The jury was not out for long before they made their decision.
Trevor Muirhead and Neil McKenzie were not, as their eloquent defence counsel suggested, merely hoaxers trying to scare their targets.
They were rather, full of malice and thankfully only lacked the technical competence to construct a viable Improvised Explosive Device (IED).
What Muirhead and McKenzie did possess was a different type of IED which was fully operational and much more deadly than the bombs they tried to make.
Both of them are Rangers supporting zealots from central casting and, because of that, they come fully equipped with an Inbred Emotional Deficiency as standard
When they were arrested I undertook some background research for a UK newspaper and what I found was not pretty.
Their palpable hatred for fine people like the late Paul McBride QC, Trish Godman and Neil Lennon just because of their perceived ethnic and religious background is, for me, the real story of this trial.
Everything has a cost and the price of being silent on Anti-Irish racism in Scotland is Muirhead and McKenzie.
It is many years since I wrote a Social Enquiry Report for a Glasgow court so I won’t revisit that career now.
However, these two men, convicts that they now are and awaiting sentence for their crimes, are products of a toxic belief system that passes for normal in their homeland.
This is especially baffling for media colleagues in London and Dublin, but it is the only conclusion that can be reached when sifting the sociological evidence.
At time of writing official Scotland still cannot use the term “Anti-Irish Racism” and I have no clear idea why this should be the case.
Perhaps it is because that would finally recognise the presence of the country’s large Irish community.
While the political class in Edinburgh continue to operate a discrete racism towards the Irish in Scotland as a people then the jury must still be out on just what kind of country the Holyrood elite want to be in charge of after 2014.
