“They can hate me if they want, but they can’t spit in my face”
JEANETTE Findlay throws her head back in a long, throaty guffaw. The academic has just been asked if there is institutional discrimination against Protestants in Scotland. It takes her a while to catch her breath.
“You can say I laughed, wheezed and spluttered my tea,” she says. “You can say I nearly died.” Eventually, still giggling, she gets to her answer: individual Protestants, she reckons, may well suffer prejudice but there is no systemic bias against them.
Findlay chairs a new group, Call It Out. Her campaign plans, if it can, to protest against any loyalist or Orange parade that passes a Catholic church this coming season.
But Call It Out also, for the first time, challenges the very concept of sectarianism and anybody who fails to recognize what Findlay and others see as the real issue: the closely intertwined concepts of anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Irish racism.
She has just been showing The Herald on Sunday around historic St Mary’s, on the eastern edge of the Calton, one of churches where Canon Tom White preaches. This is a potential point of dispute for march routes.
Findlay is one of those who had an “enough is enough” moment after St Alphonsus. She and her campaign have told the police they will protest against parades that pass Catholic churches. On each occasion they have done so, all but one of the marches was rerouted.
She said: “What our organisation wants is a wee bit of give and take. We don’t want to ban anybody. There are something like 2,164 streets in Glasgow. Fewer than 60 have a Catholic church on them. What we are saying is that you can march anywhere you like except those 60 streets. And if you do march on those streets we will come and protest against you.”
How does she feel about the Orange Order? “You can think what you like,” she says. “But you can’t make it my problem. They can hate me if they want, but they can’t spit in my face.
“If people were asking the far right not to march past a mosque or a synagogue, it would just be normal.”
Findlay, a Labour supporter, is also critical of some Scottish online attitudes to the Order. “They think ‘we don’t want this nasty business tainting our Tartan nirvana’,” she says.
The 58-year-old does not feel Scottish, though she was born and bred in the country. She feels Irish. And she says the Irish community is not only invisible but its very distinctiveness is often denied, despite its visible music, dance, language and sporting traditions.
She says: “We are overrepresented among the prison population, overrepresented among the poor, overrepresented among people with alcohol issues.
“We are dying younger and are poorer. To me that is because we are an immigrant population which has never been accepted. If we did not exist as a distinct population, we would not be statistically distinguishable and we are.
“The reaction to that is either to deny there is a problem or to suggest that somehow we are the problem. So when you want to deal with the problem with attacks on us you say it is ‘sectarianism’, we lump it together with other things to just look away.”
What does she think of the now traditional approach to tackling sectarianism? “It’s a cover-up. It’s a determined and sustained campaign by successive administrations to refuse to identify what is happening to our community.
“People have peddled this false equivalence for too long. Why are we called Call It Out? We are saying ‘call it what it is’. Equally, if you see an example of anti-Protestant bigotry, call it out, call it was it is. Don’t lump it together.”
This new mood dislikes the old messaging, that anti-Catholic and antiProtestant prejudice, as characterised by Findlay, are ‘two cheeks of the one arse.’ Findlay is scathing about charities such as Nil by Mouth, which she believes have misdiagnosed what used to be called Scotland’s Shame. The charity, she said, has had a “poisonous impact on all of this debate”.
She sounds more angry about Nil by Mouth than the Orange Order. “I am,” she says. “Because they should know better.” while working for a campaign that tries to root out the last of the bigotry it can inspire.
Scott, however, recognises there is a change in mood. “Scotland has never succumbed to the levels of madness my own part of the world has,” he says. “There are still pockets of people who have sectarian attitudes. You can find them at schools, workplaces and communities and football clubs.
“In the last couple of years we have seen the rise of identity politics and these kind of ethno-religious tribes have become something people talk about more loudly.
“You have more parades in Strathclyde than you have in Belfast. When it comes to the Orange Order, marching is pretty much the thing they do.”
And feelings among Catholics, he acknowledges, have hardened after that St Alphonsus event.
But Scott is sceptical about the way Findlay highlights the Irish in Scotland as “other”. He says: ‘As an Irish person myself, is there an Irish community in Scotland? I think the Irish are very well integrated into Scottish society.
And he defends efforts to tackle sectarian bigotry in general rather than its component parts. He says: “Of course there is an issue with anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishism. It is a big and significant piece of the puzzle. But if it is the only one you reach for, you are not going to solve the jigsaw.
“What you are then at risk of doing is saying that it is only something that happens to us or it is not something that people like us do.
“At Nil by Mouth we recognise sectarianism has its roots in religion and that it shoots off into politics and themes of identity. We will take that on. We