Opinion: Narrative of sectarianism as an import needs rewritten

Scotland against England, Iran versus the United States, and the rivalry between Argentina and England are just a few examples where historical memory is significant.

Relevant banners, flags and chants at Scottish international matches referencing 14th-century historical events, figures and battles, and a range of other such examples from across the globe reveal the importance of socio-cultural, political memories and histories to numerous football rivalries.

Memory is also contestable terrain, particularly in terms of what is actively remembered, unconsciously forgotten, knowingly discarded or actively produced in relation to publicly-shared and historically meaningful events; and also to how and when such memory might be recalled, abused or celebrated. Some historical selectivity – or “amnesia” – also plays a role when it comes to popular understanding and descriptions of one of the most well-known club rivalries in world football, that between Rangers and Celtic.

Indeed, relevant commentary in Scotland,often created, endorsed and promoted that suggesting that these football clubs and their respective fan bases doms characterise an “importation of Irish problems into Scotland” is a principle example of a level of this amnesia regarding how certain moments, events, and processes in Scottish-British-Irish history have been marginalised in understanding this rivalry.

More critically, the idea of ethno-religious problems being imported into Scotland has also become an essential ingredient in dominant representations of so-called “sectarianism”. Indeed, on many occasions, the two clubs and their supporters are held, equally, “to blame” for this aspect of a once-Christian Scotland’s contemporary issue with this archaic aspect of religion.

In Scotland, the public propagation of narratives that point to Ireland and sectarianism is incessant. For example, in 2011, an MSP stated that sectarianism in Scotland was “born out of the history of Ireland”; and a national broadcaster, in the build-up to one Glasgow derby, said that this was a football match and not a “re-enactment of Irish history”.

A newspaper said ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland was ‘a mindset imported to the west of Scotland’ by 19th century migrants. A letter to another Scottish newspaper was critical of Celtic and Rangers fans for offering their interpretation of ‘500 years of Irish history’. Although celebrating the compulsiveness and enormity of Rangers versus Celtic as ‘Scottish football’s crown jewel’, in the build-up to one derby game a national sports broadcaster stated, that this was a football match and not a ‘re-enactment of Irish history’.

There are many other examples of narratives that construct Irish history as distinct, and mainly a negative series of often violent events somehow and past figures unrelated to events in Great Britain. This is rhetoric that reflects a deep ignorance of the wide-ranging socio-cultural, military, religious and political interweaving that has intimately connected both islands for centuries.

Once recognised, such superficiality compels us to go beyond popular and dominant references to Ireland being the cause of Scotland’s ethno-religious cleavages and sectarianism in particular.

One way to begin to explore relevant questions and issues is to consider the role of Scots in conquering and colonising Ireland, and the significance of this for football and society more widely.

Scots have had a decisive role in modern Irish-British history, especially in relation to national, ethnic and religious conflict. As part of the conquest of Ireland’s Ulster province, it was mainly from Scotland in the 17th century that tens of thousands of Protestants came to settle be planted there under terms that allowed them, for the benefit of the British Crown, Government and military, to acquire land and power and to dominate and control those native Irish Catholics who had not been killed or fled west.

The colonisers were offered favourable terms in an effort to drive native Irish Catholics off their land.

Various historians, like ATQ Stewart, note that the Scots have been at the core of the Ulster problem has been the Scots.

Later, many Scottish-British colonists – referred to as “Scots-Irish” and “Ulster-Scots” – left frontier Ulster for North America, where they became central to the European colonial enterprise that would become the United States of America and in the process produce many future presidents.

Over the past 400 years or so, the British colonisation of Ireland has been central to various historical developments and events in and between Ireland and Britain. These include the catastrophic Great Famine, in which more than one million people perished and another million or so were forced to emigrate as refugees, with around 100,000 of them escaping to Scotland. This event led directly to the foundation of Celtic Football Club.

There is also, of course, the monumental legacy of more recent ethno-religious, political and military conflict – often referred to as “The Troubles” – in Ireland’s north-eastern counties as well as beyond them.

Overall, the Irish-British history of colonialism and immigration has had a profound bearing on modern Scotland, just as Scots too have had a profound historical impact – militarily, politically, socially, culturally and religiously – on Ireland. Over the centuries, this has meant war and the countless deaths of Protestant planters, indigenous Irish Catholics and British military personnel.

In relation to popular accounts of Scotland’s great football rivalry, there is a customary failure to explore explain or recognise the distinctive as well as interrelated club histories and wider histories and identities of supporters. As observed at the world-famous Catalan club Barcelona, significance on the pitch football field is constituted, for supporters and society, via cultural, religious, political, ethnic and national contexts, histories and memories. It is such complex interweaving that helps explain the meaningfulness and symbolism of these two football institutions, as well as the contest between and around them.

This rivalry speaks to constructed social memories of colonialism in Ireland – and elsewhere - and which has contributed to the mosaic of Scottish that comprises life in Scotland.

Dr Joseph M Bradley is Associate Tutor in Culture, Media & Sport at the University of Edinburgh.