Only the loud, sloppy drunks in the back of the boat clearly indicate that an Old Firm match has taken place. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
Most of the Rangers fans on this late boat adhere to a new set of etiquette. In this highly mixed crowd, inevitably packed with Catholics, taunting is verboten.
The drunkenness of the Carrickfergus crew, however, prevents the practice of restraint. Jimmy, scrawny, blond, and dressed in a track suit, leads the group through a song list in the spirit of unabashed triumphalism. They don’t really converse; just go from song to song. At the mere mention of a phrase —“top of the league,” “King Billy,” “shit Fenian bastard”—they’re o¤.
Because I buy a round of drinks, they enthusiastically welcome me. Jimmy asks me to pile into an already crammed corner of the ship. “Whatever you want to know, I’ve got it. Ask away. I’ll answer anything.”
But before I can ask him anything, he begins to boast about his friendship with the guy who dresses as the Rangers team mascot. In the background, Jimmy’s traveling companions sing their anti-Catholic medley, repeating the phrase “Fuck the pope” with particular relish.
Jimmy joins them, and then puts his beer on the table and his arm on my shoulder. “Say, ‘Fuck the pope,’ Frankie boy,” he implores me. “We won’t talk to you until you say it. Come on, ‘Fuck the pope.’ It feels good to say it.”
Jimmy’s minions—two twenty-something women,
an older mustachioed carpenter named John Boy, Ralphie the lorry driver, and about six younger guys—take their leader’s cue. They begin clapping and chanting rhythmically, “Fuck the pope!” One of the women is most strident: “Don’t be a fuckin’ Fenian, Frankie. ‘Fuck the pope,’ come on.” I shrug my shoulders, look around the ship to see if anyone else is watching, and try to recite the phrase as a rhetorical question. To the tune of
“Camptown Races,” they begin to sing, as if planned in advance, “Frankie’s a sectarian. Doo-dahh, doo-dahh.”
It’s obvious that the repeated and vociferous use of the phrase “Fuck the pope” hardly endears us to the rest of the boat. For the entire trip, Jimmy has traded looks with a middle-aged man in a sweater. Another group in a nearby bank of seats has been muttering about the songs. “Ruining our trip, they are. I didn’t pay forty quid to be insulted like this,” a woman complains to a stewardess. A few moments later, the stewardess approaches us. She leans over and says, “I’m sorry. You’ve got to stop. It’s the rules. It’s in your interest to stop.” Apparently, this is the third time that she has reproached the group. When we arrive in Belfast, she says, security will be waiting to deal with us. Under normal, more sober circumstances, the threat might have meant something. “Okay. Fine,” Jimmy tells her and then points his finger at me, “It was this American sectarian causing all the trouble.” Once again, he starts singing my name. The stewardess rises and walks away.
The connection between Scotland and Ireland—or more precisely, the connection between Glasgow and Belfast—runs deep. You can see it across Belfast. In downtown, both Celtic and Rangers have shops selling their gear. Around the city, the Rangers fan clubs double as the lodges for the Orange Order. A cab driver called Billy takes me to his club in the middle of a neighborhood that had once been Protestant, but had almost overnight turned Catholic. His club has a bar, a HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE PORNOGRAPHY OF SECTS
billiards table, a TV set for watching games, and chairs for meetings. It’s a place you can unself-consciously roll up your sleeves and display the “’Gers” tattoo on your forearm. Billy’s club stands as the last foothold against inevitable Catholic encroachment in this part of town, a battle-scarred fortress without windows. A tall fence surrounds the building. A Scottish standard flaps atop a pole. Garbage lies scattered through the parking lot in front. “We’re more interested in staying than making it look pretty,” he apologizes. Across the street, he points to the rubble of a Protestant church. It had been burned to the ground three times.
Old Firm matches, it seems, stir up as much may-hem in Northern Ireland as in Glasgow, if not more.
Where the violence in Glasgow takes a desultory pattern, dependent mostly on drunken thugs randomly crossing paths, it occurs regularly in Northern Ireland on the frontiers that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The day I arrive from Scotland, a battle had waged through the night, across the province, in the town of Derry. The Old Firm had coincided with an annual Protestant march through town, and the
confluence of the two events was explosive. News reports showed the town lit by burning cars, bands of Catholics marching en masse toward the city center to disrupt the Protestant celebrations, police holding their line as the Catholics shot fireworks at them. Stabbings and gunfights were reported.
There’s a basic reason for the Northern Irish to embrace the Old Firm with such fervor. They have nothing comparable on their side of the Irish Sea. The country simply can’t accommodate it. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, the city housed a team called Belfast Celtic, ripped o¤ from the original Scottish concept; and it even had its own Protestant rival, a team called Linfield. But in 1949, the Catholic squad folded.
Belfast Celtic’s management felt that the club could no longer depend on the Protestant police to protect its players and fans. A year earlier, they had watched police cheer Linfield goals. When Linfield’s fans invaded the field and began beating players, even breaking legs, the cops
