As Glasgow’s first St Patrick’s Day parade wound down towards the Merchant City from Blythswood Square on Saturday morning, some old men could be seen weeping. This was a day they thought they’d never live to see.

For many decades they and their parents and their grandparents had been told to conceal their Irish identities if they wanted to ‘get on’ in Scotland. Some had been arrested and detained under specious legislation aimed at eradicating sectarianism, under the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, when flying the Irish tricolour or wearing the colours of Irish GAA clubs could land you in bother.

Glasgow was the only city in the world with a large Irish diaspora – almost all of them descended from those who had fled An Gorta Mor (the Great famine) in the 19th century – which didn’t have a memorial commemorating this vast human tragedy. Right up until the 1980s it was commonplace for men and women of Irish descent to be denied employment because of their faith and nationality.

The old newspaper and print trades were as complicit in this as all the other ‘reserved’ professions. When I’d initially expressed a desire to be a journalist in the late 1970s more than one teacher had told me not to waste my time. “With a name like yours, you’ve got little chance of making a decent career as a journalist in Scotland.” In the mid-1990s a friend of mine, having been invited to be a columnist on a Scottish national newspaper, was then asked to ‘modify’ his rather too Catholic name.

The old men’s tears on Saturday were a mixture of happiness and sorrow. Joy that they had lived to see their beloved city at last acknowledging their full Irish identity; sorrow at the memory of old........

© Herald Scotland