EVERY year at Hogmanay my extended family used to gather in my auntie's house, up a close in Dundee, to see in the new year with a party. Everyone had their own song, even us kids. Mine, if you must know, was 'Nobody's Child'. And let me assure you: after the final verse there was never a dry eye in the room.
Even as a young boy, one thing about these gatherings struck me as strange. Many of the songs my relatives sung were sentimental Irish ballads. This puzzled me, because although this was a good Catholic family, devout in the way of the respectable wo
rking class, you had to go back a century to find the last true Irishman in the family. (He came over from Baillieborough, Co Cavan, in 1851.) I doubt if many of my relatives had ever been to Ireland. Yet they sang these songs like true sons of Erin's green isle, using an accent that wasn't their own.
At some quiet moment late in the night, someone would start up with 'I'll Take You Home Again', Kathleen, and because this was Uncle Bobby's song, and Uncle Bobby was no longer with us, everybody in the room would start to cry. Then they would help each other unsteadily down the tenement stairs and into the frost of a new year.
A sense of belonging is a powerful force. My uncles were Scots, but they sang in Irish accents because faith, family and football were bound up together, and all had their roots in Ireland. In Dundee, the community that shared this allegiance was a rich and nourishing one. To deny it would be to deny themselves.
We have to be careful in the battle against sectarianism in Scotland not to denigrate a legitimate sense of belonging. When does the celebration of your own culture turn into the disparagement of someone else's? Where do we draw the line?
Last week we saw the perfect demonstration of how problematic this can be. A Glasgow University lecturer called Dr Jeanette Findlay was condemned on the front pages of Scotland's tabloid newspapers after she made comments about the singing of Irish Republican songs by Celtic fans at Parkhead. Findlay is leader of a rebel group of Celtic shareholders who object to the appointment of John Reid as club chairman, given his role in taking Britain into the Iraq war.
She was asked on the radio last week which was worse, the appointment of Reid or the singing of pro-IRA songs on the terraces. Her reply was: "You are talking about songs about the IRA but, again, many of those songs are songs from what was essentially a war of independence going back over a hundred years." Cue outrage. A spokesman for the First Minister commented: "Her repugnant views have no place in a modern, forward-thinking Scotland."
I may be being overly kind to Dr Findlay, but I suspect she was trying to make an important distinction. Many 'Irish Republican' songs are indeed in praise of the terror organisation that has been responsible for thousands of deaths over the past 40 years. They have no place at Parkhead or anywhere else.
But other songs popular among Scots of Irish descent are about the long struggle that gave birth to the modern Irish state, and the subsequent civil war. Leading figures in this earlier conflict, such as Robert Emmet and Edinburgh-born James Connolly, are legitimately honoured in Ireland as national heroes. Is it wrong for Scots of Irish descent to celebrate them?
Just because some events from the past are misused to justify hatred today doesn't mean they have to be airbrushed out of history - and that goes for the Battle of the Boyne as well as the Easter Rising. Many people are uncomfortable with the fact that an affinity with Irish history, on both sides, is a feature of contemporary Scottish life. They would prefer it to disappear.
Well, that isn't going to happen, and nor should it.
I'd hate to see a Scotland where there were no wee girls learning Irish dancing, and no wee boys learning to play the snare drum so they can play in a Orange marching band. We must be allowed to mark our cultural antecedents, just as New Scots from Pakistan or Poland must be encouraged to celebrate theirs.
The challenge - and it is a formidable one - is to drain the hardline Catholic and Protestant identities of their residue of poison. That requires rather more subtlety than was displayed last week by both Dr Findlay and those who condemned her.
Do we really want to deracinate Scots with Irish ancestry, on either side of the religious divide? Do we really want cultural differences subsumed to the extent that our only distinguishing feature is whether we prefer our Saturday night takeaway from Domino's or Pizza Hut? You can believe in a united Ireland and still be a good, law-abiding, fully-fledged Scot. Same goes for someone who believes that Eire has no claim on Ulster. You can be Scots who support different football teams and disagree fundamentally about Ireland, but agree about the evils of terrorism.
At my family's Hogmanay parties when I was child, the songs were not about Armalites or the IRA - it was sentimental stuff such as 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling'. The cultural signifiers in my family were not Republican politics but the Roman Catholic Church and Celtic FC. Attendance at mass was compulsory and each week a copy of The Celtic View was passed around until it was a tattered rag. It marked me, of course. But I'm afraid I ended up a disappointment to all concerned - a Dundee United supporter and an atheist, my very own cultural baggage.
The full article contains 968 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
