade, patronising them with false praise in one sentence and then in another implying that the group were associated with drunken anti-social behaviour and fighting at Dundee. This became a rallying point for MacGiollabhain and his merry band of middle-class, holier-than-thou ‘rebels’ and foaming-at-the-mouth anti-republicans and anti-politicos. There is a method to the madness. Phil has realised that his personal vision of the club’s commercial future is not mutually exclusive to that envisaged by the club itself. Maybe Phil fancies his chances as journalistic cheerleader and PR consultant in the club’s drive to open up new markets in terms of sponsorship and advertising and developing the Celtic name as a ‘global brand’ to rival that of the Manchester United’s and Barcelona’s. That is Phil’s (and the PLC’s) ‘bigger picture’, the global capitalist position, if you like. Any which way you look at it, it’s about the accumulation of wealth. It’s certainly not about widening the club’s fan base, because that is more likely to come as a by-product of wider ‘brand recognition’ as a bigger growing concern getting more media coverage. Our fanbase in the USA and Canada is pretty much rooted in Irish America anyway, maybe its full potential has not yet been reached, but this is about big bucks not loose change. As Phil so carelessly let slip in one of his less guarded moments (a slip of the pen that managed to draw some sharp intakes of breath from some of his most fervent supporters) this is about the ‘monetizing’ of An Gorta Mor – the common link that bonds the Irish worldwide – the suffering of millions as the cultural backdrop to a football club’s (and in particular, it’s board and major shareholder’s) insatiable appetite for cash. Phil MacGiollabhain has embraced the global commercial ambitions of Celtic PLC and the price of this ‘rebel’s’ support is permission to add his own little bit of ‘Irish cultural’ branding to it. Is this really the club that Brother Walfrid built? The hullabaloo over a bit of Boxing Day drunkenness at Dens Park was overreaction in extremis. Some Celtic fan blogs shamefully aped the tabloid press in their condemnation of the fans. Whilst we are in no way condoning any anti-social behaviour that did take place, a sense of proportion needs to be applied. It should be remembered that there was a total of 4 Celtic fans arrested as a result of these incidents. One Dundee fan was arrested in an unrelated matter. A total of 5 arrests from incidents that the press described as a ‘mass brawl’ and which the Tayside Police called a ‘riot’. At a third division match involving another Glasgow club, there were 8 arrests in what police described as ‘trouble’. At the most recent Dundee derby match, there was a total of 18 arrests. The same Tayside Police – who claimed that a ‘riot’ was going on when they arrested 4 Celtic fans – congratulated both sets of fans for their ‘good behaviour’. A POLICY OF CRIMINALISATION There is a concerted effort being made to criminalise members of the Green Brigade and other young supporters of the club by the police, who appear to be getting every assistance and encouragement from Celtic’s Security Chief and the PLC board. The recent statement by a GB member with regard to Dundee gave only a brief glimpse of the police harassment of Green Brigade members. The campaign against the group appears now to include the feeding of misinformation about them by the club to ‘onside’ reporters and bloggers. The spread of deliberate lies about the group being responsible for repeated acts of criminal damage in their section at Celtic Park even got as far as players, groundstaff and ex-players. There maybe Celtic fans who will dismiss the GB’s claims of harassment and their claim that they have proof of a wider conspiracy against them that runs from the club board all the way down to the rebel journalist. We haven’t seen the GB’s evidence, but from past experience all we can say is that it rings true to us at TAL. We experienced much of the same treatment by the club and security staff under the stewardship of ‘the bunnet’. For example, during the era of Fergus McCann’s ownership of the club, fan-based anti-racist campaigns were deliberately countered by club-controlled mirror groups. When we set up Celtic Fans Against Fascism, the club responded by setting upBhoys Against Bigotry, a group that McCann privately encouraged to target TAL as an example of ‘bigotry’. When we reacted to the murder of two young Celtic supporters and the maiming of another by rangers-supporting loyalists in establishing theCampaign Against Sectarian Attacks, the club responded by head-hunting a claimed associate of one of the victims as a front person and funding her in setting up the ineffective but media-savvyNil By Mouthcampaign. This is the culmination of the ‘if we cant control you we’ll destroy you’ strategy.TAL was a tiny organisation in comparison to the Green Brigade, which enjoys a popularity among the wider Celtic support that TAL and CFAF could only dream of. The Green Brigade’s strength is in its numbers, but just as importantly, its other strength is in its political autonomy. It is this more than anything that it needs to hold onto. The alternative is a club that denies freedom of expression to its fans. LET THE PEOPLE SING That one of the Celtic fans arrested at Dundee’s charge sheet included a reference to ‘pro-IRA chanting’ was enough to send the Celtic bloggosphere into a round of furious tweets and articles, falling over each other to issue their messages of condemnation. Notwithstanding that a person is innocent until proven guilty, their haste to jump on the bandwagon of condemnation was less than dignified. And from those little acorns grew the giant tree of the ‘songs debate’ – AGAIN. Celtic fans lecturing Celtic fans about ‘the IRA’ and what they should or should not sing. What appears to have been almost completely missed in the rants for and against, is that the songs issue has been a never-ending one at this club. If Jock Stein, our greatest ever manager, couldn’t convince the ‘rebels’ to stop, what makes Phil MacGiollabhain and the PLC board think that they will succeed where better men have failed? As always, it was Jeanette Findlay of The Celtic Trust and Fans Against Criminalisation who made the salient points in reply to the dubious claims made by blogger Angela Haggerty: “As a founding member of Fans Against Criminalisation I have evidence of numerous examples of the disgraceful behaviour of the police in terms of trying to criminalise young Celtic fans for singing (or not as the case may be) songs which you may not like, may not agree with and/or may wish not to be sung at football matches, but which would not be criminal in any normal society. I would like to see someone with your journalistic skills investigating the abuse of their powers by the police which is a far more dangerous development than than the declining incidence of songs about an organisation which has not fired a shot for 17 years and has not existed for almost a decade. In fact, most of the songs in question are not even about the most recent armed struggle against British rule but about the prison struggle or about the War of Independence which led to the establishment of a member EU state, whose participants have been honoured recently by the British Queen. If you bother to follow this story up I would be prepared to bet that there will be no conviction of the person you mentioned unless he was a young boy who has plead guilty through fear or ignorance. You will note that, at no time, have I called on anyone to sing any song or, indeed, not to sing any song. The key issue facing us is not an internal, friendly debate about what we should or shouldn’t sing but the devastating impact on young people of the operation of one of the most illiberal acts this country has seen in a long time. That is what any journalist worthy of the name should be examining.”
