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Gary Robertson ⚽ Dunno about you but I hate international friendlies and Saturdays did nothing to earn my love.
 
I watched it, simply because it was football and it helped pass the time til the Champions league final. It was either that or housework and whilst the prospect of watching Scotland scrape past a team ranked 84th in the world didn’t appeal neither did mopping floors. And as I’d just made a coffee I figured I might as well sit on my arse and tune in.
 
To put this into context, Curacao are a country with a population almost equivalent to the size of the city of Dundee (although that’s where the comparisons end though as one’s an island paradise in the Caribbean and the others on the east coast of Scotland). Well done Dundee for getting a mention without me moaning about the Tannadice pitch. 

So it came as absolutely no surprise to anyone anywhere ever when Curacao took the lead. Chong of Sheffield Utd slotting home past 43 year old Craig Gordon to put the visitors a goal up. (Curaçao are ranked one place higher in FIFA rankings than Haiti whom everyone (least on this side of the Irish Sea) assumes we will beat with ease in the USA). 

Scotland were up against it and whilst the final score of 4-1 looks pleasing on paper we were rank rotten and but for the sending off of Miami FCs Locadia in the 38th minute the story could have been -  would have been - completely different. 

Curaçao came with a game plan: they weren’t here to kick a ball around and lie down, they came to compete, and competitive it was. Indeed competitive enough for Scotland midfield wizard Billy Gilmour to suffer an injury that’s ruined his chance of playing at the World Cup. When I saw him limping away I feared the worst and although he’s a youngster of 24 this may have been his one and only chance of ever playing for the what was the Jules Remit trophy. I hope it’s not but Scotland's inability to qualify for these tournaments mean it’s highly likely. I’m angry, bloody angry. Sure, I mean, yeah, play some fringe players in friendlies but we knew Billy would have been a regular starter so what did he have to prove? Fuck you Steve Clarke and Fuck the SFA.
 
We’ve another pointless friendly coming up against Bolivia at on Saturday, (9pm kick off and available on the BBC if you’re desperate. If not, I could give you a couple of movie suggestions. Just ask. Oh, and no Scottish TV are showing England v New Zealand so no point turning over, unless it’s to sleep.

In other news St Mirren managed to retain their SPL status having taken care of Partick Thistle in the play offs.
 
Congratulations also to Auchinleck Talbot who won the Scottish junior cup for the 15th time in the club's history.
 
And finally …
 
Congratulations to Celtic FC women who despite being reduced to ten after Emma Lawton was awarded a second yellow still managed to overcome their bitterest rivals at Hampden and lift the women’s Scottish Cup. It’s been a rocky old season for Celtic women after losing coach Elena Sadiku. And under new manager, former Hibs boss Grant Scott, it looked like a season to write off but as has been said before “there’s something of a fairy tale about this club”. And against the odds Kelly Clark’s ghirls did the business. A goal from Morgan Cross and some outstanding keeping from American keeper Adelaide Gay gave captain Kelly Clark and manager Grant Scott a lot to cheer about at the end of a difficult 25/26.

This Friday June 5th Scotland women line up against Israel as they do again on Tuesday the 9th. I believe we should take a stand and refuse point blank to play these matches. As long as Israel continues to commit genocide and war crimes daily we shouldn’t be turning away and pretending everything is fine. Maggie Chapman of the Scottish Greens and Leòdhas Massie of Your Party have along with councillors across the board urged the SFA not to let these games go ahead. But whilst it might be a lion on the badge we’re ran by cowards and they’ll carry on regardless.

Israel is a genocidal state committing war crimes and backed by the US and UK is carrying out atrocities that would give Putin nightmares. Shame on the SFA.

Til next time

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Carrying On Regardless

Double Down News ★ Abby Martin Went To Israel 🪶 It's Worse Than You Think.

Recommended by Enda Craig.

The Fourth Reich

Barry Gilheany 🔖 Writing about the concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, vicar and columnist Rev Giles Fraser once described as repositories for “Germany’s shit;” . . . 


. . . places where those who deviated from the norms of the healthy, warrior, blue eyed Germanic master race would be detained, out of sight and out of mind. 

These deviants included political opponents; asocial elements including the unemployed; mentally subnormal and atypical; LGTB+ people and others who violated the Nazi aesthetic be they sexually liberated women, prostitutes and “degenerate” artists and writers. Of course they also held those whose very existence as opposed to behaviours was an affront to Nazi ideals, namely Jews and Gypsies who were to pay the ultimate collective price for it. In her book on the operation of and the inmates trapped in the Magdalen Laundries The Fallen, the academic Louise Brangan whose expertise is in the areas of injustice and imprisonment, describes a similar dynamic in the operation of the carceral archipelago of clerical run institutions of detention, “care,” “welfare” and reformatories that were constructed in independent Ireland. 

While lacking the exterminatory logic and praxis of Nazi Germany, Brangan dissects a system in which Ireland’s excreta was contained. Such institutions operated in plain sight and yet away from the prying eyes of those who knew and yet refused to know. The figure of the fallen woman occupied a particular form of Übermenschen in Irish society. For to be pregnant out of marriage was the ultimate, unmentionable sin in Ireland. For it was family reputation and honour that was being violated in the gossip strewn large village that was Ireland for at least five decades after independence. It was to avoid the shame and disgrace, the threat of which largely held together a social structure which had emerged in the decades after the Great Famine, that the carriers of the ultimate taboo and stigma had to be shepherded into permanent incarceration. Moral purity was the ideological mission statement of post-independence Ireland just as racial purity was the overarching principle of Nazi Germany; those who transgressed the national ethic were not just to be punished but disappeared into the unknowing Kafkaesque realm of the Irish morality gulag.

Much has been written both in academic texts, personal biography and in the dry tomes of government commissions on the horrors of the Irish Catholic ideal. The extent of child sexual abuse by priests, bishops and nuns has been well documented. As have the dimensions of the systematic and almost ritual psychical brutality of the Industrial Schools run by the Christian Brothers (over and above the regular, almost banal abuse in the schools that order ran), the cruelties of the Mother and Baby Homes.

The legalisation of the right to choose abortion after the deletion of Article 40.3. or the Eighth Amendment in the 2018 referendum resolved Ireland’s tortuous history over reproductive rights. The struggle for full LGTB+ rights was fully won by the legalisation of same sex marriage in the 2015 referendum. It is worth stating such developments would have been scarcely imaginable as recently as the 1990s. 

Louise Brangan fills a surprising lacunae in the literature and chronicles of the death of Most Holy Catholic Ireland by her coruscating study of the Magdalen Laundries, the publication of which was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the closure of the last Laundry in 1996. Surely this closure should have laid to rest yet another harrowing episode in Irish history. However the inter-generational trauma that is a legacy of the institutional cruelty of this node in Irish Catholicism’s gulag ensures that it is very much a live issue for scholars of this regime and a festering scar on the Irish collective psyche. Brangan thus performs an invaluable therapeutic task in telling the forgotten story of the Magdalen Laundries, through the testimonies of the women who suffered the indignities of the system, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived in physical proximity to these sites of indefinite incarceration, but who often chose to avert their gaze from them.

It is the through the stories of six inmates/residents/detainees (choose whatever the appropriate descriptor is for you the reader) Carmel, Brigid, Eileen, Nora, Catherine, and Katie that Brangan brings to awareness the corporeal reality of the Laundries and sheds light on the hidden and not so hidden cruelties and hypocrisies of “respectable Ireland.” We learn in raw, unflinching oral evidence how Carmel ended up in the Laundries because the nuns decided that even though she was eighteen, she was not ready for Civvy Street. To escape the Laundries, she had to escape Ireland. We are told how “for giddy acts of truancy” Brigid paid the ultimate price. For when she crept back into society, she was an adult woman in a world that she could not engage with, within a community unwilling to accept her. We are informed how without any explanation, discussion or justification, Eileen was sent to the Laundry because, Matrix or Minority Report style, some strangers had judged her predelinquent, too weak to avoid the seduction of the world around her and so doomed to the fate of no longer in the world at all. There is Nora whose pregnancies and babies had to be hidden to ward off the public shame that would have descended on her family. There were girls like Katie who were dispatched to the Laundries like refugees, because the State had abandoned them and Catherine who, like many other children, were deposited in the Laundries because their parenting resources depended on love, money, and respectability and any one of them could be critically absent.[1]

Ireland’s Prisons of Patriarchy

It is one of the cruellest ironies of the history of the Republic of Ireland that for the first three or four decades that at one time the liberal and permissive use of temporary release in the Irish men’s prison system - to avoid what prison administrators thought of as long, degrading and inhumane periods of imprisonment - earned for Ireland a temporary reputation in the twentieth century for having one of the more humane prison systems in the world[2], that by the 1950s, one in every seventy Irish persons over the age of 24 was confined in an asylum. Be it psychiatric hospitals (or the more common moniker mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, County Homes (formerly workhouses rebranded after Irish independence), and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls’ pregnant outside marriage were accommodated (as was also the practice in the UK). And superimposed on these care/remand centres were the Magdalen Laundries. Taken as an aggregate, these institutions held over 1 per cent of the Irish population.[3]

In 1951 when the Laundries were at their peak of operation, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison, of which there were only five. While for every 100,000 females, seventy were in a Laundry. They were for females virtually beyond redemption. They were considered to be beyond the help of the Mother and Baby Home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the remit of modern life. They were the end of the line. They were the termini, a concept developed by the criminologist Richard Sparks, who used it to describe the extreme forms of prison segregation and the ‘recurrent capacity’ of our systems to control, ‘to develop the deepest places – ends-of-the-lines; termini.[4]

The Irish government ‘s official calculation is that 10,012 women and girls were sent to the Laundries; a figure which is rightly contested as an underestimate. However another figure which was casually thrown into the public domain is equally open to challenge; this is the statistic of in excess of 56,000 young women who in the closing credits of the 2024 film Small Little Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy, based on the bestselling novella by the Irish author Claire Keegan and set in 1985 in the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in County Wexford ‘were sent to the Magdalene Laundries’ and to whom the film was dedicated to as well ‘as the children who were taken from them’. However this was the headline figure from the official State investigation which was exclusively concerned with the Mother and Baby Homes which had held 56,000 women and girls across the twentieth century.[5]

The history of the Magdalene institutions is not of linear and all-pervasive cruelty. Brangan describes how they had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people of both Catholic and Protestant religious persuasion to work with prostitutes and other ‘fallen women,’ as well as the homeless and alcoholics – all of whom were adjudged to be in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as ‘rescue work.’ The first Protestant Magdalene asylum was established in 1765 and by the end of the 18th century there were at least forty-one of these refuges. Catholic nuns also operated Magdalene Refuges, though these were usually larger enterprises than the ones operated by lay people. While daily life in the convent Laundries were regimented and religious, they were not coercive or established for profit and the women and children under their care could leave and return at will.[6]

By the early twentieth century, the numbers of women attending the smaller lay Magdalene Refuges steadily declined until they were abandoned completely, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. On its independence from Britain in 1922, there were only ten Catholic Laundries across Ireland ran by four religious orders: Religious Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, and the Good Shepherd Sisters. Located close to the edges of the island, this decemvirate of institutions encircled the new nation. On the east coast there were four Laundries in the capital Dublin; two on the south-east coast in New Ross, Wexford and in County Waterford; two more in the southernmost city of Cork; one each on the western seaboard in Limerick and Galway and one across the new frontier in the newly established state of Northern Ireland.[7]

Brangan’s book is a forensic yet harrowing account of the Work Hard and Pray Hard ethos that was the imprimatur of these institutions told through the stories of the main actors; the detained women and custodial nuns as well as an examination of their archives and the decision-making processes of the state agencies that acted in collusion. However to understand how the monotonous cruelty of the Laundries could furnish, one must look at the Ideological superstructure of the new Irish state and its underpinnings.

The Devane Rites Of Irish Catholicism

After independence, the Catholic Church which had developed an authoritative hold on the Irish people in the decades after the Great Famine, now found itself to be the most important power bloc in the new nation and one to whose whim the nascent Irish state would steadily genuflect towards in the coming decades. The new Irish authorities found themselves dealing with the legacies of the War of Independence and the bitter Civil War which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921; the impoverishment caused by the ‘famine like conditions” in the 1920s and the appalling financial strictures forced on the Cumann na nGaedheal government which led to cuts in public expenditure from £42 million in 1923-24 to £24 million in 1927 and then to a paring of the already meagre welfare budget, including a 10 per cent cut to the pension. The consequent falls in wages and welfare payments led to a cost of living crisis and throughout the 1920s infant mortality, overcrowded living and unemployment spiralled and emigration took on such proportions that by 1927, the population had plummeted to its lowest recorded level since the 1840s.[8] 

The government also had to deal with the residual bitterness of and the challenge to its legitimacy from the losing side in the Civil War which sometimes found an outlet in violence; the most notorious incident being the assassination of Government Minister Kevin O’Higgins in 1927. Internationally, there was a febrile atmosphere across Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution which found expression in widespread fear of Communism among authority and power holders including the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy.

But for the Irish episcopate there was much greater danger to the Irish nation than far off revolutionary movements or even the grinding poverty. This was the threat to the Irish soul from the ‘tyranny of the senses’ produced by the Roaring Twenties. For the Twenties represented not just the birth of a new Irish democratic nation state but that of an age of modernity that for at least some of almost 50 per cent cohort of the Irish population that was under 25 years of age must have had appeal. It was the era of jazz, modernist literature (think DH Lawrence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers notoriety or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which scandalised prudish British sensibilities), new music, changing fashions and new dance forms such as the Charleston. This culture’s celebration of individualism, ordinary people, and mundane bodily pleasures, such as James Joyce’s remorseless stream-of- consciousness style in Ulysses represented a contemporary middle finger to Catholic values of modesty and self-denial. In the dance halls, liberated bodies danced sensuously to the shimmy, Black Bottom, Charleston, shag, and jitterbug (which would have disturbed racial sensitivities of the time) were eclipsing the native reel and jigs.[9]

The terrain on which the struggle between the Church and ‘alien’ culture and morality was to be contested was women’s corporeality. The spectacles of women wearing shorter skirts and shimmering drapery designed to accentuate their movements were, in the view of the bishops, ‘bordering on indecency.’ These modern women were reviled as no more than ‘fag-smoking, jazz-dancing, lip-sticking flappers.’ Since the Catholic ideal for women was the Virgin Mary, these new trends were condemned as the ruin of Irish maidens’ fundamental ‘Christian virtue’ and represented a national crisis as the ‘future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the women of Ireland.[10] For some prelates the solution to such immorality lay at home. So the advice from Bishop O’Doherty of Galway to parents whose daughters stayed out late was to “lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, and that should be the system today.”

It was not just the institutional Church that was outraged by the menace of modernism. The 1920s saw the emergence of a lay fundamentalist Catholic movement which sought to enforce social and doctrinal purity. They consisted of groups such as the Catholic Truth Society, the Catholic Society for the Protection of Girls, the Kinship of Christ and, the most prominent of their number, the Legion of Mary. Such right-wing social movements operating outside the official remit of the Church hierarchy such as the Maria Duce movement of the 1950, the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign in the 1980s, Youth Defence in the 1990s and the Iona Institute in recent decades do emerge at key moments of challenge to clericalism and resultant backlash. And it was in just sort of a milieu that the moment of one of the most consequential thinkers and activists in the early years of the Irish state emerged – Father Richard Devane. Despite his relative obscurity in Irish Catholic historiography, he is worthy of a biography because of his role in the construction of the most repressive edifice of clericalism in Western Europe (outside of the Franco regime in Spain) and the evasion of democratic scrutiny that this process involved, and which Louise Brangan superbly brings to light.

Born in Limerick in 1876, Father Devane returned to his native city in 1904 after a spell as a curate in England. His experience of the class system in England, English liberalism and its unhindered accumulation of wealth proved to be a very formative experience for the young curate as he soon developed his life mission to promote social purity as part of his campaign for a Catholic counter kulturkampf in Ireland. An immediate objective of his was to rid Ireland of the ‘filthy Sunday cross-Channel papers’ because of their capacity and intention to scintillate and arouse through coverage of gruesome murders, divorce and “adulteresses.’ 

He had no qualms about working ‘outside the law’ and in 1911 he struck his first blow for purity by the seizure of British newspapers by his Vigilance Committee at Limerick railway station, their ceremonial burning in a public park and a successful boycott of Limerick shops who stocked these newspapers.[11] 

With independence won, he sought through his writings in newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals exposing such evil as foreign newspapers, the bad book and unmarried mothers to investigate how the ‘new won powers’ could be instrumentalised to ensure that Ireland would be organised ‘according to Irish ideals and Catholic standards.'  Devane proposed the regulation of dance halls, censorship of films and the prohibition or high taxation of foreign materials. But his most far reaching and chillingly punitive suggestions were for female transgressors of the new Irish moral code. Girls could be charged with immoral behaviour. Unmarried mothers and their illegitimate offspring dealt with expediently and in secrecy. Then there were those morally degenerate, mentally defective, or perverse creatures (free spirited young women in other words) who needed to be protected from their own base instincts by committal to a Good Shepherd Home, namely a Magdalene Laundry. Detention would be the only way to ensure that ‘the public is safeguarded.’[12]

Long before Hannah Arendt and scholars like Professor Sam Finer had coined the term ‘totalitarian’ to characterise the state in Nazi Germany and the USSR under Josef Stalin, Fr Devane mused about the possibility of how:

we Christians develop such a totalitarian Christian faith (like the all-consuming faith of fascist and communist regimes) of a like white-heat intensity?

For this Utopia to happen, a purge was required. All distractions had to be removed, all recourse to indolence squashed and all cultural expressions of the values or aesthetic of individualism be erased. The challenge for Devane was how to introduce laws to uphold the Catholic social ideal without exposing those of purity of mind to the spiritual pollution of immoral thoughts and actions. To avoid such a vista, he pondered ‘would it be asking too much of the government’ to instead make legislation by a private committee of people who could bring the law into harmony with Catholic spiritual values?[13]

The answer to Devane’s prayers came in the form of the Carrigan Report which was the outcome of the work of a review committee tasked by the Department of Justice in 1930 to reappraise the criminal law bill, with specific attention paid to the age of consent and juvenile prostitution, and to produce a report with their recommendations. The committee was comprised of Catholic and Protestant clerics and health and welfare professionals and was chaired by a judge named William Carrigan. Throughout the 1920s the pressure has intensified from militant lay groups as well as the Church hierarchy to enshrine Catholic moral principles in the law of the new Irish Free State and for the expurgation of ‘foreign influences’ like cross-channel newspapers from Irish society; there were growing moral panics about the rate of illegitimate births and venereal disease and the spectre of the ‘fallen woman’, and women were being steadily being removed from the public sphere through the civil service and teaching marriage bans and the removal of woman from automatic membership of juries. The Committee on Evil Literature had been formed in 1926 to examine the need for stricter censorship laws. But as Louise Brangan describes the reach of the Carrigan Report and its subsequent influence on the criminal law of the Irish Free State proved to be a democratic outrage.

In the first instance, the Committee appeared to have expanded their scope of inquiry beyond their mandated realms of ‘social morality’ and ‘evil’ to concern about the ‘suppression’ of ‘public vice.’ The sources of Ireland’s societal deterioration were neatly laid out: popular amusements such as ‘dances of a disgusting character’ and ‘misbehaviour’ in cinemas; male predators, immoral girls, illegitimate children, and an absence of tougher laws to surveil, punish and remove them. These immoral characters were the product of bad families in which parents had balefully ceded control. In particular, they focused attention on the industrial schools which were, in their opinion, designed for ‘delinquents.’ On departure from these institutions, these children because they ‘are usually without responsible friends or relatives’ were a special threat to national purity as they drift into ‘evil ways.’ Girls particularly so, since the ‘girl of 16’:

is often mentally and emotionally unstable… has not finished developing; and cannot really appreciate the nature and result of the act to which she consents. 

The vulnerability of these girls to exploitation by their ‘vicious associates’ was the source of the endless cycle illegitimacy and, by extension, Ireland’s degeneration. [14]

Among the measures recommended to ‘purge the State of these evils’ were additional monitoring of children leaving industrial schools and if necessary ‘further detention;’ the setting up of special borstals for ill-natured girls and the appointment of ‘women police’ to help deal with the marked characteristics of female deviance. Regarding male sexual offending, flogging and public shaming should be reinstated for miscreants and the details of the offence, along with the name and address of the guilty party, should be published in the newspapers.[15]

The then Minister of Justice, Enda Fitzgerald-Kenney, rejected the Carrigan Report and left it in abeyance in the hope that a future administration would resume the mantle. This duly happened with the entry into office of the populist nationalist party Fianna Fail, the party of the losing side in the Civil War and led by Eamon de Valera, one of 20th century Ireland’s most towering political figures. The new Minister for Justice, James Geoghegan, after reading the Carrigan Report, agreed with its main animating contention, that something needed to be done about Ireland’s moral malaise. Geoghegan wanted the law brought in alignment with ‘the best Catholic teaching and practice' but he also wanted to do it without the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny; in other words the democratic process was to be by-passed. 

This is precisely what happened. On 26 November 1932, Geoghegan convened a secret committee of sitting politicians who shared ‘the Catholic view’. For six months, he kept the bishops and De Valera up to speed of their progress. The committee produced the bill, but as they lacked the power to ratify it, it had to pass through the Oireachtas. The formulation of amendments would require a parliamentary reading and discussion of any new laws, where all the evidence of Ireland’s dark underside; its ‘unsavoury’ ‘sex problems’ would be uncovered and the resulting scandals would be raked over in the newspapers.[16] As Michel Foucault describes it in The History of Sexuality Volume I, under this regime of taboo and repression; sex was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Its universality was being spoken through silence. As one member of the Seanad put it, when it came to the public, ‘the less that is known about it the better. The public, perhaps, know too much.’[17]

It was under this shroud of secrecy and total absence of debate that the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act became statutory laws. They encompassed a near total ban on contraception, a stricter licensing regime for dance halls and the criminalisation of acts of public indecency that offended ‘modesty or cause scandal or injure the morals of the community.’ The Criminal Law Amendment Act legalised incarceration in places other than a prison for the ‘moral reclamation’ of prostitutes. This oblique reference to the Magdalene Laundries is one of the very few extant in Irish law.[18]

These legislative measures, along with the edifice of censorship and the explicitly Catholic and patriarchal articles of the 1937 Constitution drawn up by De Valera in extensive consultation with Archbishop John McQuaid represented the triumph of Fr. Devane’s dreams of a totalitarian type Catholic regime. It was the culmination of social and ecclesiastical trends that had been underway in the aftermath of the Famine; the centralisation of Church power under Cardinal Paul Cullen; its seizure of control of education and the accompanying Devotional Revolution plus the dominance of a class of peasant proprietors defined by Professor Emmet Larkin as the thirty acre tenant farmers who dominated the stem family system of primogeniture which had replaced the pre-Famine modes of subdivision and whose ideology of “amoral familism” had become hegemonic. The post-independence panoply of clericalist legislation and the popular piety pervading Irish society made the new Irish state a very cold place for liberal intellectuals and Protestants but most of all for women and specifically the ‘deviant’ or ‘fallen.’

The Prisoners of Patriarchy

Louise Brangan describes the trifecta that characterised the black hole of incarceration and slavery: penance, slavery, and erasure. Thus on her entry into the New Ross Magdalene Laundry in 1963 after serving her sentence in the local Industrial Centre, Carmel would have her name taken from her. Once she was anointed with a new house name; she was not permitted to speak her name while enclosed within the four walls of the Laundry. She was then ritually instructed to take off her clothes and shoes in front of a nun who would then issue her with black, ill-fitting clothes and shoes which she was to discover was to be her uniform. The next act in the depersonalisation process was the shearing of her ‘very dark, down to my waist beautiful hair.’ Then she was escorted to her dormitory which was designed to minimise contact with others where, on her bed, ‘I cried my eyes out.’ The most disquieting moment for the new entrant as it was for many survivors was the realisation that her roommates were old. The sight of ‘worn-out women, crooked, with rotted teeth, short white hair, glazed expressions, silent demeanours’ must have been a uniquely frightening one without even the knowledge that these women had effectively been resident there for generations and that this was Carmel’s and so many other new inmates’ destiny. [19]

After the morning call for prayers at 6 and breakfast taken in total silence in a dreary refectory with long communal tables, Carmel processed into the industrial rooms underneath arches, one of which proclaimed ‘Unless Ye Do Penance, Ye Shall All Perish.’ It may as well have read “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” And it was into the Hades of sweat and smell, that Carmel and countless thousands like her stepped. Even at the start of the working day, the atmosphere in the laundry room was overpowering, like a heaving greenhouse with the sibilant spitting of the irons and the hot exhales of the compressors. Those who worked in the sorting room where the clothes were separated found it vile. The big sacks of laundry were, in the words of one woman, ‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ Nobody could adjust to the fetid air; ‘reeking, stinking, bleach, swell of piss, urine and the smell of it and everything was awful’[20]. In this way the literal stains of the business and professional classes of Ireland were literally washed away for nothing. Yet the women were not permitted to wash their sweat soaked bodies, nor even to soak and sooth their weary limbs with wash day being every other Sunday, when an auxiliary filled a cast-iron bath and one after another the women would scrub themselves with carbolic soap.[21] The nuns rarely missed an opportunity to make derogatory remarks about their detainees’ bodies and physical hygiene.

The hazardous nature of the work – the bleach spattering off hand brushes, the searing hot metal, machines spinning at 100 miles per hour – was heightened by the nuns’ absolute lack of technical know-how. If machinery looked to be vulnerable to collapse, the nuns would simply say a prayer rather than call a tradesman and so expose the girls to masculine danger. Burns from machines and corrosive industrial bleach were common, and on handful of occasions women were reported to have lost hands and arms.[22] So these women endured physical as well as the routine psychological penance.

In these dark satanic places, the slaves of the Magdalenes toiled to a background of the incessant incantation of litanies, rosaries, and stations of the cross. The merging of the monotonous drone of prayers and the rhythmic cadence of their collective voice created a deafening wall of sound[23]; an aural version of George Orwell’s symbol of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the perpetual boot on one’s neck. And in these black holes of detention, there was one golden rule – a version of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. For on the first page of the Magdalen Home Rules and Honarium – issued by the Sisters of Mercy who ran three convents in the country and the honarium being the hourly schedule – it was ‘strictly forbidden to mention anything concerning their past life or associates.’ Thus, in the words of women, ‘silence was everything.’ On arrival, there was no formal explanation of the reason for an entrant’s detention. During work and at meal times, no gossip or chat was exchanged. The hearsay was that fellow detainees were prostitutes or had illegitimate children, but the regime of silence prevented new entrants from finding out why the elderly women were there; that they too had been abandoned and rejected[24].

Long after their release from the institutional cruelty of the Laundries, the women could not escape adversity as they still bore the stigmata of abandonment and the message, reinforced almost daily by nuns, that they were worthless either because they were sinners in need of perpetual redemption or children who required perpetual supervision. Brangan remarks that the thousands of pages and hours of survivor testimony are suffused with account after account of what it was like for survivors to cloak their identity and conceal where they had been. On her return home Nora found that even though her family had known exactly what had happened ‘it just was a non-event, but a non-event to be ashamed of. And nobody else was, so I didn’t either …” 

Most likely because of Nora’s highly probable collusion into her disappearance into the labyrinthine of Ireland’s unique penal industrial complex. Carmel found that in her first hospital job as a domestic; she had to conceal her history from the inquisitiveness of her fellow native Wexford work mates. She could not tell them that she had done the rounds of the most shameful institutions: born in a county home, raised in an industrial school, dumped in a Magdalene Laundry. She knew, as Nora Connolly O’Brien - who as a Senator in 1960 had first drawn public attention to its stigmatic nature - observed that being in a Laundry was a permanent mark of immorality, that you had done something truly despicable, that you were truly despicable.[25]

Betty, who spent six years shutting between three different Laundries from 1971 to 1977 and who came across “as ebullient and upbeat” in her testimony also found that casual conversation at work was a danger zone. An even more devastating effect of the loneliness that swirled around survivors like Betty was on her ability to make loving relationships. She found that despite her desire to belong to someone, a declaration of love from a man she courted instantly chilled her mood as it meant he was ‘gone tomorrow.’ For ‘How could he love me, like, and my mother didn’t even love me?’ For if ‘you feel you weren’t wanted all your life and what is this man now saying he loved me for?’ For those like Laura and Michelle who did marry and have children; the imperative to silence remained. Under no circumstances, were husband and children to know of their incarceration and the reasons for it.[26]

Another survivor, Marge, said that she had always understood that the Laundry system was designed not just to silence and depersonalise its inmates from the inside but to permanently exile them in a socially reinforcing regime of silence on the outside upon release. The women had been ‘locked away, shamed away’ and they were expected to ‘go to their graves’ as ‘the silent people.’ And in the first five decades of Irish independence, this paralysis of silence was tightened by its great accomplices: gossip and scandal.[27]

Justice Served?

In the aftermath of the tsunami of revelations of the systematic physical, sexual and emotional abuses of children and women by the institutional Church and the accompanying cultural revolution in relation to Irish religiosity in the decades either side of the turn of the millennium attention finally turned towards the necessity of the recognition of and restitution for the lifelong sufferings of the thousands of Irish women who had effectively been interned without proper recourse to justice in the Magdalene Laundries. It came on 19 February 2013 when Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose to address the Dail and the nation and international media and deliver the apology for the Laundries almost four years to the day when Bart O’Keefe, then Minister of Education, dismissed any claim that the Magdalene survivors had to the State redress scheme for victims of historical child abuse on the grounds that the Laundries were privately-owned and did not come within the responsibility of the State. 

Announcing his intention ‘not just to commission the Report (to be authored by Martin McAleese, husband of the former President Mary) ‘but to actually study it and having done so to reflect on its findings,’ in his nineteen-minute address, Enda Kenny stated that these women had experienced a ‘profound and studied indifference.’ “It was a humbling and inspiring experience’ to hear the women’s stories which while individually different shared a particular experience of a particular Ireland: judgemental, intolerant, petty and prim.’ He went on:

We forgot you or, if we thought of you at all, we did so in untrue and offensive stereotypes. This is a national shame, for which again say, I am deeply sorry and offer my full and heartfelt apologies.

He concluded in a voice almost breaking with almost uncontainable emotion by hoping that:

this day and this debate … heralds a new dawn for all those who feared that the dark midnight might never end.

Cue applause from the survivors in the public gallery and applause in turn from the parliamentarians.[28]

The challenge for the McAleese report, for Brangan, was how to speak factually about a past that was once unspeakable? She argues that the Report was hobbled at the outset by the use of neutral language designed to stigmatise or cause bias against the nuns, the Laundries, or the women. Thus it was decided that the women should not be referred to as penitents, or inmates; nor, however, should be understood as survivors, let alone victims. The Report acknowledged that the Laundries were ‘frightening and lonely places’ and a ‘harsh and physically demanding work environment ‘but that ‘they were not systematically abusive’ compared to the horrors of the industrial schools. Brangan concludes that the factual narrative of the Laundries, based as it was on a narrow factual base of State and the nuns’ archives, is what gave the Committee its biggest blind spot: they lost the capacity to process and assimilate the nature of the Laundries and the experiences of the women who were sent there. But can something like human suffering on that sort of mass scale be quantified or conveyed through dry metrics?[29] How can a life not lived be measured? Indeed how can any sort of institutional crimes against humanity be narrated properly?

References

[1] Brangan p.273

[2] Ibid, p.43

[3] P.12

[4] p.12; Richard Sparks, (2002), ‘Out of the Digger: The Warrior’s honour and the guilty observer’, Ethnography, 3 (4), pp.556-81

[5] Brangan Pp.17-18

[6] Ibid Pp.12-13

[7] Ibid Pp.13-14

[8] Ibid Pp.56-57

[9] Ibid Pp.48-49

[10] Ibid P.49

[11] Ibid Pp.51-52

[13] Ibid Pp.53-54

[14] Ibid Pp.65-67

[15] Ibid P.67

[16] Ibid Pp.69-70

[17] Ibid Pp.70-71

[18] P.71

[19] Ibid pp.81-87

[20] Pp.87-91

[21] Ibid P.102

[22] Ibid P.95

[23] Ibid P.96

[24] Ibid P.98

[25] Ibid Pp.191-96

[26] Ibid Pp196-98

[27] Ibid Pp.199-201l

[28] Ibid Pp.247-48

[29] Ibid Pp.250-56

Louise Brangan (2026) The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy Of Shame London: Bodley Head.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

The Fallen

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety

 

A Morning Thought @ 3164

People And Nature ☭ Written by Nagraj Adve.


Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a significant acceleration in the rate of warming globally, from about 0.18 degrees Celsius (°C) per decade during 1970–2010, to about 0.36°C per decade since then.

Construction industry workers at a union meeting.
Photo from the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sanghan union’s social media

As James Hansen, among the world’s most regarded climate scientists, and his colleagues emphasised in a research communication in late April, the rate of warming has speeded up because the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, has been declining.

There are varied, complex reasons for this:

🔥 One, ironically, is cleaner air. Tiny aerosol pollutants in the atmosphere tend to block and scatter sunlight and hence reduce the energy absorbed by the Earth. However, this masking effect has decreased of late, partly because of stricter sulphur emission norms on marine shipping in recent years, and because China has fairly successfully addressed its air pollution over the last 15 years.

🔥 Two, both reduced aerosols and global warming affect cloud formation, reducing their masking effect.

🔥 Three, there’s less Arctic sea ice as that region warms, which has resulted in more solar radiation being absorbed by the much darker water.

This acceleration is occurring against the backdrop of continued emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that cause global warming in the first place. Because of this, the Indian landmass has warmed by 0.9°C between 1901 and 2024.

It has been particularly intense in recent years: 2023 was the second-warmest in 122 years of recorded temperatures, after 2016, which was soon overtaken by 2024 as India’s hottest year.

After a slight dip in 2025, this year too has begun ominously, with heatwaves searing much of India quite early, in April, making it for a while the hottest country in the world.

These are not merely statistical records. Accelerating warming has a bearing on the lives, livelihoods, and the health of literally hundreds of millions of working people across the country. To say nothing of agriculture, productivity, energy demand, infrastructural resilience, governance, and public health.

Given this context, a recent report – Critical Perspectives on Extreme Heat in India, by Harvard University’s Salala Institute for Climate and Sustainability – is timely. It is a compilation of short essays about facets of extreme heat, and adaptation to it, in the Indian context.

It covers providing forecasts for farmers, and its challenges; why heat thresholds that trigger adaptation measures ought to be context-specific; the need to prioritise design and materials used in buildings over merely applying reflective paint on “cool roofs”; how heat action plans that have fared unevenly in different states could be strengthened; insurance payments that are triggered automatically when certain heat thresholds are reached, rather than after the damage is done; why workers bear both the highest risks of heat and the costs of adapting to it; what a health agenda for climate adaptation might be; and finally, revamping local and global adaptation finance. For reasons of brevity, this article will dwell only on some of these themes.

🔥🔥🔥

Dealing with a warmer and more humid world

The first essay, by Peter Huybers, asks why India’s average temperature rise between 1901 and 2024 has been significantly less than the global land average temperature rise over the same period.

This is usually attributed to India’s location in the tropics, where warming is less than at higher latitudes; surface cooling that has occurred with the spread of irrigation; and the persistence of air pollution in India, in contrast to its reduction that has contributed to faster warming elsewhere.

Huybers correctly points out that warming will accelerate in India as well, once the masking effects of air pollution diminish with improved environmental regulation, and as irrigation intensity declines. However, the essay only discusses the winter months, January mostly.

Given that heatwaves and their most harmful effects on people occur largely in the summer and pre-monsoon months, one wishes warming trends had been analysed for those periods as well.

It is impossible to overstate how harmful, even lethal, more frequent, longer, and more intense heatwaves could be in vast regions in which tens of millions work outdoors, particularly in a socioeconomic context of widespread informality of labour and sub-optimal nutritional levels.

A warmer world is also a more humid world. This is largely because warmer oceans experience greater evaporation and because a warmer air can hold more moisture. This combination of greater heat and humidity is more hazardous than heat alone.

As Robert Meade, Aditya Pillai, and Satchit Balsari point out in their essay, “How hot is too hot?”, there are physiological limits to human capacity to regulate body temperature.

It is widely understood that these limits are reached at around 35°C wet bulb temperature (a measure of heat and humidity combined). Beyond that, even someone as fit as Virat Kohli [the great Indian international cricketer] would die, if he or she sat outdoors for a few hours in the shade doing nothing, because the body would unavoidably lose its capacity to expel heat.

But such a threshold is an abstract one. Physiologies differ, and the elderly, infants, or those with certain ailments would have far lower thresholds. The authors put it well – the questions we first need to ask, they say, are, “Too hot for what?” and “Too hot for whom?”

The answers to these questions depend a lot on how long one needs to work, and what one does while working. Other than deaths, there are challenges of morbidity and physiological stresses at far lower levels of heat and humidity, but academic research on what these thresholds are is just beginning in India.

🔥🔥🔥

The significance of scale

The most significant adaptive response by Indian state governments to extreme heat has been the introduction of heat action plans (HAPs). Under these HAPs, a range of measures including prior heat warnings, wider water distribution, public health interventions, etc. are triggered when the maximum temperature in a place crosses predetermined thresholds.

It is widely acknowledged that mortality from extreme heat has fallen in India after these plans were first operationalised 13 years ago.

While this is commendably true, we may be underestimating the number of deaths from relentless heat.

This is partly because, on average in India, 30 per cent of all deaths are not recorded at all. When they are, other reasons, most commonly heart attack, are registered as the cause of death – rather than the underlying, sustained exposure to extreme heat.

In Europe, where such estimations are done differently using comparisons with baseline mortality data, it was found that an additional 61,672 people died from extreme heat in a 3-month period in 2022, that too in a region with a population less than half that of India’s.

Even though we have a younger population than Europe’s, it is likely that more people are dying here from heat than we realise – and they certainly will in future, as India warms faster. We urgently need more robust baseline data and methods, improved health systems, and better targeted interventions.

As Aditya Pillai points out in his essay on HAPs, they suffer from poor targeting, whereby the most vulnerable are sketchily covered or get left out of adaptation measures.

One problem is that HAPs have inadequate legislative or financial backing. Greater emphasis on incentivising politicians and bureaucrats to act, more comprehensive implementation across all relevant sectors, along with sanctions for poor implementation, would, he states, be more effective.

I would add that greater democratisation in the conception and implementation of HAPs would also help, via regular consultations with organisations representing those most affected. Very few states have followed this in practice.

A widely discussed heat adaptation measure is “cool roofs”, the application of white chemical paints on rooftops so more sunlight is reflected, thereby cooling interiors – similar in essence to what is done by Arctic ice, which the world is fast melting.

All examples of cool roof applications I have heard of have been through small, NGO-led efforts – which, however well-intentioned, are carried out for want of resources in a handful of homes in a few slum clusters. As with all adaptation measures necessary to tackle so massive and complex a problem as global warming, what is needed is scale.

For example, Delhi’s Kashmere Gate bus terminus now has “cool roofs” across 2664 square metres (28,674 square feet). Such an approach should be taken where the poor live, in slum clusters in Delhi and elsewhere, where feasible. The onus for this lies with governments, who can provide subsidies and ensure quality, so that a roof once painted stays that way for a while.

However, as Rawal and Radhika Khosla point out in their essay on the built environment, focusing on “cool roofs” alone is inadequate. Other surfaces like walls and windows influence felt temperatures greatly, and even having “cool roofs” does not adequately address dangerous humidity, as mentioned above.

It is necessary, they say, to “prioritise other passive design strategies … that address building materials, construction techniques, and spatial configuration”. This is important, because deaths from extreme heat happen not just outdoors, but indoors even more so, of the elderly or the ill in cramped homes.

To once again emphasise scale, I would strongly urge the introduction of urban National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) schemes across towns in India. So far, the Act operates only in Rajasthan, and there too patchily.

An urban NREGA could potentially be used to build climate-resilient homes for the poor and thereby help them cope better with both extreme heat and flooding, two of the biggest impacts of climate change in urban India.

At a meeting in April, an office bearer of the MGNREGA Mazdoor Union proposed it be used to enhance green cover, to provide shade. Expanding the NREGA could help tackle both climate change and provide jobs, India’s twin crises.

Pressurising the state to carry out effective adaptation measures at scale needs strong working class and other social movements.

Sadly, climate change is becoming a political issue in India just when workers’ movements, and the left in general, are much weaker than in their heyday.

In their essay, Rajesh Nayak and Sharon Block correctly point out that workers end up bearing both the highest risks of climate change, through impacts on health and wages, and the costs of adaptation. But it was disappointing that they provided only a few examples of workers’ or union responses, and most are from Canada and the US, where the social and political dynamics are very different from our own.

One of India’s millions of farm workers, who are vulnerable to heat exposure.
Photo by Max Pixel/ Business and Human Rights Centre

Over the last three years, catalysed by intense heatwaves, a range of unions, NGOs, and other collectives that organise or work with workers – construction workers, street vendors, home-based workers, waste workers, gig workers, etc – have intensified their engagement with climate change in India.

They have been demanding that governments or municipal authorities provide protective shade, more water, cooling spaces, and toilets (which particularly matter to women working outdoors who drink less water as a consequence, potentially damaging their health).

Construction work ought to stop between 11.0 am and 3.0 pm, because most accidents occur on scaffolding during the hottest hours, an office bearer of the Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam construction workers’ union said in a meeting last year.

The Amazon workers’ union has demanded that intense production or work targets be lowered during periods of extreme heat.

Some organisations have also made the broader demand that heatwaves be defined as national disasters, so that adaptation funds to cope get released promptly and in much greater amounts than they are presently.

A connected, crucial area of adaptation to extreme heat is public health. In their essay, Nitya Khemka and Bhargav Krishna suggest a three-pronged approach:

🔥Augmenting human capacities, including adding climate change and health to existing curricula for nurses and doctors, and in-service training to recognise and treat symptoms of heat stress;

🔥 Embedding heat resilience within existing health programmes; and

🔥 Strengthening health infrastructure itself to cope with climate extremes.

I would add that we need to fill our health personnel vacancies, and expand health infrastructure and access to be able to quickly treat victims of extreme heat.

Other than in some states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the health infrastructural reality across much of India, in the Indo-Gangetic Plain in particular – an epicentre of extreme heat and humidity – is lagging decades behind a rapidly warming world.

Many hospitals and health centres even still lack the continuous electricity supply required to provide the ice and air conditioning needed to quickly treat a person suffering from heatstroke.

Clearly, we urgently need multisectoral interventions to respond adequately to a growing climate crisis.

🔥🔥🔥

Why mitigation also matters

A few points in conclusion. One, greater financial support for adaptation – the subject of this essay – is indeed much needed. But needed first is the political will: people’s lives and their quality of life need to matter more to political elites. At the core of how we develop our climate adaptation capacities going forward ought to lie notions of justice, to address the fact that extreme heat and other manifestations of global warming affect those least responsible the most.

Two, given the acceleration in warming mentioned at the outset, governments need to plan not just for the present but for at least a decade ahead.

Three, because scale is essential for adaptation, the state becomes a key actor. This has organisational implications for the climate movement: in order to exert greater pressure on the state to act swiftly, it needs to come together organisationally, to be able to exert that pressure with more frequent success.

Four, any just adaptation to, or transition from, climate change needs the climate movement, working class movement, and other social movements to ally and strengthen one another in a Red–Green framing of 21st century politics.

Finally, climate mitigation, primarily the rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is essential, because the Earth system does not negotiate. Its physics suggests that the planet will warm for as long as emissions continue.

Global emissions need to reach zero, or “net zero”, for temperatures to stabilise and warming to stop. Instead, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising even faster and reached 431 parts per million last month, the highest in at least 3 million years.

The urgency to slow down and reverse direction has never been greater. Climate adaptation has its limits, and it would be monumentally foolhardy to assume that we can adapt to everything that a warmer planet will throw at us in the years to come.

🔥 Nagraj Adve is an Indian writer and activist, member of Teachers Against the Climate Crisis and the author of Global Warming in India: Climate, Impacts, and Politics. His previous contributions on People & Nature include his pamphlet, Global Warming in the Indian Context. He can be reached at nagraj.adve[at]gmail.com.

🔥 This article was originally published in Frontline, India, on 22 May 2026, with the title, A Scorching Earth Needs Serious Action.

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Tackling Extreme Heat In India 🔥Aiming At A Moving Target

Mischa And The Bear🎺 with their new single, Bleach.

Bleach

Dr John Coulter ⚽ By the time you read this, I’ll have finally calmed down after one of the most roller coaster soccer seasons of my life - and the World Cup is still to come later this month!


I’m, of course, referring to the journey my beloved Arsenal have taken in the 25/26 season which took us to our first Premier League title for 22 years, as well as defeat to arch title rivals Manchester City in the League Cup final, and a shock defeat to some wee French team in the weekend’s Champions League final in Budapest.

My beloved Gunners have played some 60-plus first team matches this season and I’ll happily describe each one as ‘a squeaky bum’ sensation. Folk regularly ask me what’s it like to support Arsenal given the fact that we’ve ‘bottled’ the Premier League three seasons in a row before the tearful formal lifting of the trophy after the final game of the season at Crystal Palace?

It’s brutally simple - every Arsenal game is like taking the train from Belfast to Dublin, while suffering from severe diahorrea, but finding all the toilets on the train are out of order! It’s that painful.

Then again, why did I begin supporting Arsenal as a primary school pupil when my late dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, to whom I was exceptionally close as a son, was a life-long Liverpool fan?

In the Sixties, the two favourite teams among the pupils at the local village primary school in the north Antrim hills were Leeds United and Manchester City. There was one Man United fan, one Chelsea fan - and me as the lone Gunner!

The daily newspaper in Clough Presbyterian Manse in those days was the Belfast News Letter. From time to time, I’d read the sports pages. By the time I was preparing to sit my Eleven Plus exam, I’d progressed comic-wise from The Topper and The Victor, to Shoot, a weekly football magazine.

Arsenal had reached the final of the old European Fairs Cup in the 69/70 season. Until that final, I’d only said I was a Gunner at primary school just to be different from my chums as I was the sole preacher’s kid in the entire building.

Arsenal had been beaten 3-1 in the first leg of the final by the crack Belgian side, Anderlecht, and it would take a massive effort by the Gunners to overhaul the deficit in the second leg. They did, beating the Belgians 3-0 at Highbury. My decision was made. I would become a committed Gunner for the rest of my life.

The following season was another roller coaster ride in my Arsenal journey. It coincided with me leaving Clough Primary School to spend my Primary Seven year at the Ballymena Academy Preparatory Department. 1970/71 saw Arsenal complete their first double - the league and FA Cup.

We beat Liverpool 2-1 in that historic final, and after the game, I’d pretend I was a great Charlie George outside the Presbyterian Manse kicking my football against the Manse front gate scoring that winning goal over and over repeatedly.

One thing has sky rocketed since those prep school days - the price of football kits. In 1970, I bought my first ever Arsenal strip; the jersey with the badge, shorts and socks all came to five pounds! When family asked me what I wanted for my birthday or Christmas, the answer was always the same - the latest Gunners strip!

Needless to say, my collection has grown since 1970. It now fills an entire wardrobe section of my home. As a married man with two sons, I can now add Father’s Day to the constant moan of me asking for the latest Arsenal ‘footie top’. Nowadays, the price has jumped to around £100 plus per shirt. And it’s no longer ‘home and away’ jerseys - most major clubs now have a third shirt.

My eldest son is also an Arsenal fan, so a visit - much to the disapproval of my Man United supporting darling wife - to the Arsenal shop at The Emirates in London to buy all the tee-shirts and strips associated with being Premier League champions and runners-up in the Champions League will ‘bust the budget’!

Being a Presbyterian minister’s son and an avid Arsenal fan has got me a few tickings off in my time. I was reduced to tears in 1972 when Leeds beat us 1-0 in the FA Cup final. I was told by dad not to make any cheeky remarks to my Leeds chums at Sunday school the following day.

I got the same fatherly warning in 1973, when lowly Sunderland beat Leeds 1-0 in the 1973 final and was sternly warned not to taunt the Leeds fans at Sunday school in retaliation for the banter I’d received the previous year.

Away from work, my casual dress code involves wearing one of the dozens of Arsenal shirts I now possess in my collection. In my spiritual journey, I’ve witnessed a radical relaxing of the dress codes over the years to Sunday worship and especially the mid-week Bible study and prayer meetings.

This has brought me into conflict on occasions with the wives of some of the elders. In one place of worship, at a ‘mid-week’ as they are affectionately called, I was wearing my Arsenal top. Two members of session were also present - one in a Spurs top; the other in a Chelsea shirt.

Another elder’s wife decided she’d had enough of these sporting tops at the ‘mid week’ and vented her spleen on me only! She didn’t say anything to the two elders - just me as the preacher’s kid. Since then, she has become known as ‘Mrs Footie Top’.

On another occasion during a church holiday to York in England, I was dandering through that historic city proudly sporting my Arsenal shirt when I became conscious that I was being glared and stared at.

By sheer chance, I met another Arsenal fan wearing his top, who said to me - ‘they don’t like us Londoners up here!’ To avoid any conflict, I went into the nearest sports shop and bought a local football shirt!

The same happened again a few years ago at a train station in Lisbon in Portugal during a family holiday when I was confronted by Sporting Lisbon fans. We exchanged a few insults across the platforms, but thankfully no punches!

I will admit the tears were flowing when the team lifted the Premier League trophy this season, especially as we came so, so close to ‘bottling’ it again for a fourth season in succession. Finishing runner-up in the Premier League when we had led the league for so long during the season is bitter medicine for any fan to swallow.

Even as a pensioner in my 60s, the experience of being a Gunner can be an emotionally challenging one. I’ll leave my rant on the penalty decisions in the Champions League final against that Paris lot for another day.

Just a reminder - its Father’s Day again in a few weeks; you know what I want as a pressie! Size XL please.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Grimaces And Glory ⚽ The Life Of A Gunners Fan!

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Eighty Nine

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