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Glasgow’s Two Famine Memorials and the Rising Prevalence of the Issue of Anti-Irish Racism in Scotland

Les controverses autour des mémoriaux dédiés à la Grande Famine à Glasgow et la montée en puissance de la question du racisme anti-irlandais en Écosse
Nathalie Duclos

Résumés

Jusqu’à très récemment, Glasgow demeurait la seule ville au monde à compter une importante diaspora irlandaise sans posséder de mémorial dédié à la Grande Famine. Aujourd’hui, elle abrite non pas un, mais deux mémoriaux : un mémorial irlandais et écossais inauguré en juin 2018 et financé par le conseil municipal, et un mémorial privé dédié uniquement à la famine en Irlande, dévoilé en juillet 2021. Cet article étudie les questions soulevées par ces mémoriaux dans le contexte plus large d’un débat national en cours sur la nature et la persistance de ce que l’on appelle communément le « sectarisme » en Écosse. Il met en lumière comment les controverses autour de leur érection, qui ont donné lieu à des messages contradictoires concernant la place accordée aux descendants irlandais dans le Glasgow moderne, ont reflété l’évolution de la conversation nationale sur le sectarisme depuis que celui‑ci est devenu un sujet de débat public avec la mise en œuvre de la dévolution en 1999. L’article avance que, depuis les années 2010 en particulier, les débats sur la nature du sectarisme se sont de moins en moins focalisés sur les questions liées à la discrimination et à l’intolérance religieuse entre chrétiens, ou sur les liens entre sectarisme et football, et de plus en plus sur des questions d’ordre ethnique ou racial. Plus précisément, il examine dans quelle mesure divers groupes, y compris des élus, ont vu dans l’érection des deux monuments commémoratifs de la Grande Famine une occasion de souligner que le terme « sectarisme » est un terme impropre pour désigner le racisme anti-irlandais, et que celui‑ci reste un problème dans l’Écosse moderne, en particulier à Glasgow.

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Introduction

  • 1 This estimate comes from historian Martin Mitchell (Mitchell, 2008, p. vii). However, the exact pro (...)
  • 2 Perhaps around 30% of the population of Glasgow is of Irish descent. Although not all Glaswegians w (...)

1Until very recently, Glasgow remained the only city in the world with a significant Irish diaspora but without a Great Famine memorial. Among the significant minority of Scots of Irish descent (perhaps around one million in a population of 5½ millions),1 many are concentrated in Glasgow2 and more widely in the West of Scotland. Some of these are descended from the many immigrants who arrived in the wake of the “Great Famine” of the late 1840s: it is estimated that roughly 115,000 Irish people settled in Scotland in the decade between 1841 and 1851 (Handley, 1947, p. 45), with perhaps around 80,000 coming during the famine years, between 1846 and 1851 (Collins, 1991; Mitchell, 2021). In 1851, the Irish-born population reached its peak at 207,367, representing 7.2% of Scotland’s inhabitants (Vaughan, 2015) and 18.2% of the inhabitants of Glasgow more specifically (O’Brien, 2024). Hence why, in a Scottish Parliament debate on Scotland’s Irish diaspora, an MSP declared that, although there was “no typical Irish immigrant”, it would be “remiss not to mention the mass immigration from Ireland during An Gorta Mór or the Great Hunger, which is better known today as the potato famine” (Scottish Parliament, 2011a).

2The potato blight affected several parts of northern Europe, including the Scottish Highlands (especially in the years 1846 and 1847: Devine, 2012, pp. 413–414), but only in Ireland was the country’s population decimated as a result of both mass deaths and mass emigration, to the point that the Irish famine has been described as “the greatest human disaster in western Europe in the nineteenth century” (p. 413). This explains why today, around 140 Irish famine memorials can be found across the world: mostly in Australia, Canada, the United States, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain (Mark-FitzGerald, 2013).

3Until a few years ago, Glasgow was a significant omission. Yet today, it is home to not one, but two famine memorials: the City Council-funded memorial garden on Glasgow Green, inaugurated in June 2018, and the privately funded “Tower of Silence” memorial statue erected on the grounds of St Mary’s Catholic Church in the East End of Glasgow and unveiled in July 2021. The latter, a stand-alone Irish famine memorial, was built in reaction to the former, which is an Irish and Scottish Highland famine memorial. These two lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1984–1992) share a common purpose, which is to commemorate the lives of the thousands of people who emigrated to Glasgow in the context of the 1840s “subsistence crisis triggered by potato blight” (Devine, 2012, p. 413), and to celebrate the role that these people played in shaping the modern city. However, the erection of these memorials has given birth to conflicting messages concerning the place accorded to Irish descendants in modern‑day Glasgow.

  • 3 It is estimated that Protestants represented around a fourth of the total Irish immigration into Sc (...)

4In the words of historian Tom Devine on the day of its inauguration, the Irish and Highland memorial was designed as an “overtly inclusive memorial which recognises the sufferings of both Catholic and Protestant Irish victims of the catastrophe as well as that of Highland Gaels” (Glasgow City Council, 2018). One of its main purposes is to showcase modern Glasgow as a multicultural city that has learnt the lessons of the past and now strives to be welcoming of people of all national and religious backgrounds. However, some have, on the contrary, seen the memorial as evidence that Glasgow’s modern identity continues to be shaped by anti-Irish racism. The fact that, among the 140 Great Famine memorials scattered across the world, this is the only one which does not exclusively commemorate the Irish migrants and the Irish dead was interpreted as a “testament to the continued limits to the acceptance offered to our [Irish] community over 170 years later” (Irish Voice, 2017b). By contrast, the purpose of the stand-alone “Tower of Silence” famine memorial is specifically to commemorate Irish (rather than Irish and Scottish) famine migrants and celebrate the particular contribution made by Irish descendants to the shaping of modern Glasgow. However, the fact that it is located on the grounds of a Catholic church could wrongly suggest that all Irish migrants to Glasgow were Catholic, when a significant minority, perhaps around a fourth, were Protestant.3

5This paper examines some of the issues raised by Glasgow’s two recently-built famine memorials within the wider context of an ongoing national discussion over the nature and persistence of what has been commonly termed “sectarianism” in Scotland. In a recently-published article by Gouriévidis (2023), which also takes as a subject matter the memorialisation of famine migrants in Glasgow “against the background of the city’s long-standing image as a hotbed of sectarianism”, the focus is on the conflicting uses of heritage, with the article arguing that “while the GCC [Glasgow City Council]’s Irish and Highland Famine Memorial exemplifies the instrumentalist use of heritage, the Tower of Silence fulfils the self-affirming yet potentially exclusionary function of serving one specific community” (p. 146). Rather than the ways in which the two memorials “solidify in the cityscape the traces of sectarian divisions rooted in Glasgow’s past” (p. 162), the present article seeks to shed light on the extent to which disputes over their erection have mirrored the ways in which discussion of sectarianism in Scotland has evolved since it became a topic of wide-ranging public debate at the onset of devolution in 1999.

6It is argued that, since the 2010s in particular, debates on the nature of sectarianism have moved away from a focus on intra-Christian religious discrimination and bigotry, as well as on the link between sectarianism and football, also to include (and increasingly so) an ethnic or racial dimension. More specifically, the paper discusses the extent to which various groups, including elected representatives, saw the erection of the two famine memorials as an opportunity to make the point that the term “sectarianism” is a misnomer for anti-Irish racism, and that anti-Irish racism is still a problem in modern‑day Scotland and especially Glasgow.

Glasgow’s two famine memorials

The Irish and Scottish Highland famine memorial

7At the heart of the Glasgow Green memorial site is a pathway meant to “reflect the journey taken by people who were affected by the famine both in the [Scottish] Highlands and Islands and in Ireland, and their subsequent arrival to Glasgow” (MacDonald, 2017). This site finds its roots in the setting up in November 2012 of a Memorials Working Group by Glasgow City Council to examine the feasibility of “a memorial to those who perished and to those who migrated to this city, and elsewhere, to escape starvation and forge a new life” (Glasgow City Council, 2012 & 2015). This had come after the unanimous approval by the council of a motion, put forward by Councillor Feargal Dalton, recognising the “significant cultural, economic and social impact of Ireland’s An Gorta Mór and the Scottish Highland Potato Famine on the modern‑day character of our great city” (Glasgow City Council, 2012).

8The memorial was inaugurated several years later, in 2018, after a slow and torturous maturation process, “with SNP councillors notably accusing Labour representatives of fearing to alienate certain groups or voters” (Gouriévidis, 2023, p. 150). Its dedication was attended by Glasgow Council Depute Leader David McDonald, Republic of Ireland government minister Joe McHugh, and Scottish historian Tom Devine (author of, among others, a book on the “Great Highland Famine”: Devine, 2004). While the Irish member of government logically spoke only of the Irish famine migrants and their descendants, both McDonald and Devine stressed that one of the memorial’s main purposes was to acknowledge the role played by the descendants of both the Irish and the Scottish Highland and Island migrants of the 1840s in shaping modern Glasgow (Glasgow City Council, 2018; BBC News, 2018). Similarly, despite being born and raised in Dublin, Feargal Dalton, the SNP councillor who had originally proposed the idea of a famine memorial in Glasgow, has stated that he always envisaged the project as one that would “recognise events of the 1840s in Scotland and Ireland” (Irish Post, 2014).

  • 4 This is disputed by Tom Devine, who states that in the Scottish Highlands, “deaths among the old an (...)
  • 5 The Irish Voice is a free monthly newspaper that was launched in 2013. Available on <www.theirishvo (...)

9However, this Ireland-Highland memorial project was opposed from its inception by some among Glasgow’s population of Irish descent, especially by a group called Coiste Cuimhneacháin An Gorta Mór (or Great Hunger Memorial Committee), specifically set up in 2015 to erect an Irish famine memorial in Glasgow. In an official letter to the city council, the committee described the council-backed Irish-Highland project as evidence of a “revision of history” and of the “construction of a new narrative” around the idea that the Irish victims of the Great Famine could in any way be compared to (and thus commemorated alongside) those people who had suffered “as a result of the potato blight in Scotland—as per much of Europe—in the mid‑1800s”, even though there were “no fatalities” in Scotland,4 while Ireland experienced “the worst mass hunger (per head of population) affecting Europe for hundreds of years” (Irish Voice, 2017a). In an article for the Irish Voice (the newspaper for the Irish community in Scotland),5 the committee similarly contrasted the Highland potato blight with the “human engineered and condoned famine in Ireland”, explaining that “the scale and extent of what happened to our people […] made the notion of a ‘Highland and Irish famine memorial’ completely unacceptable to us and offensive in its very concept” (Irish Voice, 2017b).

10The committee also made the claim that Glasgow City Council had added the Highland element onto the famine memorial because it “knew, or believed, that there were forces in Glasgow even today who would not accept a memorial which involved the Irish alone” (Irish Voice, 2017b). The implication here was obvious: anti-Irish feeling was still strong in Glasgow, to the point that even a memorial commemorating the Irish victims of “the worst mass hunger […] affecting Europe for hundreds of years” was repugnant to some. In summary, the committee saw the Irish and Highland memorial as unacceptable and as a testament to the persistence of anti-Irish sentiment in Glasgow. It therefore chose to go ahead with its own, privately-funded, Irish famine memorial project.

The standalone Irish famine memorial

11The Irish famine memorial statue, erected on the grounds of a Catholic Church (St Mary’s) in the Calton area in the east end of Glasgow, was unveiled in July 2021 in the presence of Irish sculptor John McCarron, parish priest Canon Tom White, chair of Coiste Cuimhneacháin An Gorta Mór Jeanette Findlay, and Ireland’s Consul General to Scotland Jane McCulloch. Its origin story as presented by Coiste Cuimhneacháin An Gorta Mór and others is that of an Irish community that had to take it upon itself to erect a memorial to the Irish victims of the famine in a city unique among “scores of cities and towns” with a significant Irish diaspora across the world in lacking such a memorial (Irish Voice, 2017a), and in the face of obstruction on the part of the city council—“in spite of Glasgow city council rather than because of it”, in the words of journalist Kevin McKenna (2017).

12Coiste Cuimhneacháin An Gorta Mór claimed that it had begun discussions with the council as early as May 2016 to provide a site for a memorial on the Clydeside—mainly because of the river’s “historical significance” as “the entry point of our people [the Irish] when they arrived here”—but that, after initial positive discussions, the council had refused to back the project and to grant the committee access to the site it was most interested in, namely “the paved area directly facing the doors of St Andrew’s Cathedral on the river side of the street” (Irish Voice, 2017b). Faced with the “obstacles and poor engagement” of the city council, Glasgow’s Irish community had to take matters “into [its] own hands” to raise the necessary funds and find a suitable site (McGinty, 2021).

13Like its choice to add a “Highland” element to its own famine memorial, the city council’s uncooperative attitude and refusal to help the erection of a memorial dedicated solely to the Irish victims of the famine were felt to encapsulate something about the status of the Irish community in Glasgow today. A few days before the “Tower of Silence” memorial statue was unveiled on the grounds of St Mary’s Church, Canon Tom White bitterly pointed out that, after “futile conversations with the local authority”, it became “readily apparent that this city of ours, which did not have the reputation of welcoming Irish immigrants, refuses to embrace even their memory” and that “An Gorta Mór was not considered worthy of its own memorial”. He stated his shock at the fact that:

In these days when the injustices of oppression and colonialism are increasingly recognised, […] even now there are those in some quarters of the media and in civic and political life who would see an Irish famine memorial as something controversial. (White, 2021)

14He denounced the “hostility and prejudice many descendants of those immigrants still encounter[ed]”, adding that “it may well be dressed up and disguised at times, but for those with an interest, it is blatant and obvious” (White, 2021).

15As for the chair of Coiste Cuimhneacháin An Gorta Mór, she acknowledged that some people questioned the location of the memorial on the grounds of a Catholic Church (when a significant minority of Irish immigrants to Glasgow had been Protestant), to which her answer was that “it is there because good people welcomed it when no one else would” and that she hoped “people of all communities and all faiths” would “come to this place and ponder on the inhumanity of what was done to the victims of An Gorta Mór—those who died and those who left and settled here” (Findlay, 2021). On the day of the unveiling, she also lamented the fact that the recognition of the very existence of an Irish community in the city of Glasgow had for too long been “withheld by many parts of society, including government”. As for why it had taken so long for an Irish famine memorial to be built in Glasgow, she felt that it was part of “an important story that speaks to us of current realities”, though she refrained from spelling out in public exactly what those realities were (Coiste Cuimhneachain An Gorta Mór, 2021). She was less allusive in a private interview with an academic (Gouriévidis, 2023). In it, she claimed that, in the Glasgow City Council famine memorial, the Highlands “were just used as a cover because GCC was not prepared to face down to the anti-Catholic bigotry, the anti-Irish racism in this city”; she also “saw sectarianism as a misnomer, failing to depict this precise form of racism” (Gouriévidis, p. 159).

16Some elected representatives also used the unveiling of the standalone Irish famine memorial to make the same points, speaking openly of anti-Irish racism. On 28 October 2021, those words figured in a Glasgow City Council motion which commended the “recent unveiling” of the Tower of Silence memorial while also celebrating the already-existing Glasgow Green memorial, and described both as “fitting tributes to this period of history which has shaped our city” (Glasgow City Council, 2021). In the motion, the words “anti-Irish racism” were not however directly associated with either memorial, but rather with the “scenes of anti-Irish racism once again witnessed on the streets of Glasgow” at the time of the unveiling of the standalone Irish memorial, in the wake of an “Old Firm” match between Glasgow’s two main football clubs, namely Rangers and Celtic.

17In defence of the use of the phrase “anti-Irish racism” rather than the more commonly-used “sectarianism”, the councillor who submitted the motion recalled an incident during which he had been verbally abused on the Glasgow subway just for having an Irish accent. After noting that the attack had “nothing to do with football” and that his abusers “didn’t ask about [his] religion”, he concluded that the council should “call it out for what it is”, namely, “racism”. He insisted that his motion was “not a sectarianism motion”, but a “racism motion”, arguing that sectarianism implied a “two‑way street” with violence on both sides, while “there are victims of racism and there are perpetrators of racism” (Sandelands, 2021).

18The motion carried on 28 October 2021 by Glasgow City Council was then followed on 4 November by a motion lodged in the Scottish Parliament, one which also combined a condemnation of “anti-Irish racism” and a recognition of the existence of “two memorial sites in Glasgow dedicated to those who were forced to emigrate or lost their life during the Great Hunger” (Scottish Parliament, 2021e).

19These motions are evidence that the recent erection of two famine memorials in Glasgow, and especially that of the standalone Irish famine memorial in 2021, was seen by some as an opportunity to discuss the existence and persistence of anti-Irish racism in the city, and to argue that what has been commonly termed “sectarianism”—something which has been at the centre of debates since the introduction of devolution—is in fact a misnomer for this. As will now be argued, the discussion around Glasgow’s famine memorials has, in that sense, been representative of the direction in which debate over sectarianism in Scotland has evolved in recent years.

From “sectarianism” to “anti-Irish racism”

20“Incidents of anti-Irish racism continue to arise, and often continue to be misidentified as ‘sectarianism’”: such were the opening words of the editorial of The Irish Voice in its edition of 5 October 2022. The editorial also regretted the fact that sectarianism was “a word which makes many people go deaf”, and it hoped that describing incidents as instances of anti-Irish racism would open their ears to the issues at hand (Irish Voice, 2022). As illustrated in this example, the nature of the discussion around Glasgow’s famine memorials, where links were drawn between the erection of the standalone Irish memorial and incidents involving Rangers fans and branded as anti-Irish, has been indicative of a wider trend where public debate on sectarianism in Scotland has increasingly included an ethnic Irish dimension. In particular, it has become common to hear that the term “sectarianism” is unhelpful for the reason that it hides from view the existence and persistence in Scottish society of anti-Irish racism.

The debate around sectarianism in the early years of devolution: a focus on religious bigotry and on football

21A few weeks before the setting up of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999, Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan had given a lecture at the Edinburgh International Festival (printed in full in MacMillan, 2000) in which he had described anti-Catholic bigotry as “Scotland’s shame”. His speech had opened up a huge public and academic discussion around “sectarianism” in the parliament’s first years of existence—one so extensive that one historian has spoken of an “obsessive talking-point” (Devine, 2000, p. 8) and two other academics of an anti-sectarianism “industry” (Waiton, 2013, pp. 104, 112; Walker, 2016, p. 49). In those early days of devolution, debate had mainly focused on the extent and seriousness of sectarianism, with some academics taking the view that its persistence in modern‑day Scotland was a myth (Rosie, 2004; Bruce et al., 2004; Bruce et al., 2005). However, positions on this issue largely depended on the meaning given to the term.

22Debate over the nature of sectarianism in Scotland had mainly hinged on whether the word should be used in reference to structural forms of religious discrimination only, such as in employment (as argued by those academics for whom its persistence was a myth), or whether it also included cultural and attitudinal forms of religious intolerance, such as in jokes or songs. Within that debate, much of the focus was on the links between sectarianism and football, and more specifically the rivalry between Glasgow Rangers and Celtic football clubs, with some arguing that a large part of what was seen as evidence of sectarianism was nothing more than expressions of football tribalism (Bruce et al., 2004; Rosie, 2004). However, whatever the perspective, the definition taken of sectarianism was centred on prejudice or discrimination based on religious belief or identity. By contrast, it is here argued that in recent years, discussion has evolved away from a focus on the religious dimension of sectarianism towards a greater focus on its national, ethnic or racial component. More specifically, it is now often stated that some (or much) of what is referred to under the heading of sectarianism should more properly be described as anti-Irish racism.

23In the first decade of devolution, the issue of anti-Irish racism had hardly featured in an explicit sense in the academic discussion around sectarianism, with debate focusing on religious bigotry and discrimination, rather than racial discrimination. One exception had been Gerry Finn, who, in an essay included in the very first book published in reaction to MacMillan’s speech, had argued that “although MacMillan [did] not inter-relate anti-Catholic prejudice with anti-Irish racism, that is a substantial component of the history of the phenomenon” (Finn, 2000, p. 59). The focus of the book, however, had been on the study of the former rather than the latter, as indicated in the first paragraph of the preface (Devine, 2000, p. 7). In two other books on the issue published in 2004, sectarianism was respectively defined as denoting “a widespread and shared culture of improperly treating people in terms of their religion” (Bruce et al., 2004, p. 4), and as “a social setting in which systematic discrimination affects the life chances of religious groups” (Rosie, 2004, p. 3). The former book opened on the assertion that it was born “out of frustration with the dreadful quality of public debate about the importance of religious identity in modern Scotland” (Bruce et al., 2004, p. vii), and although the terms “religious identity” were occasionally replaced with “religio-ethnic” or “religious and ethnic identity” (e.g. p. 144 or p. 173), the social-science evidence examined in the book concerned the socio-economic status of Catholics and non‑Catholics.

24In all official publications and initiatives on the topic and dating back to the early days of devolution, sectarianism was seen as referring to religious bigotry and discrimination. In July 2001, the “Sense over Sectarianism” project was launched by Glasgow City Council in partnership with Rangers and Celtic football clubs, the Church of Scotland, the Catholic Archdiocese in Glasgow, and anti-sectarian charity Nil by Mouth, with the aim of challenging “religiously aggravated prejudice and discrimination” (Action on Sectarianism, 2021). In the same period, the Scottish government (then termed the “Executive”) set up a cross-party working group on “Tackling religious hatred” to consider the possibility and desirability of introducing legislation “likely to lead to the reduction of sectarianism and other forms of religious hatred” (Cross-Party Group on Religious Hatred, 2002, p. 4). In its final report of 2002, the group did recognise that “religion may be only one factor in an interconnected cultural, political, territorial and ethnic identity” and that “focussing on religious differences can be a way of expressing cultural intolerance or racist attitudes”, as a result of which it could be difficult to “disentangle whether religious, racist or cultural beliefs are an impetus to harmful or violent behaviour” (p. 8). The complexity of the problem of religious hatred, “enmeshed as it can often be in a mixture of cultural, political, historical and racial identities” (p. 22), warranted the recommendation that the Scottish government commission research to “provide a statistical and descriptive baseline of incidents of religious and sectarian hatred and which can set this within the wider context of hate crime and violence more generally” (p. 23). It is, however, notable that the report never made specific reference to “anti-Irish racism”.

25Nor was anti-Irish racism mentioned in either the Sectarianism in Scotland report published the following year and commissioned by Glasgow City Council (NFO Social Research, 2003), or the Scottish government report of 2005, tellingly entitled Religious Discrimination & Sectarianism in Scotland: A Brief Review of Evidence (2002–2004) (Scottish Executive, 2005). The latter stated at the onset that its focus was on “discrimination between and against various faith groups” (Scottish Executive, 2005, p. 4), although it acknowledged that “the wider discussion around sectarianism and religion has developed links with other issues such as ethnicity and identity” (p. 5). The former did not associate sectarianism with racism at all, and proposed a definition of it as “a pejorative term to describe divisions, bigotry and discrimination based on religion”, one that, in the specific context of Glasgow, was “usually taken as a specific reference to conflict between Protestants and Catholics” (NFO Social Research, 2003, p. 5). It was noted that most of the respondents to the survey conducted for the report “took an even-handed view” of sectarianism in Glasgow, which they felt to be “equally aimed at Catholics and Protestants” (p. 5). The report added that “for some, the role of football was so significant that it actually replaced religion as the source and focus of sectarian attitudes and behaviours” (p. 10), but also that there was no consensus on whether football-related violence was “sectarian in nature” or rather “similar to what is viewed as mindless hooliganism elsewhere” (p. 12).

The debate around sectarianism in the early to mid‑2010s: an increasing focus on anti-Irish racism

26Although one scholar in particular had started making the point that sectarianism is in large part a misnomer for anti-Irish racism in the early 1990s (Finn, 1991), only from the 2010s onwards did it become a regular part of the discussion on sectarianism, with anti-Irish racism even being described in a Guardian article of 2013 as a hate crime from which the Scottish media “avert[ed] their gaze” and of which they “dare[d] not speak the name” (Greenslade, 2013).

27In an academic book published in the same year and entitled Bigotry, Football and Scotland (Flint & Kelly, 2013), the editors explained that they had intentionally avoided the word “sectarianism” in their title, preferring to speak of “bigotry”, and more specifically of “ethno-religious bigotry”, as one of the editors had also argued in a previously-published article (Kelly, 2010, p. 418). The addition of the “ethnic” tag was significant, with the editors underlining that:

Like racism and sexism, ethno-religious bigotry is grounded in relations of power and these hierarchies of power need to be acknowledged if sectarian relationships are to be understood, never mind “fixed”. What is often missing in sectarian discourse is an analysis of ethnic relations rather than simply religious difference. (Flint & Kelly, 2013, p. 5)

28Moreover, though they did not frame the debate in terms of “anti-Irish racism”, their introduction insisted that sectarianism could not be understood without taking into account the former colonial relations between Britain and Ireland. Quoting from two other academics, they argued that one of the problems with the word “sectarianism” as used in Scotland was that it had until then “avoid[ed] any identification of causality, neglect[ed] any analysis of social and political power within Scotland and implie[d] equal culpability for prejudice between majority and minority communities”. By contrast, “having knowledge of Ireland’s conquest, exploitation and domination by Britain [was] crucial to understanding the position of the Irish and their offspring within British society, particularly in Scotland” (p. 5).

29Also in the early 2010s, the words “anti-Irish racism” appeared for the first time in a Scottish Parliament motion (on “fighting sectarianism and anti-Irish racism”) lodged by Bob Doris, an SNP MSP for Glasgow, and debated in the chamber (Scottish Parliament, 2011b). During the debate, Humza Yousaf, another SNP MSP for Glasgow, declared that one of the challenges for modern‑day Scotland was “not to let the fight against anti-Irish racism be lost in the battle against sectarianism”, and that, despite the “element of overlap”, to “confuse the two would be harmful and dangerous”. Several Labour MSPs agreed with him. John Park (MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife) made the point that there was “a huge difference between tackling anti-Irish racism and tackling sectarianism more widely”, and that “anti-Irish racism must be looked at specifically” and required “a much wider view and perhaps legislation in the longer term”. Michael McMahon (MSP for Uddingston and Bellshill) similarly argued that if anti-Irish racism was to be “subsumed into strategies on sectarianism rather than treated distinctly for what it is”, he held out “little hope for a solution to it”.

30However, McMahon disagreed that new legislation was the solution, arguing that the criminalisation of manifestations of anti-Irish racism, such as the so‑called “Famine Song”, would not be effective and that a change of attitude was instead needed:

I do not want people to stop singing the famine song because they are afraid that they will go to jail; I want them to understand why it is offensive for them to sing it, and why it is important for me to value my Irish heritage and for them to welcome the diversity that Irish immigration has brought to this country. I want people to stop singing the famine song because they appreciate the offence that it causes to people such as me, whose traditions are different from theirs. No amount of legislation will bring that about. (Scottish Parliament, 2011b)

  • 6 See William Walls vs Procurator Fiscal, Kilmarnock, 2009. The judgment was summarised by Lord Braca (...)

31As a reminder, the “Famine Song”—to which further mention will be made again below—was written by Rangers fans to antagonise Celtic fans, and it notably includes the refrain “Well the Famine is over/Why don’t you [or “they”] go home?”. This has led it to be officially considered racist since a judgement of 2009,6 after which its singing was banned by Rangers FC. The understanding of the song as a form of anti-Irish racism is contested by Rangers fans, who—it has been argued—see it as “mocking inauthentic ‘Irishness’ and highlighting disloyalty to Britain by British citizens” (Flint & Kelly, 2013, p. 9). As has been argued elsewhere: “Old Firm supporters draw on historical events in Ireland to antagonise each other. The important thing is the wind‑up” (Bruce et al., 2004, p. 131).

32Three years later, and in the immediate wake of the Scottish independence referendum, another motion on “Sectarianism and anti-Irish racism” (Scottish Parliament, 2014) was lodged in the Scottish Parliament by John Mason (also a Glasgow MSP), though it was never taken in the chamber. After welcoming the fact that people of all faiths and no faith had campaigned for both sides in the referendum, the motion regretted that “sectarianism, including anti-Catholicism, and anti-Irish racism were brought into the debate in Glasgow Shettleston and some other areas”.

33The words “anti-Irish racism” had not appeared in a Scottish Government report published the previous year (Scottish Government Justice Analytical Services, 2013), in which sectarianism had still been defined in religious terms. The report had acknowledged that “some commentators argue[d] that there is an ethnic as well as religious element to the problem with Irish Catholics being a key focus of sectarian behaviour” (p. 7). However, whether this was truly the case could not really be established: not only the numbers experiencing sectarian discrimination seemed to be very small, but more qualitative research was also needed to explore “if and how sectarianism affect[ed] particular communities” in present‑day Scotland (pp. 18–19).

34By contrast, in an interim report issued in the same year by a government-backed advisory group on sectarianism (Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland, 2013), the phrase “anti-Irish” was used no less than seven times (pp. 4, 15, 18, and 19). One of the report’s main findings, however, was that sectarianism could be reduced to neither anti-Catholicism nor anti-Irish racism, both being described as “assumptions” that needed “to be challenged” (p. 4). This statement is evidence of the fact that by now, the debate on sectarianism commonly included the assumption that sectarianism was a misnomer for anti-Irish racism. This was rejected by the advisory group on the basis that at its core, sectarianism “always involves opposition or antagonism based on religious difference, however that is expressed” (p. 17). In other words, the report stressed that “sectarianism in Scotland is related to, but distinct from racism” (p. 13), and it distinguished between what it termed “anti-Irishness, in a cultural sense”, which was “clearly a form of racism” that “should be named as such”, and sectarianism, which added a “religious dimension” to “anti-Irish prejudice” (p. 18). As a result, the definition now offered of sectarianism—as “a complex of perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, actions and structures, at personal and communal levels, which originate in religious difference and can involve a negative mixing of religion with politics, sporting allegiance and national identifications” (p. 5)—was much more intricate than in previous official publications on the issue.

35In its final report published two years later (Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland, 2015), the same advisory group concluded that in practice, it was “impossible to finally and absolutely separate” sectarianism from other phenomena, including “anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Irish racism”, but also from other issues such as “poverty and industrialisation, local and regional factors, and important dimensions of gender” (p. 11). It repeated that sectarianism “always involves religious intolerance mixed with another factor”, which in Scotland tended to be “politics, and/or football allegiance and/or national identity” (p. 23), adding that to leave out these other factors would be “to give undue weight to the religious element of sectarianism” (p. 23). It was acknowledged that some people now “felt that ‘sectarianism’ was an unhelpful term since the problem was actually ‘anti-Irish racism’”. To this, the advisory group replied that it recognised “the seriousness of both anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish racism, and their role within the wider problem of sectarianism”, but also that “no one group is sole perpetrator nor sole victim of sectarian attitudes and behaviour in Scotland” (p. 30).

36Also in 2015, no less than three reports on sectarianism were issued by the Scottish government social research group (Scottish Government, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). The first was based on a survey which explored public views on sectarianism based on questions mainly centred on its religious dimension: the focus was “on perceptions of discrimination against Protestants and Catholics, or on respondents’ feelings in specific situations where religion may be an issue” (Scottish Government, 2015a, p. 3), and interviewers were given a definition of sectarianism as “a term used to describe division, bigotry and discrimination rooted in religion” (pp. 3, 21). The report did note, but in passing only, that sectarianism could sometimes be “associated with […] ‘anti-Irish’ prejudice” (p. 3). Moreover, sectarianism was mainly presented as a two‑way street—as having “most commonly taken the form of those who regard themselves as ‘Protestant’ discriminating in some way against those who are thought to be ‘Catholic’, and vice-versa”.

37“Anti-Irish prejudice” was also fleetingly mentioned, once again in an aside, in the second government report of 2015, where it was noted that there could be “a racist element in sectarianism, such as anti-Irish prejudice” (Scottish Government, 2015b, p. 26). However, the report mainly stressed that some of the research participants were “unsure” what the term sectarianism meant and “found it difficult to isolate the concept from other types of prejudice”, including “religious prejudice and racism—all types of racism, not only anti-Irish racism” (p. 5). Moreover, as had been common in older publications, it was pointed out that for participants originating from Glasgow and North Lanarkshire, “there was an almost immediate conflation between sectarianism and football” (p. 9). The report also singled out songs as having “a particular power to create sectarian meaning” (p. 9), with certain songs being given as examples (p. 45), including the previously-mentioned Famine Song.

38The third government report of 2015, which focused on public processions in Scotland (Scottish Government, 2015c), was an update on another government-sponsored report issued ten years previously, in which the term “anti-Irish racism” had only featured once, in a passage mentioning the suggestion by an Irish Republican organisation (Cairde na hÉireann) that procession organisers “be required to sign a statement renouncing racism (including anti-Irish racism) and sectarianism” (Orr, 2005, p. 102). The more recent report also mentioned anti-Irish racism in relation to Irish Republican organisations, in pages stressing the differences in the cultural significance given to processions by their organisers. While Loyalist organisations mainly put the emphasis on religion and saw processions as a celebration of their Protestant identity (Scottish Government, 2015c, p. vi), Irish Republican organisations “defined themselves as organisations that campaign on behalf of, and support, the Irish community in Scotland” (p. vii) and saw their processions–much fewer in number than the Loyalist ones: 1.8% of all processions in Scotland in 2012, as opposed to 33.9% for Loyalist ones (p. 21)—as being political in nature and as having “the explicit aim of challenging racism, notably anti-Irish racism, and sectarianism in Scottish society” (p. vii). Use in the report of the term “anti-Irish racism” therefore reflected Irish Republican organisations’ perception that this was an issue in Scottish society, rather than a perception on the part of the authors themselves.

The debate around sectarianism in the late 2010s: sectarianism as either rooted in, or a misnomer for, anti-Irish racism

39Three years later, in 2018, an organisation named “Call It Out” and describing itself as “a coordinated voice for the multi-generational Irish community in Scotland” was founded in response to what it described as “a series of high-profile anti-Catholic and anti-Irish incidents” and with the explicit purpose of campaigning “against anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic bigotry” (Call It Out, undated, a). One of its posts, on the topic of new anti-racism support materials for teachers in Scotland, referred to “contemporary forms of anti-Irish racism” which, it was claimed, “include[d] wrongful description of anti-Irish racism as sectarianism (Call It Out, undated, b). Significantly, the foundation of Call It Out came a few months after another organisation called “Show Racism the Red Card” had conducted a survey of 513 Irish people in Scotland, most of whom had claimed to have either experienced (56%) or witnessed (60%) anti-Irish racism (Jones, 2017).

  • 7 Sectarianism had been defined as a “mixture of perceptions, attitudes, actions, and structures that (...)

40Also in 2018, another government-backed working group on sectarianism was set up, this time to consider the establishment of a legal definition of sectarianism. Strikingly, a whole part of its final report was now dedicated to the question of “Sectarianism and its relation to other discrimination such as anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish Racism” (Working Group on Defining Sectarianism in Scots Law, 2018, pp. 9–10), a part which underlined that “the word ‘sectarian’ has evolved as a distinct cultural pattern, and can no longer be defined in purely religious terms” (p. 9). One of the main conclusions reached was that sectarianism was “undoubtedly an intersectional issue” (p. 3), one “characterised not only by religious antipathy based on perceived Christian denominational affiliation, but also hostility expressed in terms of perceived British or Irish national origins and citizenship, or a combination of the two” (p. 29). It was also pointed out that the definition of sectarianism proposed by the previous advisory group on the issue in its final report of 20157 had elicited many positive responses, but also some criticisms, including that it did not explicitly mention “anti-Irish racism” (Working Group on Defining Sectarianism in Scots Law, 2018, p. 6). The more recent working group recorded being told that “the term ‘sectarianism’ [was] misleading and that it [was] important not to allow the term to obscure its more specific underlying roots” in anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, anti-Irish racism, or even anti-British racism—a phrase which here made its first appearance in an official publication on sectarianism (p. 9).

41Call It Out’s response to the publication of the report was indicative of this trend of calling the term “sectarianism” misleading, with the organisation claiming that the introduction of a new “sectarian” aggravation in Scottish hate crime legislation would “mask the true nature of anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Irish racism in Scottish society by formally subsuming it into the contested category of “sectarianism’”. Unsurprisingly, Call It Out also regretted that the report treated anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish racism as “empirically equivalent” with “equally wrong but significantly less prevalent” anti-Protestantism and anti-Britishness (Call It Out, undated, c).

42Finally, 2018 also saw the publication of an academic book on the topic of racism in Scotland, in which a whole part was dedicated to “anti-Irish racism and sectarianism” (Davidson et al., 2018). In his conclusion, one of the authors pointed out that describing as sectarian instances of racism, such as the singing of the Famine Song, was revealing of a structural failure to properly deal with the issue of anti-Irish racism:

The failure of the state to deal with the widespread singing of songs at football and within communities whose lyrics include the expressed desire to be “Up to our knees in Fenian blood” or “The famine is over, why don’t you go home”, indicates not just a problem with racism but a historically and politically specific racism aimed at the Irish in Scotland. When the Irish Consulate in Scotland raised concerns over “The Famine Song” with the SNP Government, the response was telling. “The Scottish Government is totally committed to combating sectarianism and bigotry.” (Forsyth, 2008)

In other words this was a problem of intra-Christian rivalry and not of racism. This displays a worrying misunderstanding of racism and Scotland’s history (Slaven, 2018, p. 68).

43Another essay started from the premise that “in relation to Scotland, sectarianism and racism are not two separate phenomena”, quoting from Finn who had argued in 1990 that sectarianism was “the preferred term because it perpetuate[d] the ‘national myth’ that Scotland is a country free from racism” (McBride, 2018, p. 69). It was also pointed out that studies which came to the conclusion that the persistence of sectarianism in modern‑day Scotland was a myth were quantitative studies based on demographic indicators and focusing on structural changes; this, it was argued, did not allow them to “properly take into account the legacy of past discrimination and inequality, and residual tensions which may arise from these” and led them to “marginalis[e] claims of the Irish as an ethnic minority and a racialised group”. The author also regretted “the ‘equivalence’ frame which focuses on ‘Protestant-Catholic relations’”, as this neglected the “historic unequal power relations” between Britain and Ireland, and between Protestants and Catholics (pp. 88–89).

Scottish political debate since the early 2020s: anti-Irish racism now discussed as such

  • 8 For instance: among MPs, Carol Monaghan (MP for Glasgow West); among MSPs, Bob Doris (MSP for Glasg (...)

44The issue of anti-Irish racism has arguably become even more prevalent in Scottish political debate since the early 2020s. Not only is it now regularly discussed in different political forums, but it is now often discussed as such, rather than as part of a discussion on sectarianism. This is mainly due to the dedication of a group of elected representatives representing Glasgow (or one of its areas),8 who in recent years have initiated debates on the topic in the UK House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, as well as in Glasgow City Council. This has arguably been especially the case since the summer of 2021, a summer that witnessed the unveiling of Glasgow’s standalone Irish famine memorial, but that also saw incidents occur in the wake of an Old Firm football match between Rangers and Celtic. This group of Glasgow councillors, MPs and MSPs have been notable for their commitment to entrenching the phrase “anti-Irish racism” into the public lexicon, as well as to mainstreaming the idea that anti-Irish racism has neither been called out nor fought effectively enough, mainly because it hasn’t been “called what it is” and has instead been improperly termed “sectarianism”.

45One of these representatives is James Dornan, SNP MSP for Glasgow Cathcart, who, in June 2018, initiated a Scottish Parliament cross-party group on “combatting sectarianism in Scottish society” (Dornan, 2018) and been quoted as saying:

The only sort of group behaviour that seems to be still acceptable is sectarianism. I’m not saying that homophobic behaviour doesn’t exist, or racism, or misogyny, but they’re all now recognised as being unacceptable behaviours. Sectarianism isn’t in the same way. (Davidson, 2018)

46Tellingly, three years later, in June 2021, Dornan no longer spoke of “sectarianism” as the last acceptable form of discriminatory group behaviour, but of “anti-Irish racism” as “the last acceptable form of racism in Scotland” (Scottish Parliament, 10 June 2021), as exhibited by thousands of Rangers fans who had gathered in Glasgow’s George Square a month before.

47Another representative worth mentioning is Carol Monaghan, SNP MP for Glasgow North West. In March 2021, she was one of the 18 signers (including 4 other SNP MPs) of an early‑day motion on “Anti-Irish discrimination” in the UK House of Commons, a motion which opened on the words “That this House condemns anti-Irish racism in all its forms” (UK House of Commons, 2021). In August of the same year, a number of Rangers fans were arrested on the day of an Old Firm football match and later charged for singing the Famine Song while walking through Glasgow city centre. This incident led Monaghan to write to the Scottish First Minister and to Police Scotland, speaking of an “endemic anti-Irish problem” in Glasgow and denouncing what she called “yet another display of public, explicit anti-Irish racism in our city”, with “racist football fans” singing “an overtly racist chant”. She added:

If these sentiments were directed at any other ethnic minority, they would be rightfully and universally condemned as acts of hate and bigotry. We cannot brand anti-Irish racism as “the norm” in Glasgow—it must be called out and persecuted as a hate crime. (Monaghan, 2021)

48A few days later, on 2 September, Pauline McNeill, Labour MSP for Glasgow, asked Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon what plans her government had to “tackle public displays of anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic prejudice”, to which Sturgeon answered that she “unequivocally condemn[ed] anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic prejudice”, adding that it “should be called what it is and it should be called out”. After thanking the First Minister for her answer, McNeill made the point that there was

still a clear problem with a minority of people displaying anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice, as well as a growing feeling that, if those terms were used about any other minority group, the sentiments displayed on our streets would be treated far more seriously. (Scottish Parliament, 2021b)

A few days later, James Dornan lodged a similar question to the Scottish Government, to which the answer was once again that the Government “unequivocally condemn[ed] all forms of hatred or prejudice, including anti-Irish racism” (Scottish Parliament, 2021c). Dornan also lodged a parliamentary motion (entitled “Holding Racists Accountable”) which condemned “the anti-Irish racism and religious bigotry” displayed by the Rangers fans on the day of the Old Firm match, requested that Rangers FC conduct an “internal investigation into the reasons for these reported instances of anti-Irish racism”, and urged “Rangers FC, Police Scotland, the Scottish Government, Glasgow City Council and any other interested parties” to hold a summit to deal with what was described as “this longstanding and dangerous issue” (Scottish Parliament, 2021d).

49Finally, a few weeks later, on 28 October 2021, Glasgow City Council voted its own (previously-mentioned) motion that at the same time condemned “the scenes of anti-Irish racism once again witnessed on the streets of Glasgow” and celebrated both of Glasgow’s famine memorials (Glasgow City Council, 2021), a motion that was then seconded in the Scottish Parliament a few days later (Scottish Parliament, 2021e).

Conclusion

50Behind such motions lie not only the belief that the fight against instances of prejudice such as exhibited by Rangers football fans in August 2021 would be better targeted and more effective if they were described as examples of anti-Irish racism, but also, more generally, the belief that anti-Irish racism is a structural problem in modern‑day Scotland, especially Glasgow, and the wish that this be recognised on a wider scale. Why did some of these motions at the same time condemn the anti-Irish racism displayed by some football supporters, and mention Glasgow’s famine memorials? The link lies in the reference to the Great Famine, with the Rangers fans being condemned for singing the anti-Irish Famine Song. More generally, reference to the famine as a way of portraying the Irish in a negative way is part of a discourse which has historically racialised the Irish, with some arguing that in Scotland, racialisation of the Irish has “operated with greater intensity than in England” (Finn, 2000, p. 55). That the Irish were racialised in the wake of the wave of famine migration can be seen, for instance, in the following extract from an official report on the 1871 population census:

The Irish are the most numerous aliens in Scotland, amounting to 207,770 persons or 6.184 per cent of the total inhabitants. It must be remembered, however, that the Irish as a race are much more numerous in the Population—probably amounting at the least to 400,000; for the numbers above only include those who were born in Ireland, and do not include the members of their families who have been born in Scotland. This very high proportion of the Irish race in Scotland has undoubtedly produced deleterious results, lowered greatly the moral tone of the lower classes, and greatly increased the necessity for the enforcement of sanitary and police precautions wherever they have settled in numbers. (Quoted in Vaughan, 2015)

51More controversial however is whether this racialisation process is still at work today, such as when a memorial to the Great Famine is built that does not exclusively commemorate Irish migrants, or when Rangers fans sing the Famine Song or throw potatoes (again in reference to the famine) onto the Celtic Park pitch during an Old Firm match, as in an incident from 2004 related by the Daily Record’s Stuart Cosgrove. While some would see the latter as clear instances of anti-Irish racism, others dismiss these claims of racism as instances of “political correctness”. Of the potato-throwing incident, Cosgrove had, for instance, written that it was “obviously a part of the gallows humour of football rivalry that only a very irate Celtic fan could take seriously. To elevate it to the status of sinister sectarianism borders on desperation”. About the singing of the Famine Song, another Daily Record journalist had similarly asked: “when did the gallows humour of the terracing, which for decades has made us all smile by cutting right through pomposity and politically-correct boundaries, become such a terrible thing?”, to which he had added: “Don’t tell me a line in a song about the decade-long potato famine that made people flee Ireland in their tens of thousands in the middle of the 19th century is what we should be beating ourselves up about” (quoted in Kelly, 2010, pp. 428–429).

  • 9 In the end, Ahern did attend the unveiling ceremony, which was only delayed by a few months. Intere (...)

52Whatever the position taken, the continuing association between the famine and anti-Irish racism largely explains why the erection of famine memorials has been such a sensitive issue in Scotland, especially in the West of Scotland, where most Irish descendants are concentrated. In February 2001, an invitation sent to Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern to unveil an Irish famine memorial at the Carfin Grotto in Lanarkshire was temporarily withdrawn following an intervention by Frank Roy, Labour MP for Motherwell and Wishaw, who had raised concerns that the ceremony was to fall on the same day as an Old Firm match (Collins, 2001).9

53It has been argued that there is a contrast between the “acknowledgement of the racialisation of the Irish” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and “its systematic absence from contemporary accounts of racism and ethnicity”—as a result of a “long academic tradition of ‘over-racialising’ the representation of ‘non‑white’ social collectivities, while denying the possibility of white groups being racialised minorities”—leading to an invisibilisation of the Irish as an ethnic minority group, and thereby also an invisibilisation and even a negation of contemporary anti-Irish racism (Mac an Ghaill, 2000, pp. 137–138). In a previously-mentioned essay on sectarianism and anti-Irish racism in modern‑day Scotland, it was noted that the absence of an Irish famine memorial in Glasgow had given rise to “claims of ‘cultural invisibility’” but also to perceptions “that such a memorial could attract trouble” (McBride, 2018, p. 88). The rise in the prevalence of the issue of anti-Irish racism in Scottish political debate must therefore be seen not only in the specifically Scottish context of the debate over sectarianism, but also in the wider British context of calls for recognition, and increasing political mobilisation, of the Irish in Britain as a minority group, including in Scotland (where they form the largest such group) and more specifically in Glasgow. At the very least, the fact that there are now two different memorials that commemorate Irish famine migrants in Glasgow when just a few years ago there were none could be construed, as done by Graham Walker, as a testament to “the recent rise of an Irish cultural profile” in Glasgow and the West of Scotland (Walker, 2016, p. 63).

Call it Out, n.d.a, “Home”. Available on <www.callitout.org.uk/> (accessed on 13 January 2025), website now discontinued, and replaced with <https://www.callitout.uk/​>.

Call it Out, n.d.b, “Scot Gov Publishes Curriculum Guidance on Colonialism”. Available on <www.callitout.org.uk/post/scot-gov-publishes-curriculum-guidance-for-schools-on-teaching-impacts-of-colonialism> (accessed on 13 January 2025), link now discontinued.

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Notes

1 This estimate comes from historian Martin Mitchell (Mitchell, 2008, p. vii). However, the exact proportion of Scots with Irish roots is impossible to establish, as in Scotland’s censuses, hyphenated categories such as Scottish-Irish are unavailable to choose. Scots with Irish ancestry must therefore choose between the “White: Scottish” and the “White: Irish” categories, the latter having been included in censuses since 2001. Most if not all Scots with Irish roots opt for the “Scottish” category: in the censuses of 2001, 2011 and 2022, only about 1% of the population of Scotland identified as “White: Irish”. These Irish identifiers are likely to be Irish people residing in Scotland, rather than Scots with Irish origins: as has been pointed out, the “number of people resident of Scotland at the time of the [2001] census who chose to describe themselves as Irish (40,000) was less than the number of people who had been born in Ireland (55,000)” (Bruce et al., 2004, p. 99).

2 Perhaps around 30% of the population of Glasgow is of Irish descent. Although not all Glaswegians with Irish roots are Catholic, and although not all the Catholics of Glasgow have Irish origins, the 2001 census showed that Catholics make up 29% of the population of Glasgow (Bruce et al., 2004, p. 95).

3 It is estimated that Protestants represented around a fourth of the total Irish immigration into Scotland from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries (Walker, 1991, p. 49).

4 This is disputed by Tom Devine, who states that in the Scottish Highlands, “deaths among the old and the very young rose significantly in late 1846 and the first few months of 1847” (Devine, 2019, p. 307).

5 The Irish Voice is a free monthly newspaper that was launched in 2013. Available on <www.theirishvoice.com/about> (accessed 2 March 2026).

6 See William Walls vs Procurator Fiscal, Kilmarnock, 2009. The judgment was summarised by Lord Bracadale in the following way: “The court considered that the lyrics of the Famine Song were racist in calling upon people native to Scotland to leave the country because of their racial origins” (Bracadale, 2018, p. 95).

7 Sectarianism had been defined as a “mixture of perceptions, attitudes, actions, and structures that involves overlooking, excluding, discriminating against or being abusive or violent towards others on the basis of their perceived Christian denominational background”, a perception “always mixed with other factors such as, but not confined to, politics, football allegiance and national identity” (Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland, 2015, pp. 5, 24).

8 For instance: among MPs, Carol Monaghan (MP for Glasgow West); among MSPs, Bob Doris (MSP for Glasgow Maryhill & Springburn), James Dornan (MSP for Glasgow Cathcart), Pauline McNeill (MSP for Glasgow), and Paul Sweeney (MSP for Glasgow); and among Glasgow City councillors: Feargal Dalton and Ruairi Kelly.

9 In the end, Ahern did attend the unveiling ceremony, which was only delayed by a few months. Interestingly, in his speech, the Irish Taoiseach not only noted that no event in Irish history could compare with the Great Famine, but also that “Scotland and its people also shared the suffering of those terrible times. Here, too, potato blight and famine stalked the land and the Highland clearances compelled proud people to set sail for distant shores” (quoted in O’Hagan, 2002, p. 280).

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Nathalie Duclos, « Glasgow’s Two Famine Memorials and the Rising Prevalence of the Issue of Anti-Irish Racism in Scotland  »Études écossaises [En ligne], 25 | 2026, mis en ligne le 09 avril 2026, consulté le 11 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/7185 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/161ml

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Nathalie Duclos

Université de Toulouse
nathalie.duclos@univ-tlse2.fr
 
Nathalie Duclos is a professor of British politics & history and a member of the Centre for Anglophone Studies at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France). Her research speciality is Scottish politics, and more specifically the study of Scottish nationalism and the Scottish independence movement. She is currently the president of the French Society for Scottish Studies (Société française d’études écossaises).
 
Nathalie Duclos est professeur des universités en civilisation britannique et membre du Centre for Anglophone Studies (CAS) de l’Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès. Sa recherche porte sur la vie politique écossaise, et plus spécifiquement sur le nationalisme et le mouvement indépendantiste écossais. Elle est actuellement présidente de la Société française d’études écossaises (SFEE).

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