Minority Reporter: Modern Scotland’s bad attitude towards her own Irish, by Phil Mac Giolla Bháin (Frontline Noir, £9.99) IMAGINE the public row that would break out should football fans sing a song on the terraces demanding that a black player born in Britain should go home. Then imagine that the barracked footballer is a British-born Jew. Now imagine the song being directed at the crowd who support the black or Jewish player’s team. Such unacceptable behaviour would be dubbed racist and provoke an outcry. Given that the men were Britons, it would also be an example of gross ignorance. But, in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, racist conduct towards people of Irish background, many of whose ancestors emigrated generations ago, persists. Although it doesn’t just happen inside football grounds, its most manifest instance is a disgraceful song that, despite being deemed racist by Scotland’s highest court, continues to be heard. According to its opening verse, immigrants from Ireland during the famine years of the 1840s (and over the course of the following century) “brought us nothing but trouble and shame”. Then comes the offensive refrain: “Well the famine is over. Why don’t they go home?” That song is the central feature of a penetrating analysis of anti-Irish racism by Phil Mac Giolla Bháin, who was born and raised in Scotland. His book was published in 2013 and I’m reviewing it a decade later for three reasons. First, because so little has changed; second, because it received no reviews at the time, itself significant; and third, because it makes a coherent and compelling distinction between sectarianism and racism. I could add a fourth. There is a definite link between the anti-Irish attitudes to be found in Glasgow with those evident in Belfast, where loyalists have adopted the famine song as their own. But let’s concentrate on Scotland’s shame, the tacit acceptance of racism that is unacceptable elsewhere in Britain. In 2017, a survey by a charity called Show Racism the Red Card found that 56% per cent of 513 people living in Scotland, and identifying as of Irish descent, said they had experienced anti-Irish racism.