A Short Film about Sectarianism

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a Ranger…”

But, as Tony Bennett kicks in with “Rags to Riches”, I’m not Henry Hill. I’m the Billy Batts character. More accurately, in my case, Frank Vincent plays Billy Boy. And I’m the one doing the narrating and I’m not being stabbed up and shot in the boot of a car as much as held down and punched in a patch of dirt under a rope swing knotted to a tree in the middle of a council estate in Kilbirnie, North Ayrshire.

This Scorsese movie begins with the childhood flashbacks. I’m seven years old at most and this is the first time I remember being called a hun.

It’s never taken much to beat me up. As long as you don’t let me sit on you, overcoming me physically remains relatively easy. I’m no fighter. But, in this case, I genuinely was outnumbered by three or four to one.

Or three- or four-and-a-half to one if you count my cousin Joe, whose school chums these were; Chums from a different school to mine. So he was neither joining the punch-fest nor doing much to stop it.

In fairness, though, neither was I.

I was probably still trying to work out what a hun was - was it related to my ginger hair? - and why these boys had such a lack of respect for my best clothes. I was clearly attending a cousin’s birthday party.  But they didn’t care what the animals said. What the hell did they care. So, not for the first or last time, my Gran saved me.

She’d seen a lot in life, knew how to live and let live and keep judgements to herself. But I’ll never forget the rage on her face as her eldest grandchild – her only son’s only son – took a pasting from this wee gang. I think she may have called them animals which even I, despite having my head sand-shoed into calcifying white dog jobby at the time, thought was a bit much considering their age.

God, I loved my Gran.

It was also around this time Callum Blair, from not only my school but my class, told me as we played at the derelict site of my dad’s former primary school one Saturday morning, that he didn’t like Steve Austin because Steve Austin was a Catholic. So I went home and told my mum that we shouldn’t like Steve Austin any longer because Steve Austin was a Catholic.

She needed more information.

Had Callum been referring to Steve Austin – the actual Six Million Dollar Man – or was it Lee Majors, the actor who played him? And, rather than “Catholic”, had Callum perhaps meant “bionic”?

Because, while there were undoubtedly moral issues involved in the cyborg technology used to rebuild Colonel Steve Austin  - issues the Vatican would certainly raise if His Holiness watched the same TV as us on a Friday – Callum’s parents might be bigots or Callum might just be getting shit wrong.

My mum also had more information for me on the subject. I might not know what a Catholic was but I should know she was one. My Nana - her mum - was another one of these Catholics. And my Aunt Brenda, my Uncle Ian, all the Donnachies and even my Dad’s dad - my Gran’s husband who’d died years before I was born – were all Catholic.

I suddenly wondered what Callum’s problem was. These people were all fucking great. For a start, neither Callum nor Steve Austin had ever made a Christmas cake with icing as thick and soft as my Aunt Brenda’s. And bionic was all well and good but my Nana bought me the duffle bag with the picture of our 1978 treble-winning team on it. Much better.

I knew about Celtic, obviously. My Uncle Jim – Joe’s dad – would tease me about Rangers. I found Jim’s decorated tankards and the pennants on Joe and his wee brother Philip’s bedroom wall weirdly fascinating. They were green and white versions of the stuff I had on my wall in my sister and I’s room. But mostly me and the McCluskeys just ran about playing at soldiers. And I’m pretty sure we were fighting the Wermacht rather than dodging petrol bombs on the Bogside.

Maybe if all the Donnachies had been more interested in football rather than sci-fi, music, movies, board games, Airfix soldiers and all the other stuff I loved so much, it would have been more apparent what underpinned the Old Firm rivalry but, for me, it was just a grown-up name for two big teams and I loved the one with the blue shirts that didn’t match their socks.

My Gran and her husband – "my Dad’s dad" – then my own parents experienced so much hassle from gossips when getting married, in the late 1940s and late 1960s respectively, that church and religion was never a thing for my sister and I. We were never christened in any faith other than family.

My dad, the eldest of five, was just 14 when he lost his father. There had been no life insurance. Why the hell would my dad believe in god.

My Gran, barely in her 30s when she lost her husband, worked extra jobs to support those five kids. She always felt there was someone looking over her, getting her through it. She didn’t talk about this more than once. She just attended the Park Parish Church most Sundays.

Lynn and me attended a non-denominational school – took us both years to realise there’s no such thing as a “Protestant school” – and learned that when the guy with the collar called father turned up at my Nana’s we, like the rest of my cousins, should get the Tonka Trucks out the living room.

My Nana’s oldest girl, my mum’s sister – my Aunt Jean – died when I’d just started primary school. She left behind eight Donnachies. The oldest one joined the army. The youngest few fell into my Nana’s care, which meant my Mum and my Aunt Brenda’s care.

For some of those younger cousins that started a lot of being sent to mass as show for my Nana's neighbours. But my Nana never went to mass. Neither did her husband, my Papa, who worked at the explosives factory, got pished with his mates on a Friday, kept a Celtic bunnett on the top shelf of the linen cupboard and walked me for miles all round Saltcoats in my pram as a kid.

My Papa did go blind around about the time my Nana bought me the Rangers scarf I still wear to this day but I’m sure it wasn’t related.

The woman who lived next door to me and my folks (after the original neighbours who regularly played the Orange tunes killed themselves, and nearly us with them, in the closest they ever came to being rude to us - their third attempt at passing out drunk with a chip pan on or a fag in hand) would do a lot of acting like she was amazing because she went to the same Church of Scotland outlet as my Gran but that neighbour was actually a bit of a cow.

Joe’s now a Celtic man who, when we were barely at Primary school, was sat next to me on the planks of the Centenary Stand at my first Rangers game (v Hibs). I was at his kids’ christenings. I was as honoured as I was devastated to carry my Uncle Jim’s coffin.  

I really don’t know what else to tell you.  It’s complicated and that’s what understandably annoys people with lives already so complex they’re desperate for labels. What it doesn’t excuse are the people who know better who then choose to exploit those labels for their own ends.

MSPs, for example. Maybe journalists.

There weren’t a lot of university degrees flying about in my childhood but there was compassion and sociability to honours standards. There was innate understanding of life being too short to let pish like sectarianism get in the way of enjoyment.

I’m almost certainly – must be - descended from Irish Catholics. I was at a wedding once, sat at the Charlie Tully table, with people claiming they could tell I was a Rangers fan because of my name. I’m the fifth Alexander Anderson on the trot and my dad’s the first Protestant one. Where do people get this shit?

There are Rangers supporters I wouldn’t have in the house and there are Celtic fans I’ll love til the day I die.

I sang about fenians and tims until I knew those weren’t just nicknames for Celtic fans. And then I sang those songs a little bit longer. Probably until I stopped being a virgin. Which was a few years – although not as many as I’d have liked - before I began a six year relationship with a girl whose mum and dad were devout Catholics.

Her dad had served in the army and her mum loved the Queen and Margaret Thatcher almost as much as the Pope. Why do I have to tell you this? This shouldn’t be necessary. But you don’t have to keep track of all the strands – just see how many there are, how quickly they become knotted.

My Aunt Brenda hates football and would light a candle for me at mass when I was at games because she knew people got hurt at football matches. I didn’t know this til my mum told me a few years ago and, anytime I’m on one of those foreign holidays I’m so lucky to be on when I consider how my Gran struggled and I visit the inevitable local cathedral, I light a candle for my Auntie B and my cousins, her fantastic daughter and her son who cheered on Celtic in my presence as a kid, served in Helmand fucking Province and is arguably the loveliest young man I’ve ever met.

This shouldn’t have to be explained to anyone but there it is. I’m sick of having to preface every discussion of Rangers victory celebrations with “but some of my best grandfathers are Catholic”.

Scotland is a country with more social and health problems than any other in Western Europe. Drink and drugs are the real cancers. Religion offers a healthier relief to some and football does the same. When life is shit you need a win.

My dad stopped me following his and his dad’s team because Kilmarnock, despite being champions more recently than Rangers when I was born, are generally shit. When Hampden has almost every European crowd record you can think of it’s a fair guess most working class Scots will love football so the best thing a dad can do for his son is let him support a winning team. Using your religion - or your “background” – gives that choice an instant authenticity and avoids all accusations of glory hunting.

Jock Stein, the Protestant Rangers fan who married a Catholic and won Celtic the European Cup, claimed the Old Firm acted as a social pressure valve. It let out the sectarian resentment built up in the working week. It let it out in a stream of daft songs and chants.

I feel that’s now inverted. In a world where Catholics marrying Protestants is now so common it makes the prefix “mixed” redundant (is there anyone in this country today who genuinely knows no members of one sect or the other who they like if not actually love?), the Old Firm often seems like the only thing keeping sectarianism alive in Scotland.

It’s just another excuse to sing about hate, the stuff which colours fitba. If Scotland loved the game as much as it loved the opportunities it provides for spite, Scotland would be favourites for this summer’s Euros. And the holders.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be. Just be. Anyone who felt the same would always be one of the family, my kinda good fella.