There is no need for a ‘songs debate’ because there is no issue about songs among the core base or the club’s support, which is the 60,000 at every home game and the travelling away support. There are no ‘gung ho’ war songs extolling the daring exploits of the IRA being sung at Celtic any more, and if there are, they are very few and far between. The songs sung these days are more commemorative, about the H-Block Martyrs or victims of injustice like Aiden McAnespie. A popular sea shanty by the WolfeTones that contained the old “Ooh Aah…” chant, so despised by the prawn sandwichers, is gradually giving way to a new lyric of “Up The Celts” replacing the old chant. These songs are certainly not hateful or sectarian, nor do they contain discriminatory language. It’s an evolutionary process. The ‘rebel songs’ that were sung on the terraces in my father’s time were no longer sung by the time I was a teenager. The ‘rebel songs’ that were sung when I was a teenager were dying out 20 years ago and you’ll hear very few, if any, of the ‘rebel songs’ of 20 years ago being sung today, give or take a couple of classics that have survived the generations. Songs evolve and move on with the times, so do the fans. The Green Brigade are proof of the progress of Celtic’s fans. They are a fantastic development within the Celtic support . And the club hierarchy and a section of the fans, particularly those with blogband access, don’t know how to deal with it. Broadly speaking the group’s activities are carried out in the spirit of everything that is good about the club and its supporters. ULTRAS NOT HOOLIGANS Opposition to the GB comes mainly from the ‘prawn sandwich brigade’, who apparently also have computers, and who are, like Phil, ‘culturally radical’ and politically liberal only in the general sense. They don’t mind being for the working class, just so long as they don’t have to live among them. It is this element who don’t like radical change among the Celtic supporters. ‘What they do not understand they will attack, what they do not control they will destroy.’ A section of our supporters can’t quite get their heads around the “ultras” phenomenon at the club and they wrongly (but in some cases knowingly and deliberately) equate it with the casuals/hooligan scene. This falsehood is promoted, along with their constructed outrage at ‘incidents’ like Dundee, as the ‘last straw’ on hooliganism, or the rebel songs issue, or the Green Brigade, or whichever other issue or group fits the role of scapegoat. It’s fair to say that the original ultras scene in Italy and Spain pre-dated, but also also mirrored the rise of the football ‘casuals’ in Britain. There is probably a greater affinity between old skool casuals and the original ‘ultra’ than there are links between the modern Ultras phenomenon and present-day football hooligans. Many of these new progressive Ultras groups identify with the politics of the anti-fascist left and other autonomous left political movements. Theirs is not a culture of aggression, however, it is largely defensive actions against fascist aggression that is advocated by them. Ultras groups are in general terms peaceful and co-operative by instinct. They make banners, organise tifo displays and involve themselves in a range of community and social activities, inside and outside of the normal group activities. Participation is encouraged, it is a very open and basically an organically democratic structure. That cannot be said of all ultras groups, particularly those from the political right, whose groups are often run on a strict boss/capo system with decisions made and implemented from the top-down. The Green Brigade are one of the new breed of Ultras groups that takes a progressive left stance and is active against fascism, racism and all forms of discrimination in football. THE SOCIAL PHENOMENON In addition to adding colour and noise to the stadium on a regular basis, the group’s members are also pro-active in a number of other areas of the club’s support; from fanzines and local supporters clubs to the CSA, Celtic Trust, Celtic Graves Society and Fans Against Criminalisation. The group runs an annual ‘anti-discrimination’ football tournament that has included teams from all communities and international visitors. They maintain friendships with politically and socially progressive football supporters groups from all over the world, as well as being one of the founding member groups of Alerta! – The Network of Anti-Fascist Football Fans in Europe. Outside of group activities many of the Green Brigades’ members are active in political, cultural and community organisations. It is a phenomenon on a par with St Pauli, Livorno, Bilbao and other progressive clubs that include within the ranks of its supporters, autonomous groups of politically progressive fans. The only thing that the GB lacks is the bricks and mortar of its own pub, clubhouse, squat or social centre that the fans of other clubs in Europe have acquired as a base for their activities, social gatherings and fundraising. In every other respect they are a fully fledged part of the progressive ‘Ultras’ movement, in practice and in spirit. If examining the Green Brigade from a traditional, academic, sociological perspective, the group must surely be viewed as a positive social phenomenon that provides a range of progressive, positive activities for young people, mainly, but not exclusively, centring around their support for and identification with The Celtic Football Club. Viewed from that perspective – and in spite of the club’s desperate attempts to control the group, shouldn’t the club (and even the police and other authorities) be welcoming an organisation like the Green Brigade? The alternative to an organically democratic, bottom-up organisation like the Green Brigade is a support controlled from top to bottom by fear; with grassroots fan organisations replaced by arselicking ‘bosses unions’; and ‘official’ club campaigns specifically designed to involve as few people as possible other than hand-picked ‘fans’ and the ‘professionals’ employed to run them. These are the wider implications of Phil’s, and by implications the PLC’s ‘Brave New Celtic’, it is a commercially driven vision for Celtic that puts the drive for wealth and power in football above the interests of its supporters. It fears any alternative to the prescribed way forward, which is why the political autonomy of ‘Plebs’ like the Green Brigade, who have brought back the thunder and the colour to Celtic Park, is to be undermined and disrupted by club and the police, whose approach is based on outdated profiling methods to determine potential troublemakers at football and a public order act that gives them free reign to criminalise a whole section of youth who follow football in Scotland. WE ARE ALL THE GREEN BRIGADE Celtic is the 60,000 in that stadium at every home game, Celtic is the travelling away support who will be there in rain, snow or hail to support the bhoys. Celtic is the Green Brigade who enthuse the whole stadium with their banners, tifo choreographies, songs and chants. And it doesn’t matter if you’re watching in Dublin, Belfast, London, Paris, Johannesburg, Sydney, Oslo, Hamburg, Toronto, San Francisco, New York or Boston, the Celtic support is a worldwide family and the GB represent all of us who would love to be there to share in the noise and atmosphere that they create. The many Celts around the world gathered around big screens joining in with their chants and their songs. The ones who can’t be there. The Green Brigade should not be excluded by the club, rather they should be embraced by it, we should all as Celtic supporters be proud of them. They are after all what this club is all about. “Football,” said the great Jock Stein, “is nothing without the fans.” Those who were recently fretting after the ‘well-earned reputation’ of our fans would do well to remember that it is the work of groups like the Green Brigade which greatly contribute to that good reputation. As the great Bill Shankly once said of the Celtic Football Club, “It’s a form of socialism, without the politics of course.”
Ever since crowds started attending Celtic games, the Celtic crowd have been acclaimed For its singing. Over the years and especially in the early 1960's Celtic made major changes to its range of songs. The Celtic fans stopped singing Roman Catholic hymns And over the years the consequences have been loud protests from people who attend Celtic Park once a season or less, to get the Celtic crowd to abandon more of its tradition And for what reason,that , we don't offend a fourth tier club's fans or police people whose ears are groomed to only hear Irish songs.
