with people like Donald Findlay.” He argued that Scotland su¤ered from a case of “sleepwalking bigotry.”
Newspaper columnists pronounced Findlay a national stain. But he had his defenders, too. Even some of the management at Celtic testified to Findlay’s good heart.
In e¤ect, the Donald Findlay debate cut to an essential question of the Old Firm: When they talked about murder and terrorism, was it just good fun or an expression of rotten consciences?
Nearly three years after the videotape, Findlay remains one of the five wealthiest barristers in Scotland. He has rehabilitated himself just enough to become a fairly regular newspaper and television pundit. The Tory party in Scotland doesn’t really have a more prominent spokesman. Yet, he can’t put the episode behind him. It haunts and obsesses him.
When Findlay agreed to meet me, I devised clever plans to coax him onto the subject of the tape. He immediately renders them superfluous. “About the tapes: I should have put up a fight. I would try to challenge them to provide one human being who’d been
adversely a¤ected by me because of religion, color, or anything else.” Fighting the politically correct elites, he would have proven that the songs are essentially harmless traditions: “It’s about getting into the opposition’s head; it’s a game; it’s in the context of football. Do you want to be up to your knees in Fenian blood? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Like many of the staunchest supporters of Rangers, he didn’t grow up in Glasgow. He came from the east of Scotland, a small town called Cowdenbeath, born into a staunchly Tory working-class family. And like most Rangers supporters, he doesn’t believe in the Protestantism that his team represents. “I’ve got no religious beliefs. Believe me, I’ve tried hard but you can’t teach that.” What he did inherit was a belief in the monarchy and the British union that disparaged the Scottish-Catholic a¤ection for the Irish motherland. He jokingly, I think, announces his preferred test for British citizenship: If a troop carrying Queen’s colors
“doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, then fuck o¤!”
It’s easy to link support for a soccer club with reli-giosity. But in an important way, Rangers has actually replaced the Church of Scotland. It allows men like Findlay to join the tradition and institutions of their forefathers, to allay fears about abandoning history without having to embrace their forefathers’ eschatology.
Findlay splays across our booth, his pants pulling up past his ankle. He enjoys his cigarillos. From the moment we meet, he advertises himself as a provoca-teur. By the middle of our conversation, he provokes.
“The one absolute barrier is that you must never prejudice a man for his religion. If I wanted to hire a black, lesbian, Catholic, great. But are you not entitled to say that you have no time for the Catholic religion, that it involves the worships of idols?” The statement is structured rhetorically, like a law school professor’s hypo-thetical. With his academic tone, I expect the defamations of the Catholic faith to stop after he has made his point. They don’t. “Why can’t you be forgiven for thinking that confessing to a priest who is confessing to God is ridiculous and o¤ensive? Or that the pope is a man of perdition?” A bit later he suggests that Scots should have the right to say “that priests immerse HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
themselves in jewels and wealth while they live amid poverty.”
Scottish society is a paradox. It has more or less eradicated discrimination in the public sphere.
Catholics have their fair share of representation in the universities and workforce. Nevertheless, bigotry against them persists. There was no civil rights movement to sweep away anti-Catholicism—discrimination only faded thanks to globalization. Glasgow’s shipyards and steel mills, which had practiced blatantly anti-Catholic hiring, folded in the wake of the ’73 oil shocks.
Much of the industry that survived came under the ownership of Americans and Japanese, a new economic order that came from “places where they are not nearly so obsessed with defending Derry’s walls against the Whore of Babylon,” as the critic Patrick Reilly has put it. Catholics gained their social equality without forcing Scotland into a reckoning with its deeply held beliefs.
That’s why Scottish society continues to harbor, and even reward, Donald Findlay, Rangers fans, and their ideology.
V.
A day after the Old Firm match, I travel to Belfast on the choppy winter sea. The last major Irish migration to Scotland ended about forty years ago. Each time Celtic and Rangers play, however, there’s a demographic rip-ple. Several thousand Northern Irish, Catholics and Protestants, ride the ferry to Glasgow to see the Old Firm. Several thousand make the trip. A sociologist called Raymond Boyle has determined that eighty percent of Celtic fans in Belfast make sixteen voyages a year to see their club. To finance these ventures, they must spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds.
By the time I catch the boat, the vast bulk of the supporters has already gone home. Only the hardcore, who want to squeeze every last pint of lager out of their weekend, remain. A contingent from Carrickfergus, 10
minutes up the coast from Belfast, had started on Friday, after a half-day on their jobs as lorry drivers, construction workers, and barmaids. Some didn’t even have tickets to the game and little hope of scoring one.
They began drinking upon boarding the ferry, which has two bars serving a definitive selection of alcohol, and never really stopped. Jimmy, the thirty-two-year-old unoªcial leader of the group, slept in Glasgow on a friend’s floor with a bottle of wine by his side to stave o¤ uncomfortable vicissitudes in his blood-alcohol level. On the ship back to Belfast, with his wife awaiting his arrival, Jimmy has another five pints.
Because the ferry often carries both Celtic and Rangers fans, there’s usually an unspoken code of behavior. Supporters of the home crowd can sing as loudly
