JUSTICE FOR ALL... Time for Celtic to forget about their bank balance and the club’s reputation
It’s time for Celtic to forget about the cost to their bank balance and the club’s reputation and focus fully on...
FOR parents, school summer holidays usually mean entrusting sons and daughters to people we don’t really know. Exposing our own flesh and blood to stranger danger.
Grandparents and relatives bear most of the load. Yet across the country, summer camps have been rolled out by councils, playgroups and sporting bodies to help out the squeezed middle. Working mums and dads grateful for the assistance.
Driving a teenage daughter to a fashion boot camp from Monday to Friday this week, there was no question of placing her in any danger. She’d been there before and enjoyed every minute.
Yet the unspoken truth is this. In our heads we all carry out an informal risk assessment.
But when that car door closes, no parent ever really knows for sure.
And British football’s child-abuse scandal has forced each and every one of us to ask a disturbing question; how would we react if our own flesh and blood were harmed in any way?
For the families of those who wanted to play for Celtic between the 1960s and 1990s, this is no hypothetical scenario.
It’s not the plot of Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus effort. It’s a torturous daily reality.
Many victims of sexual abuse stored up the anguish for years, suffering serious mental health problems.
Others took solace in alcohol.
To open up and speak publicly about their ordeal sooner might have helped.
But it takes enormous bravery to sit before a BBC Scotland camera or a High Court jury and discuss the greatest source of shame and distress in their life.
Public identification could mean sons, daughters or grandchildren facing up to the consequences of their actions in the playground or workplace.
And, let’s be honest, who wants that? To their credit, some brave souls found the courage to make a stand.
Because of them, paedophiles Jim Torbett, Frank Cairney, Gerald King and Jim McCafferty were all brought to justice.
Yet few of them will sleep any easier at night as a result.
As a football club, Celtic can do little to erase the wrongs of the past.
The people who run the club now are not to blame for the appalling deeds of the past. But they can make amends by ending the practice of dropping legal boulders on the heads of suffering victims.
These people are owed some form of apology and compensation. Yet, for too many of the victims, extracting either has been a bloodand-stone experience.
A fresh source of unbearable anger. Amidst all the online pointscoring and tribalism over this issue, a core point is often lost.
Most of the victims are Celtic supporters.
Some still attend games and buy season tickets, they are paying customers.
They are not troublemakers or supporters of other teams with an ‘agenda’.
They are fathers and grandfathers whose only crime was a desperate desire to play football for Celtic.
And their pain and mental anguish at being exploited by predatory paedophile coaches is now being heightened by the reluctance of the Parkhead club to admit culpability for the repeated, indefensible failure of past club custodians to protect the children placed in their care.
Now, finally, comes a measure of justice.
As this newspaper reports on its front page today, Celtic have become the first Scottish club to pay compensation to a victim of historic sexual abuse.
It’s a significant development and a starting point.
But no-one should hold out any hope of the floodgates opening. Not yet.
Victims of abuse at Celtic fall into two distinct groups.
Most of the focus has fallen on the victims of Celtic Boys’ Club. The vulnerable, innocent children who only ever wanted to play football and had their hopes and dreams despicably abused by the twisted trio of Torbett, Cairney and King.
Almost overlooked in all of this were the professional youth players who worked side by side on the Parkhead ground staff with kitman McCafferty in the 1990s.
They were full-time employees of Celtic working out of Parkhead.
The trust and youth of one at least was shamefully exploited, his case for personal injury compensation indisputable.
Other victims of Boys’ Club abuse continue to bang their heads off a brick wall.
Celtic maintain the line that the feeder club was an ‘entirely separate organisation’ and, while that might stack up legally, it’s morally dubious.
Scotland’s champions recently announced the appointment of a ‘wholly independent and experienced lawyer’ to investigate the wrongs of the past. And compensating and apologising to one victim is a start.
But justice can’t stop at the few. Whatever the damage to their reputation and bank balance, Celtic are duty bound to extend a transparent form of justice to all.