Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish “banter” normal inside SFA say sacked three.

A worrying picture of a “canteen culture” of everyday anti-Catholic anti-Irish “banter” in the Scottish Football Association offices has emerged during the appeals into the sackings of the SFA workers caught up in the Dallas Email affair.

The defence, in part, of the three sacked workers is that this  “banter” was normal behaviour in the SFA and that email  “jokes” about priests, Catholics and Irish people was the norm.

My sources tell me that the IT specialists were “horrified” at the amount of offensive and discriminatory material that they uncovered on the SFA server in the wake of the Dallas email scandal.

The trade union view is that the three should be re-instated and a line be drawn under the affair.

Then a new IT policy would be drawn up and everyone would sign up to that.

The three sacked workers do not want to be associated with Hugh Dallas and believe that they were sacked because of the public furore of the Pope email being forwarded on by him on the date of the Pope’s visits to the UK in September.

This olive branch has been rejected by those in positions of power at the SFA much to the dismay of the union officials representing the three young people who have lost their jobs.

The workers are particularly angry that senior SFA functionaries were in receipt of emails of a similar nature from them before the Dallas email story broke.

The emails included audio and video “jokes” of an anti-catholic and anti-Irish nature.

Not once, the sacked three claim, did senior SFA personnel complain to them and say that this type of email “humour” was unacceptable to be passed around using the official SFA email accounts.

It was during the appeal hearings held on the 23^rd December last year that it was pointed out to SFA HR specialist Ms.Viv Coady that if the same criteria were used on the rest of the SFA staff approximately 70% of the workers there would have to be dismissed. My sources tell me that she did not challenge this statement when it was put to her.

Critics will point to this allegation of an anti-Catholic anti-Irish “canteen culture” inside the SFA as further evidence that the organisation itself is intuitionally biased against Celtic because of the Parkhead club’s Irish Catholic heritage.