Well, someone has to say it. Religious sectarianism in Scotland will never fully be eradicated while religious apartheid is written into the state education system. So long as children grow up to define themselves as Catholic or Protestant, in segregated schools, and associate predominantly with their own kind, then the old antagonisms and rivalries will remain. I have great respect for Catholic schools and their high educational standards - which cause so many non-believers try to send their children there, the Liberal leader Nick Clegg being one. However, they do discriminate on grounds of religion, and there’s no getting away from that.
Now, I know this line of thinking will outrage many of my Catholic friends, practising or lapsed, who believe that religious schools are a defence AGAINST sectarianism, Protestant sectarianism, rather than the cause of it. And of course, Catholic schools don’t cause letter bombs. It is from the darker recesses of Protestant Unionism, that come the death threats and the street violence. The nail bombs sent to Neil Lennon, lawyer Paul McBride and Trish Godman, the former Labour MSP, were probably assembled by paramilitary elements in one of the stagnant pools of Loyalist Orangism that still linger in the housing estates of West Central Scotland. Aye, and not only in the housing estates, but in some of the best addresses in Glasgow, in certain golf clubs and legal chambers.
Scotland’s half million Catholics rightly feel that they have been, and continue to be, victims of discrimination - from their exclusion from succession to the throne to harsh treatment by football authorities. It is to the eternal shame of my own grandfather’s generation of Clyde shipyard workers that Catholics generally did not get jobs in the major yards. However, the worst forms of discrimination, in council house waiting lists, in the workplace, in policing and the justice system, are surely a thing of he past.
Moreover, we live in a predominantly secular society. Sectarian violence is a bizarre anachronism - how many of the bigots who chant religious sectarian songs at old firm matches understand the theological distinction between consubstantiation and transubstantiation? This is tribalism - it is communal violence based on a barely comprehended historic identity. But the identity has a basis in religion and is rooted in the separation at five years old between Catholics and Protestants.
