Thursday, 21 Nov 2013

Originally created by Tom Devine on 23/04/2011

THE disgraceful episode of "bombs in the post" has produced unprecedented soul-searching about this country's age-old problem of sectarianism. It has led to claim and counter-claim, assertion and counter-assertion and much hand-wringing in public and private.

The sheer criminality and wickedness of the acts involved demand no less a response to these seismic events and also to the related broader context of brazen sectarian chants at football matches and the vile content of various internet sites.

How the nation now deals with this problem will be crucial, not only to the social harmony and civilised life of the country in the future but to the reputation of Scotland abroad. We should all be clear that the world is now fully aware about our sinister little secret.

When the extraordinary story of devices with potentially lethal potential being sent to the manager of a football club and a few of its high-profile supporters broke last week, the news rapidly spread across the globe. Soccer is a worldwide craze and it was inevitable that these horrific incidents associated with the game would excite enormous interest. The Associated Press agency, an organisation with a possible readership of billions, was among the first to report the sorry saga. Its story was then reprinted in several hundred daily newspapers across four continents.

Now is the time to seek a way forward which will be intellectually rigorous, honest and thoroughly based on representative evidence. There is no doubt that the forces of law and order, which have attracted substantial criticism in the last few days, have now learned their lesson and have publicly announced that they intend to move towards enforcement with much more vigour.

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The First Minister himself has also solemnly promised that in future there will be "zero tolerance" of sectarian behaviour. All of this is to the good and represents a significant step forward. But, it might also be asked, is it good enough? There are several problems associated with the development of a robust, sustainable and realistic policy on this complex subject. No consensus exists, for instance, on the definition of the term "sectarianism", a word which platitudinously slips off the tongue of politicians and commentators with little clear understanding.

Again, though academic research can provide a guide to the patterns of the last century, precious little has been published so far on the key period after 1990. We can only really move beyond assertion to careful argument and then policy-framing on the basis of hard evidence.The current debate has been lively but virtually bereft of impartially verifiable fact.

Ironically, some much-needed evidence does exist, but for reasons which are difficult to understand, given the pressing nature of this serious social issue, it has not yet been released into the public domain where it can be analysed and interpreted. Since the passing of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003, Section 74, an additional penalty can be imposed if offences are "aggravated by religious prejudice", that is "if an offender evinces towards the victim of the offence malice and ill-will based on the victim's membership of a religious group".

Apart from anything else, that is an excellent definition of sectarian intent which commentators could do well to adopt in future discussion.

Even more crucially, the implementation of the act has resulted in a huge archive of data on annual numbers of offences and the religious affiliation of both offenders and victims, together with information on where and when indictable offences were committed.

It is most unfortunate that almost all of this invaluable evidence, gathered for over a decade and more, has not been yet presented in public. It has been left untouched without being either analysed or published.

Why this should be so is a mystery, especially since absolute transparency ought to be the watchword if the Augean stable is to be thoroughly cleansed once and for all.

It is now to the great credit of the current Solicitor General that in early March this year he convinced the Scottish Cabinet, among a number of initiatives, that this data should be released after analysis by civil servants, though no timeframe has yet been set for publication.

The information lying in these files could, of course, be potentially explosive. The Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh and other senior Roman Catholics have claimed that the Scottish problem is not "sectarianism" at all but, in the words of Keith O'Brien, "blatant anti-Catholicism".

This accusation was partly based on an earlier and limited review of the files covering an 18-month period in 2004-5. On the basis of this snapshot, the Catholic Church's survey of the data concluded that Catholics were five to six times more likely to be victims of such offences than those of other religions. What will the longer-run series reveal? If the results are similar, the Scottish Government may have to consider a root and branch review of its "anti-sectarian" strategies.

But at the same time it is important to remember historical context and perspective in the current febrile atmosphere. Scotland has come a very long way in recent years in eliminating structural and institutional sectarianism. Labour market discrimination, which does affect all life chances from employment to health, has been consigned to the past since the 1970s.In 2004, for instance, only four cases in Scotland brought under the UK Employment (Religion or Belief) regulations, among the many administered by employment tribunals, had even the slightest sectarian connotation.

Scots of Irish Roman Catholic descent finally achieved occupational parity with their fellow Scots in the 1990s, though this was nearly a full century after their Irish American cousins did so in the US. A large Catholic professional class, fully integrated into the life of the nation, has emerged over the past three decades. Indeed, the two current senior law officers in Scotland, charged with the implementation of anti-sectarian legislation, the Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General, are both Roman Catholics. And there can be little doubt that Pope Benedict, on his visit to Scotland last year, was warmly welcomed by Scots of all denominations and none.

The need now is to maintain that progress in order to combat remaining prejudice and bigotry, which is much more difficult to achieve than legislating for non-discriminatory employment practices.

Perhaps it is not widely known within our country that Scotland is now the only jurisdiction across the globe where Irish Catholics and Protestants settled in past generations which has an anti-sectarian strategy in place. It would be wonderful to believe that we might reach a time, sooner rather than later, when the need for such policies became redundant.

• Professor Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh