A shameful centenary that official Scotland cannot ignore

A year ago this month, I wrote to the Church of Scotland media office.

I was fully aware that the centenary of the infamous Church and Nation Committee report on the Irish in Scotland was little more than 12 months away.

In my book Minority Reporter, I included that document as an appendix.

The strap line to that book, published a decade ago by Frontline Noir, was:

Modern Scotland’s bad attitude towards her own Irish.

As synchronicity would have it, I posted a copy of Minority Reporter last week to a friend here in Donegal.

He had reached out to me after doing a book review on another work which examined anti-Irish racism.

I will spare his blushes, but he once was, like your humble correspondent,  a writer for An Phoblacht.

The press officer at the Church of Scotland had signed off her email last year with a stated intention that she would elicit the view of her colleagues on the issue I had raised.

In truth, I had forgotten about this correspondence until I saw this front page in the Irish Voice which is the featured Image.

Today, I have written back to the helpful person at the Church of Scotland inquiring if they would attend a conference on the 1923 report if an invitation were forthcoming.

 

Sadly, modern Scotland’s bad attitude towards her own Irish has endured since Minority Reporter hit the shelves.

In 2013 I wrote that Fair Caledonia had abnormalised itself apropos the Irish and Irishness.

If anyone in public life fancied a bit of punching down, then Paddy was a free hit just like a hundred years ago when the Kirk was getting all eugenicist about the Irish other in their midst.

Indeed, as the Irish Voice itself noted in this piece in 2018.

It is worth noting that the British politician’s career suffered no adverse consequences for her sneering jibe at Scotland’s multi-generational Irish community.

Here she is swearing loyalty to the Saxe Coburg Gotha family.

Perhaps the honourable member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South will receive an invitation to the proposed conference on the 1923 report.

As regular readers will know, I wrote to this British MP some years back and gifted her a copy of Minority Reporter.

I hoped that she might learn something about the community that she considered to be “plastic”.

Unlike the Church of Scotland, she didn’t reply.