Passion and disagreement among Irish voices in Glasgow as referendum nears

Early arrivals had begun to gather in good time to watch the Kerry-Mayo match downstairs in Malone’s Bar off Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow .

Upstairs, however, passions were already exercised in a debate among several dozen Irish-Scots and the Irish-born on their views on the upcoming referendum.

A Yes vote on September 18th would be a vote for “all those people around the world who would love to see the break-up of the British state”, said Unison official Sarah Collins.

“As a socialist and as an internationalist could I vote to maintain the British state given all of the atrocities that the British state has committed?” she said. The referendum offers the chance to build a socially-equal Scotland, even though she knows she would not “wake up in a socialist Utopia” on September 19th.

The meeting was organised by the Irish Voice newspaper – which has built up a 7,000-strong circulation, but which studiously avoids taking a position on the referendum. Traditionally, the Irish immigrant community, particularly in the west of Scotland, looked to the Labour Party in days when religious sectarianism ran rife.

‘Gombeen’

Today, there is significantly less sectarianism , even though it has not disappeared, and the Scottish National Party has been a beneficiary. Nevertheless, former Labour MSP Frank McAveety, who opposes independence, said he has been called “a gombeen, quisling, a traitor, even an agent of the British state” for his stand.

Labour MP Jim Murphy, who has been on a tour of 100 towns in the run up to the referendum, was forced last week to pause his tour, following increasingly bitter abuse from Yes campaigners. In some cases, local branches of “Yes, Scotland” had tweeted the location and times of his street meetings, encouraging Yes supporters to turn up and protest.

“Now when I see a fellow called Murphy being attacked on the streets of Scotland I think back to my parents and my grandparents and what they endured,” said McAveety, who lost his Holyrood seat in 2011.

‘More egalitarian’

He disagreed with the notion promulgated by the Yes side that the Irish community in Scotland is “instinctively more egalitarian, or that we are better than people living in Durham”. The Scottish working class have more in common with the working class in Liverpool and other major cities “who were there for us when we needed them”, he said. Dublin-born Fergal Dalton, who now represents a Glasgow ward for the Scottish National Party, said an independent Scotland would respond to its citizens.

Scotland’s ability to influence happenings in Westminster is non-existent, said Dalton, who rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy before retiring. Scotland’s future within the United Kingdom will never guarantee equality: “I can’t guarantee it, but with independence you never know, we might pull it off.”

Academic Tom Gallagher, who is campaigning for a No vote, said the idea that socialist views of the type expressed by Collins would win through if Scotland votes Yes is a nonsense. Today, he said, the Scottish Socialist Party, and others on the left, poll little more than 1.5 per cent of the vote, yet they still believe they can influence the post-referendum result.

Anarchist

Talk from the SNP and others on the left that an independent Scotland would repudiate its share of the UK’s national debt is little short of anarchist, he went on.

Scottish first minister Alex Salmond "goes on about" Scotland being the 14th richest country in the world, he said, far more often than he talks about Glasgow's mortality figures, still one of the worst in Europe. People voting for independence who believe they will get socialism afterwards will find "that they have been left high and dry", Gallagher said.

At the end of the meeting, the chair, journalist Ian Dunn, asked how many of the 30-strong audience would be voting Yes. All but three or four put up their hands. “Don’t we ask any more for the result from the other side?” interjected Frank McAveety. “Is this new Scotland?”

No one volunteered to put up their hands. Just two declared as undecided.