‘Sectarianism’ and Scottish football: Critical reflections on dominant discourse and press commentary

Theoretically framing press discourse on sectarianism

This section begins by focusing specifically on the importance of textual analysts being sensitive to power, ideology and social-historical contexts. The latent power of a discursive formation is shown, illustrating how this preferred reading of Celtic’s Catholic linkages (and to a lesser extent, Rangers’ Protestant linkages) should be understood as an ideological product itself. The example reveals how this type of discourse serves to mystify rather than clarify understanding. The section concludes with an outline of the critical discourse analysis approach employed in this study.

As Willis (1982) has convincingly argued, in simply mapping cultural variables, one’s knowledge or understanding about the nature of social attitudes, cultural values or meaningful symbols remains partial, ambiguous and confusing. Willis (1982) notes that one cannot understand social phenomena by mere ‘linear determinism’ (p.119). In order to overcome the limiting and linear determined approach Willis proposes a method described as ‘analytic cultural criticism’ that is concerned with locating social realities within a power framework. As Willis explains:

The analytic socio-cultural task is not to measure these differences precisely and explain them physically, but to ask why some differences, and not others, are taken as so important, become so exaggerated, are used to buttress social attitudes or prejudice . . . why do people think a particular difference is important, how do they use the difference, is this use related at all to a general system of attitudes and beliefs: to ideology. (p. 120, original emphasis)

In Scotland, sections of the press define and measure sectarianism within a general system of attitudes and beliefs. This ideology combines to represent the dominant discursive formation and, when situated in Scottish sectarian discourse, alternative readings are themselves often invidiously and inappropriately demonized as sectarian.

Audiences are, thus, positioned as partisan actors and divisions between ‘we’, the decent, ‘non-sectarian’ ones and they, the ‘sectarian’, are defined and reinforced. As Willis recognizes, ideology operates as ‘a powerful force of definition seeking its own reflection from reality in order to confirm itself’ (p. 124). Bruce (2004) acknowledges a similar point in her analysis of the racist discourses of sports commentators:

If the sports media systematically reinforce racist ideologies … it is not because media workers are active racists. It is through the sets of practices and discourses by which knowledge is constructed in the media, not the personal inclinations of media workers, that racist ideologies continue to be recreated. (p. 863)

In Scotland, the discursive formation constructs the ‘Old Firm’ as a non-hierarchical dualism constituting ‘Protestant’ Rangers and ‘Catholic’ Celtic. This embodies a powerful ideological construction of equal culpability ⁷ helping to shape and sustain much of the prejudice hidden within the polysemous term ‘sectarian/ism’, allowing it to be shorn of its inherent power dynamics. Thus, this allows sectarian/ism to be used to describe anti-Catholic/Protestant prejudice and legitimate associations to religious, political and ethnic identifiers providing a crippling ambiguity. Rangers openly (though unofficially) refused to employ Catholics until 1989 ⁸ whilst Celtic has never operated such an exclusionary practice. Being sensitive to the distinction between Rangers’ anti-Catholic Protestant culture and Celtic’s catholic Roman Catholic culture is crucial yet also almost universally unacknowledged in mediated accounts which strip the relationship of its historical contexts to simplistically anchor Rangers as a ‘Protestant’ team and Celtic as a ‘Catholic’ team.

By analysing Celtic more closely the limitations of the linear determined approach is illustrated further. Celtic’s large percentage of Catholic fans is not simply a matter of sectarian choice. Catholic football fans in the central belt of Scotland have limited choice of club for two primary reasons. First, Rangers’ historically embedded anti-Catholic policy and fan culture, ⁹ together with other central belt clubs with similar (real or perceived) anti-Catholic fan cultures like Airdrie, Hearts, Motherwell and Falkirk, make it unremarkable that many, if not most, football supporting Catholics from this part of Scotland would be likely to support Celtic. Second, in addition to innocent habitus-forming factors (family, geography, ethno-political attachments), Celtic has always had legitimate historical associations with Ireland and Irish-Catholic immigrants (Bradley, 2004, 2006a; Campbell and Woods, 1996), and consequently, many Scots of Irish descent grow up supporting Celtic and being raised in families that are ‘Celtic minded’. ¹⁰ Yet, revealingly, both of these related factors are continually overlooked in Scottish press commentary. Furthermore, whilst the specific social, cultural and religious context here is almost ¹¹ unique to Celtic, the effects (of being raised in a football club tradition), with its inevitable dyadic formulation of defining and conceptualizing one’s club in opposition to an antithetical ‘other’, are unique to neither Celtic nor Rangers. The absence of acknowledgement of these factors is part of the institutionally accepted discourse that serves to reinforce the relational order by which these identities are to be negotiated in the Scottish press and which provide a crippling ambiguity.

A key task, therefore, for any critical analysis is to locate the study within ‘an ongoing narrative of struggle that blends individuals and collective action or agency with political, economic and cultural flows and forces’ (Sugden and Tomlinson, 2002: 8). It is to these political and cultural forces that attention now turns in order to outline how this article seeks to analyse the selected press accounts of sectarianism and football in Scotland.

There are no fixed theoretical and methodological procedures for textual analyses, which cross a variety of disciplines, each with potentially different methodological and theoretical approaches. Two of the most common methods are content analysis and discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Philo, 2007). Whilst these share commonalities of method and procedure – involving a degree of semiotic analysis for example – content analysis tends to focus on quantitative words and/or images, whilst discourse analytical approaches describe these words and images (texts) in relation to particular social and political contexts (Van Dijk, 2000). Discourse analysis then, is more explicitly linked to power and social interests (Fairclough, 2001, 2003; Philo, 2007). Whilst actors may be socially differentiated, their cultural and ideological frames of reference ensure that they interpret, construct, transform and appropriate social truths within particular social-historical contexts. Therefore, one should consider the position of power by locating mediated expressions of anything meaningful:

in relation to the historically specific and socially structured contexts and processes within which, and by means of which, these symbolic forms are produced, transmitted and received. (Thompson, 1988: 361)

Echoing Thompson’s call, Philo (2007) criticizes those textual analysts who fail to adequately consider the production and context of mediated texts. In describing the pioneering work of the GUMG (of which he is part) he adds:

we were interested in how language was linked to wider social processes and how individual meanings and communications related to conflict and divisions within society as a whole . . . The issue then was not to look simply at the descriptions which were offered of the world in a specific text, but to look at the social relations which underpinned the generation of these descriptions. (p. 5 ¹² )

Thus, my approach, which is a critical discourse analysis influenced by Willis’s analytic cultural criticism method, avoids a quasi-experimental design content analysis seeking to ‘discover’ patterns over a fixed event or mediated product (such as those used by Bruce, 2004 and Kennedy, 2001). Rather, it locates one common discursive formation (discourse) around mediated versions of ‘sectarianism’ and theoretically engages in a critical discourse analysis of it. Some illustrative examples (or ‘explanatory themes’ as Philo terms it) are selected over the last decade in order to inform the study. This period coincides with an increase in media and political ‘interest’ in sectarianism. The main aim is to locate these examples within their wider ideological systems in similar ways the GUMG’s critical discourse analyses have done with their substantive topics.

The key conclusions in terms of methods which we drew, was that it was not possible to analyse texts in isolation from the study of the wider systems of ideologies which informed them and the production processes which structured their representation . . . This linking of production, content and reception became the basis of our methodological approach. (Philo, 2007: 14)

The illustrative examples all relate explicitly to broader historical, political and national discourses around sectarianism and have been selected because of their suitability in revealing an overarching ideological discourse around the production, content and reception of Scotland’s press articles. The first two examples reveal a particularly powerful and interconnected discursive production – the de-legitimizing of Celtic’s Irish-Catholic links alongside the implication that Celtic (fans and club) has an underlying anti-non-Catholic (which translates in Scottish discourse as anti-‘Protestant’) culture. Two further examples – both linked to An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger in Ireland) – are included because they were high profile incidents, widely reported and, whilst once again being interconnected, they expose further the wider systems of ideology informing Scottish press accounts. All examples originate from prominent national (Scottish) newspapers ¹³ – The Scotsman (Edinburgh based), Daily Record (Glasgow based), Sunday Herald (Glasgow based), Scottish News of the World (Glasgow based) – and all journalists (except Hodgart) are nationally recognized journalists in their field.

Clearly this selection involves overlooking other discourses and other media sites. However, remaining true to a critical discourse analysis epistemology, selection, subjectivity and interpretation are inescapable inevitabilities of all textual analysis. Just as Falcous’s (2007) work on New Zealand sporting identities and mediated constructions was not intended to ‘offer an essentialist interpretation of media texts but to reveal workings and displace their hierarchical assumptions’ (p. 381), this article seeks similar ambitions. The selection, then, should be viewed in the wider context of the discursive formation being presented.

Dysconscious sectarianism, sincere fictions and symbolic annihilation: Press accounts of Celtic FC’s Irish-Catholic links

Jarvie and Reid (1997) warn against applying universal theories to sport, ethnicity and racism in developing an authentic gaze. In developing an authentic gaze into Scottish football’s (and society’s) ‘sectarian problem’, sectarianism’s historical legacy and contemporary setting have to be acknowledged and contextualized within a power framework if one is to begin to meaningfully analyse its mediatization.

We may furnish our understanding by drawing on King’s (1997) work on the power dynamics surrounding ‘race’. King’s term ‘dysconscious racism’ describes the uncritical acceptance of ‘dominant White norms and privileges’ (p. 128). Thus, we are reminded here of other studies in sport, notably Falcous (2007), Elder et al. (2006), Bruce (2004) and Jackson and Ponic (2001) that reveal whiteness being (re)constructed in the media as ‘normal’ against the constructed ‘other’ of Maori, indigenous Australian, black American and black Canadian respectively. The parallels here with gender analyses are also instructive if we consider Scraton and Flintoff’s (2002) observations on gender relations:

What is seen to be missing is an analysis of gender relations rather than simply sex difference. What we understand about ‘masculinity’ at any one time is always defined in relation to ‘femininity’. However, these ideas are not just relational, but are also hierarchical, where one set of attributes and associated activities (men’s) are viewed as more important than the others (women’s). Gender relations can therefore be defined as relations of power. (p. 34, original emphasis)

Lenskyj (1998) is aware of the power hierarchies when critically analysing women and sport media texts, utilizing the term ‘symbolic annihilation’ (p. 20) to describe a set of processes that trivialize, stereotype and under-represent female sporting achievement. These parallels help us analyse the hierarchical relations of power that constructs the press framing of sectarianism in Scotland.

As Spencer (2004) has informatively explicated in her work, by utilizing Feagin and Vera’s (1995) concept of ‘sincere fictions’, despite sustained participation in a racist culture, few ‘whites’ ever admit to being racist. Indeed, despite it being likely that some individuals within the press consciously seek to present their biased perceptions, it is contended that there is a press-created dysconscious sectarianism that is so deeply embedded many (perhaps most) press actors may be consciously unaware of the ideologically laden nature of their acts and the power hierarchies within the sincere fictions of their constructed words. Hall (1997) reminds us of the intimacy between cultural norms and values and their collective representation in language:

We are born into a language, its codes and its meanings. Language is therefore . . . a social phenomenon. It cannot be an individual matter because we cannot make up the rules of language individually, for ourselves. Their source lies in society, in the culture, in our shared cultural codes, in the language system – not in nature or in the individual subject. (p. 34)

The following sincere fictions created by the press reveals more about the shared cultural code that informs the dysconscious sectarianism of the press than it does about the sectarianism of either Rangers or Celtic. For example, the following two press illustrations, which were, ironically, intended to critically challenge sectarianism, merely expose not only the sectarianized misconception of the journalists but, given the prominence of the publications and/or journalists, also the culture of acceptance pervading the society in which the prejudiced comments are made. Both examples refer to the press-created sincere fiction surrounding Celtic’s ex-manager Gordon Strachan. This sincere fiction frames Celtic fans as disliking Strachan because he is (allegedly) ¹⁴ not a Catholic, has not played for Celtic and did not support the club. The Sunday Herald’s Hodgart (13 April 2008) criticizes Celtic fans, and trivializing Catholic rosary beads, exclaims, ‘some [Celtic] fans would probably rather have a bead-rattling Hoopy Hound ¹⁵ in the dugout’ (p. 14). Aiden Smith (31 May 2009) in The Scotsman criticizes Celtic’s search for a new manager in the aftermath of Strachan’s departure, by caricaturing an ex-Celtic player pleading for the job. Smith speaks the imaginary words of this ‘candidate’, mocking ‘but unlike Gordon Strachan I played for Celtic … the fish on a Friday after training? You couldnae [sic] whack it.’ These examples are highly revealing on two counts. First, the determination to promote the preferred ideological position results in the press overstating its (speculative) supporting evidence whilst overlooking the (factual) evidence that contradicts the sincere fiction being produced. For example, in the aforementioned articles, Hodgart’s unequivocal insinuation is that Celtic fans are so determined to have only a Catholic manager, even a cartoon-like dog-hound would do. Correspondingly, Smith’s criticism of Celtic fans for being ‘Celtic-minded’ – a term which when used by the media, is a sincere fiction itself, euphemistically and pejoratively meaning Irish-Catholic – implies that Celtic fans have a fear of non-Irish-Catholic managers. Although Smith acknowledges that there are some ‘who insist that Celtic-minded has nothing to do with religion’, his one-page article referred to religion four times, and when considered in the context of the article and the wider press sincere fictions around Celtic-minded, it clearly implies intimate (and negative) connection between Celtic-minded and Catholicism. Smith attempts to placate this fear of non-Catholic managers by informing the reader that with regard to the club’s ‘romantic history’, ‘any new manager would have no difficulty acknowledging [it], whether or not he was Scottish or Irish or Catholic’. Smith then re-introduces religion, informing the reader that Strachan is ‘the wee, red-haired, Presbyterian’ before wondering whether some Celtic fans did not welcome him ‘from day one’. Additionally, in juxtaposing Celtic with its major rivals, Rangers, Smith adds the significant observation ‘you never hear the phrase Rangers-minded’. The consideration that this latter reality is itself a reflection of press discourse is overlooked, along with the factual reality of the situation. Celtic’s previous non-Catholic managers number approximately ¹⁶ six out of 15 from those employed after 1965. ¹⁷ Celtic’s most successful manager, Jock Stein, a Scottish Protestant, employed as manager from 1965 to 1978, was voted ‘the greatest ever Celt’ by Celtic fans in 2002. Meanwhile, Rangers employed its first and only Catholic manager in 2006 and Paul Le Guen’s six-month managerial reign remains the club’s shortest in 138 years of existence. It is far from obvious that anti-Catholicism figured in Rangers’ (club and fans) increasing antipathy towards Le Guen. However, the media’s duplicity is merely compounded by the fact that it is comparably doubtful that Celtic’s (fans and/or club) antipathy towards Gordon Strachan was connected to his religious background or lack of it. These facts are absented from the mediated sincere fictions. The second revealing aspect to these examples is the press’s open denigrating references to Catholicism, referring to ‘bead-rattlers’ and ‘fish on a Friday’. This exposes that in some press discourse around Catholicism in Scotland, it is unremarkable to use potentially offensive and derogatory language and to trivialize practical elements of that faith. Moreover, by constructing a picture of a cartoon-like cuddly dog-hound reciting the rosary, one need not be a semiotician to read the message being produced to depict Catholic rosary bead users. One may contrast this reality with the potential response if these sections of the Scottish press had trivialized and parodied the Sikh turban, Islamic veil, Jewish kappel (skullcap) or indeed alternative signifiers of these (or other minority) faiths. The ideological power of these sincere fictions is further revealed when one considers they appeared in articles purporting to be criticizing the sectarianism of others (Celtic FC and its fans). Spencer’s (2004) observations in relation to white racism furnish understanding here:

What obscures the reality for most (Whites) is the creation of sincere fictions that enable Whites to resolve the dissonance between beliefs in equality and participation in a racist society. This form of White racism is usually predicated on the ‘belief that White prejudice is no longer a factor’ (Reeves and Campbell, 1994, p. 73). (p. 119, original emphasis)

This underlying symbolic annihilation corresponds to the broader processes of dysconscious sectarianism, evidenced in the press’s approach that regularly problematizes Celtic’s Irish-Catholic links. Gruneau (1993) reminds us:

In struggles over ‘common sense’ and public consent, dominant interests are often able to de-legitimise alternatives by labelling them as frivolous, unnatural or archaic. In the meantime, other sources of difference frequently get incorporated in a compromised and non-threatening manner. (p. 99)

Willis (1982) contends that this often occurs in two overlapping and related ways; first, by promoting laughter or cynicism at the expense of non-dominants; second, by drawing attention to unarguable differences out of context. As the previous examples showed, laughter and cynicism are commonly used in Scottish press reports on sectarianism by ridiculing, de-legitimizing and stereotyping Celtic’s links with Ireland and Catholicism transforming these into pseudo-religious kitsch. The latter practice (drawing attention to unarguable differences out of context) is used to anchor the incontestable facts in the preferred ideological frame. That is, the fact that prior to managing the club Gordon Strachan had no Celtic links, together with the press-induced assertion that he is not a Catholic, were stripped of their context to be reconfigured into the press’s preferred anchoring, thus positioning a significant number of Celtic fans as having a problem with non-Catholics managing their club.

The next two examples reveal an additional recurring Scottish press created symbolic annihilation that ridicules Celtic supporters’ knowledge of Irish politics – thus attempting to frame their political associations as illegitimate. Aidan Smith of The Scotsman informs readers that Celtic supporters have little ‘grip on Irish politics’, and that this poor ‘grip’ is similar to that of the handle on an old ‘Oirish dresser’ (5 January 2002). Gerry McNee of The News of the World similarly stereotypes whilst attempting to de-legitimize the political association of some Celtic fans. He writes of ‘plastic Irishmen and women who drink in plastic Irish pubs and don’t know their Athenry from their Antrim when it comes to Irish history or politics’ (6 May 2001). By assuming the ‘decontextualized voice’ (Wertsch, 1990), the voice of reason, Smith and McNee reveal their ideologically laden framing of sectarianism, a frame that is continually reproduced by ideologically laden sections of the Scottish press. As Finn (2000) has shown by adapting Wertsch’s (1990) framework for contextualized/decontextualized voices, the dominant voices of the powerful often appear to be those of decontextualized rationality. Smith and McNee present themselves as the neutral, independent, rational and wise voices of reason to be contrasted with the biased, contextualized, irrational and ignorant voices of the Celtic supporters. In addition to drifting perilously close to racially stereotyping, both journalists overlook their own personal and structural position, inherently claiming – as critical journalist John Pilger (2007) refers to in relation to other journalists – ‘to have risen to the nirvana of ‘‘impartiality”’. By placing themselves (press) in the decontextualized frame, and Celtic fans in the contextualized, they have only acknowledged the contribution of half of the power dynamic, overlooking the central role that the Scottish press play.

Additionally, in attempting to annihilate aspects of Celtic’s Irish-Catholic links, neither Smith nor McNee seem willing to acknowledge that being well informed about the history and politics of an identity is not a necessary condition of having that identity. This is not to suggest that all Celtic fans or Irish songs are beyond reproach. But large sections of the press, in its determination to de-legitimize the club’s Irishness, tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Moreover, beyond Celtic’s Irish-Catholicism, it is difficult to find equivalent annihilations within the Scottish press. For example, the Scotland national football supporters’ group, the ‘Tartan Army’ sings of 700-year-old Scottish battles against the English, and of ‘sending (England’s) Proud Edward’s army home tae’ [sic] think again’ without any such similar annihilation or questioning of their historical and political knowledge from the Scottish press. Meanwhile, Rangers fans, who presumably also do not know their Belfast from their Ballymena or who lack knowledge of the intricacies of Ulster, Protestantism and Loyalism escape such annihilation, revealing contrasting treatment towards Irish-Catholicism compared to other groups in Scotland.

Two further illustrative examples of the symbolic annihilation of Celtic’s Irish-Catholicism are shown which represent mediated attempts to treat events out of context and which ultimately serve to neutralize and label frivolous the anti-Irish acts of sections of Rangers fans, simultaneously accusing the victim of ‘desperation’ and ‘political-correctness’. First, the Daily Record’s Stuart Cosgrove (13 May 2004a) comments on a derby match incident between Celtic and Rangers, when some Rangers fans threw potatoes onto the Celtic Park pitch in an apparent derogatory reference to An Gorta Mor in mid-19th-century Ireland. Cosgrove writes:

I find it difficult to get upset by the tatty controversy. It is so obviously a part of the gallows humour of football rivalry that only a very irate Celtic fan could take seriously. To elevate it to the status of sinister sectarianism borders on desperation.

On the contrary, to reduce it to the status of frivolity, borders on the prejudiced. Stripping this act of its undeniable social, historical and political context – context that presumably contributed to the Rangers fans’ eagerness to perform the act in the first place – merely illuminates the press’s ideologically embedded prejudices. This ‘blame the victim’ anchoring is replicated again in a related issue also involving reference to An Gorta Mor, this time around the anti-Irish song, which revealingly in itself, is referred to in media discourse as ‘The Famine Song’. This song is sung by sections of Rangers (and Hearts ¹⁸ ) fans and includes the line ‘the famine’s over, why don’t you go home?’ The Daily Record’s James Traynor (22 September 2008) asks in his headline, ‘isn’t there enough to worry about without beating ourselves up over a line in a song?’ and proceeds to set the scene by comparing ‘the political correctness’ of offended Celtic fans to a number of self-evidently ridiculous and out of context comparisons. These range from ‘Queen of the South can’t be called Queens because Republicans and gays will be upset’ to the ironic mocking description of how one should react to the song; ‘You will abhor it. You will write to your MSPs, MPs, UEFA, FIFA, the EU and the Vatican. This is the most divisive, anti-social and downright malicious trend to be visited upon us yet.’ The discursive framing and its associated prejudices are further affirmed by Traynor, who adds:

Don’t tell me a line in a song about the decade-long potato famine that made people flee Ireland in their tens of thousands in the middle of the 19th century is what we should be beating ourselves up about.

Rather than anchor the meaning on being about the 19th century, Traynor could have simply considered the actual line in the song and its potential 21st-century significance; notably, that when fans of a club – who until 1989 refused to knowingly sign Catholic players, and whose fans are known to sing anti-Catholic and anti-Irish songs – sing ‘the famine’s over, why don’t you go home?’ to large groups of Irish-Catholic Celtic fans residing in Scotland, this could be interpreted by these Celtic fans (and others) as prejudiced and/or racist. Indeed, upon upholding a conviction against a Rangers fan for singing the song, the Scottish Judiciary Appeal Court branded the ‘famine song’ racist. In specific reference to the line in the song deemed insignificant by the Daily Record journalist, the presiding Lord Carloway judged, ‘they are racist in calling upon people native to Scotland to leave the country because of their racial origins’ (cited in Robertson, 2009). It is therefore ideologically illuminating that Traynor asks, ‘when did the gallows humour of the terracing, which for decades has made us all smile by cutting right through pomposity and politically-correct boundaries, become such a terrible thing?’ ‘Pomposity’ and ‘politically-correct’ are used to symbolically annihilate the Irish-Catholic experience whilst simultaneously camouflaging an historically embedded culture of anti-Irishness ¹⁹ serving to demarcate us – the established group who appreciate gallows humour – from them – the pompous, politically correct outsiders hell-bent on transforming humour into sinister sectarianism. Thus, with an ideologically preferred anchoring of meaning victim is once more transformed into perpetrator by an apparently ‘neutral’ and objective press.

Sections of the Scottish press harbour a sectarian – or rather a non-Irish-Catholic hegemony – world-view whilst blissfully unaware (or in denial) of their own sectarianism. As Bruce (2004), citing Stam (2001) notes, “‘in a systematically racist society, racism is the ‘normal’ pathology from which no one is completely exempt’’ (2001: 477)’ (p. 863). This dysconscious sectarianism relies on a series of sincere fictions to evidence media neutrality including denials of anti-Irish-Catholicism, accusing Catholics (and by crude extension Celtic fans) of paranoia, ²⁰ whilst simultaneously annihilating significant Irish-Catholic experiences in Scottish society. Scottish analyses of sectarianism have often been caught in a crippling ambiguity. Anti-Catholic policies and culture by Rangers and its fans is discursively presented as ‘Protestant tradition’ or ‘sectarianism’ and is often brushed aside as a ‘west of Scotland’, working-class or ‘Old Firm’ problem. The historical and social contexts of Celtic’s links with Catholicism are seldom discussed and its legitimate and natural Irish associations are often ignored or distorted in Scotland’s press. Therefore, Celtic’s non-exclusive Catholicism and its links to Ireland are all questioned, ridiculed and problematized, allowing Celtic and sections of its fans to become the other equal half of the ‘sectarian problem’. Thus, Rangers’ anti-Catholicism and Celtic’s legitimate links to Catholicism are reinterpreted by sections of the Scottish press as corresponding halves who are equally culpable. When Celtic officials, players or fans express Irish-Catholic identities they are further annihilated by sections of the press informing them that they have no knowledge of Irish politics/history, no right to express Irish identities, and are continually ridiculed for doing so. ²¹ Celtic’s non-Catholic fans and employees and its historical association with non-Catholics are rarely mentioned. Accompanying this symbolic annihilation has been a limited response to Rangers’ previous anti-Catholic signing practices in addition to a revealing and almost universal silence on the history, context and effects of Rangers’ dearth of Catholic supporters, managers and directors throughout its entire history up to and including the present day. This lack of contextualization and differentiation has possibly been the major flaw in most press (and wider media)-driven analyses of Old Firm sectarianism in Scotland.

Just as a symbolic annihilation reinforces hegemonic masculinity and dysconscious racism privileges white norms over non-white ‘others’, a hegemonic anti-sectarian stance (which is dysconsciously sectarian itself) is promoted in large part by stripping sectarianism of relations of power and symbolically annihilating Irish-Catholicism (and wider Catholic identifiers relating to Celtic) in the discursive formations of sport, culture and society in Scotland. Therefore Irish-Catholicism in Scottish society, like aggressive, muscular, determined, de-feminized females in sport and indigenous, black, non-white ‘others’ becomes the subordinate, the unusual, unnatural deviant ²² to be reconfigured in order to maintain the dominant hegemonic order whilst annihilating any threat to the sectarian collective conscience.