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Jim Duffy  🏴 Oh no. Not Clare. I valued her. She helped me understand trans issues.

Clare Farrell

I admired her. I found myself checking what I posted as I would not want in any way inadvertently to cause her, and the trans community, offence. I probably didn't always get it right, but Clare and others were a reminder of the nature of the experience of the trans community.

Growing up on a farm taught me to realise that sexuality is not binary. The very first calf I saw born, in I think 1969, was neither male or female but had the organs of both. I remember the black cow that give birth to it didn't care that it had male organs and female organs. She just loved it.

It taught be that sexuality is never binary. There are people who biologically are neither male nor female. There are people who are born physically in one sex, but psychologically feel they are trapped in wrong body. Then there are some people who are attracted to their own sex, and those who are attracted to the other. And there are other variants.

All those variants exist in nature. We had a gay ram who had no interest in ewes, but had the hots for the neighbour's ram - much to the chagrin of the heterosexual neighbouring ram - who would keep running away from our gay ram basically saying "go away. I don't want to have sex with you!"

I remember overhearing Dad, Granny and Mammy in the kitchen of the old house discussing how to explain to me how the new calf had female bits and male bits and other calves due to be born wouldn't. They didn’t need to explain though. I got it. Sex is not straightforward. 

People, like the Catholic Church, who think everyone fits into one of two boxes are dead wrong. Sex, plus identity plus orientation and much else is is effectively on a scale and many of us, whether Claire, I myself, that little calf or one of Uncle John's part male part female pigs, are at different points on it. If you pardon the expression, nothing is straight.

RIP Clare.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Clare Farrell

Dixie Elliot ✊"Orange Order 'deserves credit' for Drumcree dispute remaining peaceful says Gerry Adams."


Adams would have been well aware that such a statement coming from himself at this time would have been a further distraction from the sentencing of Jeffrey Donaldson, yet he went ahead and did it.

Had the Orange Order and their two agitators, Bryson and Lockhart, got their way they would have gleefully watched on as the Garvaghy Road was 'sanitised' for them to walk through it.
 
They didn't so they tried to criminalise those people by describing them as 'a mob' who had guns and petrol bombs and who were prepared to kill the Orange Men and the PSNI.
 
So while the Sinn Féin party faithful and their supporters are still basking in the perceived glory of having stood up for the residents of the Garvaghy Road against the bigotry of the Orange Order, Adams is only too willing to contradict not just them but those determined people.
 
Simply because he wants to be seen as a peacemaker and some great reconciler.

His loyalty was only ever to himself. He led a generation of brave young Irish men and women to early graves and abandoned them by his constant denials that he was a member of the IRA. He only ever had to say that, for legal reasons, he couldn't admit to having been a member.
 
He wants the world to believe that he was an influential member of Sinn Féin who managed to convince the IRA to take the path of peace.
 
No matter how hard he tries Adams can never wash his hands of his past just as he can't help himself when it comes to betraying even those who remained loyal to him.
 
The email to the Garda Commissioner regarding the killing of the screw Brian Stack being but one example. And now this . . . 

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

The Great Reconciler

Guardian 📰 Written by  Alba Asenjo Domínguez.

No new indictments from eight-year investigation as state attorney general says church knew about abuse

30-September-2026
More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over several decades, according to a report released by the state’s attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The eight-year-long investigation did not result in new indictments, the office said, claiming that some conduct identified was not a crime under Massachusetts law at the time it occurred, and that in other cases the applicable statute of limitations had expired.

However, three cases were referred to different district attorney’s offices and one of those resulted in criminal charges. The majority of the abuse occurred before 2002.

“The evidence gathered during this investigation also shows that, for decades, and especially before 2002, church officials in all three dioceses knew about the sexual abuse of children yet did not take effective action to prevent it or to examine the institutional failures of leadership that led to scores of children being victimized at the hands of abusive priests,” the report stated.

The attorney general’s office said the report was “the first comparable public accounting of the institutional failures within the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses”.

Continue @ Guardian. 

Catholic Clergy Sexually Abused Nearly 1,000 Massachusetts Children Over Decades, Report Finds

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  23-June-2026.

The Bridge At Scarva • No. 3


For forty years Jeffrey Donaldson was the respectable face of a certain unionism, lecturing the Irish Catholics of the six counties on law, order and godliness. He has woken in a cell, a convicted child rapist. This is the gap the column exists to read, and it has never been wider.

He spent Monday night in Maghaberry, the first of many. That afternoon a jury of seven men and five women in Newry had deliberated for ten hours and found him guilty on every one of eighteen counts, one of rape, thirteen of indecent assault, four of gross indecency, against two children, on dates running from 1985 to 2008. He showed no emotion as the foreman spoke. He wore a small Christian fish pin on the lapel of a pristine navy suit. For four weeks he had called the two women liars from the witness stand. The jury believed them, unanimously, and the judge told a silent courtroom that a long sentence was now inevitable.

Begin there, and stay there, because everything that follows is built on that floor and must never float free of it. The two women are not material for an argument. What was done to them as children is theirs, and it is not anyone’s evidence. The only thing owed them is the plain fact that they were believed. Everything else here is about the man, and the forty years of borrowed authority the verdict has demolished.

The guarantor

For four decades Jeffrey Donaldson was a man of standing, and that was the whole of him. Not an orator, not a thinker, but a guarantor: the steady, church-going, respectable face a certain unionism presented to the world to prove it was the lawful and godly alternative to the other side. He joined the Orange Order at sixteen, and the standing began to accrue. He served in the UDR. He inherited a safe seat, walked out of a peace deal, and turned the walkout into a career. He became chief whip, then leader, then Sir Jeffrey, knight of the realm, and weeks before his arrest he was the toast of Washington and bound for the House of Lords. The standing was the product. He sold it to his party, to two governments, to the Americans, and above all to the people of his own tradition, who were invited to see in him the proof that theirs was the respectable cause. The verdict is the recall notice on forty years of that product, and reading exactly this kind of recall is what the column is for: the distance between what a man tells you he is and what the record holds.

Drumcree

To understand the standing, go to Drumcree, because Drumcree is the Planet Ulster mind entire, and Donaldson lent it his face. Each July through the late nineties, in a field outside Portadown, the Orange Order insisted on its right to march its banners down the Garvaghy Road, a road where Catholic families lived who did not want it past their doors. Not another route. Not a compromise. That road, those homes, those people, who had said no. The Order’s answer to the no was that there could be no no. The right to walk the ground was sacred, older than the objection, and the people on the ground were an obstruction to be cleared from the path of it. When the residents held, and the state at long last agreed with them, the Order laid what witnesses called a siege. Tens of thousands gathered in the fields. The whole region was brought to the edge, summer after summer, for years, until the standoff had run past a thousand days. Placards went up reading “No Taigs Here.”

And around the edges of all that righteous certainty, other men did the work the certainty licensed. The taxi driver Michael McGoldrick was murdered by loyalists in 1996. In 1998, at the very height of it, three small Quinn brothers, children, were burned to death in their home in Ballymoney. Those were the crimes of paramilitaries, and not of any Orangeman standing at the barricade, and the distinction matters and must be held without flinching. But the siege was the cause, and the cause bred the climate, and the climate killed. The march was never only a march. It was a yearly re-enactment of who was meant to hold the ground and who was meant to give way, the Boyne staged afresh down a real road past real front windows, three centuries on, by an Order that takes its name from the winning king. And there, in the photographs from the barricade in 1996, alongside Trimble and the Reverend Martin Smyth, stands Jeffrey Donaldson, Lagan Valley MP, the coming man of respectable unionism, lending the whole squalid spectacle the one thing it could not manufacture for itself: a clean, lawful, church-going face.

That is the Planet Ulster brain in full, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is the thing he embodied. It is grievance and supremacy fused into a single posture, held without any sense of the contradiction: we are the besieged and the wronged party, and we will dominate you, and we will do both at once, in our Sunday suits, with scripture to hand and a sash across the shoulder. It cannot grant the people on the road a full reality, because to do that would be to hear the no and to stop, and stopping is the one thing the worldview forbids. Donaldson was the suit it wore to be taken seriously. He was the face you fix to the front of the thing so that it can be discussed on the evening news as a question of tradition and civil rights, rather than as what it plainly was, a demand by one community to process its dominance through the front gardens of another. The standing laundered the squalor. That was its function, and he performed it for forty years without a public flicker of doubt.

The walkout

The walkout was the same instinct in a committee room. On Good Friday morning in 1998, as David Trimble led the Ulster Unionists to accept the Agreement that ended the war, Donaldson walked out. He spent the next five years convening councils against his own leader, taking the hard public line against any deal with republicans before decommissioning, and rode the wreckage of Trimble into the leadership of the rival party that had opposed the peace from the start. In 2023 he said he had no regrets.

He might have managed one, because the public hard line was never the whole story. Government papers later showed that while he was demanding full decommissioning in front of the cameras, he was in quiet contact with the republican movement, had told officials he would accept the IRA handing over no more than “a couple of bunkers,” and had tried to arrange a meeting with a senior IRA figure at the US ambassador’s residence in Dublin. The man who built a career on refusing to deal was dealing. The hard line was a costume, worn where it paid and shed where it did not. He did it again at the end: he collapsed the Stormont institutions over the Protocol in 2022 and left the North without a government for two years, swearing he would not go back until the sea border was gone, then went back in 2024 on a British command paper he said had removed the checks. The checks remained. He had not removed them. He had simply, once again, said the thing the moment required and trusted his standing to carry it.

The veto and the podium

And the whole time, he was a moral guardian. He opposed abortion. He opposed the marriages of gay people, and his party did more than oppose them. In November 2015 the Northern Ireland Assembly voted, for the first time, in favour of marriage equality, by fifty-three votes to fifty-two. A majority. The DUP struck it down with a petition of concern, the same veto Gavin Robinson and Jon Burrows reached for last week to keep ten-year-olds in the dock, turned that day against the right of people to marry. Donaldson defended the party’s view of marriage as a thing between one man and one woman, called for conscience protections for Christians who wanted no part of it, and described his faith, in his own words, as the anchor that steadied him in the storms of politics. He policed the marriages, the morals and the consciences of other people, in the name of a godliness he carried like a badge, while abusing children across the same decades. Hold the fish pin in your mind. He was wearing it in the dock.

Here the easy charge has to be set down for the true one. It would be cheap, and wrong, to say he controlled the lives of Irish republicans, or of the Catholics of the six counties he spent his career lecturing. He controlled nothing of the kind — despite his efforts as a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The truer and heavier thing is that the settlement many agreed to in order to keep the peace required the rest of us to extend him a legitimacy the record now shreds. It asked republicans to shake his hand. It asked the people of the Garvaghy Road to treat the man at the barricade as a respectable interlocutor. It asked a whole community to receive his lectures on law and order and decency as though he had the standing to deliver them. He stood on a podium for forty years and pronounced on the fitness of others to be free, to marry, to govern themselves, to be trusted. He had no right to that podium. He never had. We know it now with the certainty of a unanimous verdict, but the structure that handed him the microphone never required the certainty. It required only the standing, and the standing was a fraud from the day it was minted.

The cell

So he wakes in Maghaberry, and the navy suit and the fish pin are in a property bag, and Sir Jeffrey is a number on the sex offenders register. The crime is the fixed and terrible fact at the centre of all this, and it belongs to two women who were children when he committed it against them, and who were, at the very last, believed. The forty years of moral authority is the second thing, the thing built on top, and that was the fraud. He was the guarantor of nothing but his own concealment. The lawful, godly Ulster he fronted was, in his own person, a lie. And the only clean thing in the whole squalid business is that it was a jury of ordinary people, in the end, and not a command paper or a podium or a parade, that finally read the gap between the man and the record, and closed it.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

Lawful, Godly Ulster & Jeffrey Donaldson

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

 

Hate Theology @ 18

 

A Morning Thought @ 3300

Gary Robertson ⚽ Merriam Webster defines enigma as something hard to understand or explain.
 
Examples of an enigma are Stonehenge, The Pyramids of Giza and currently Celtic Football Club.
 
The expected drubbing by Europa League favourites Benfica came to pass on Thursday leaving fans feeling fearful of the upcoming match against Heart of Midlothian who were finally showing the form that very nearly won them the title last season.
 
Yet once again the team transformed from pub outfit to peak Barcelona and put in a performance that surprised even the most optimistic of fans.
 
Absolutely no one saw this coming, fingers crossed perhaps a one or two nil victory, perhaps a tight 2-1 but Celtic were imperious, ruthless to the point you almost wished for the final whistle to blow to put Hearts on the bus home and save them further embarrassment.
 
A 7-1 victory doesn’t flatter the home team, it could have, perhaps should have been more.
 
Doubles for Nygren & Osmand, goals from Tierney and Duran and an own goal from Hearts' McCart. Celtic have won the title 14 of the last 15 years and it would take a brave man on that performance to suggest they aren’t good enough to make it 15 from 16.
 
Of course the Scottish Premiership isn’t just Celtic. Eleven other teams start the season hopeful of taking the crown and this year the challenge looks like Rangers again. The only domestic outfit to have put this Celtic squad to the sword.
 
With a Saturday evening fixture (for TV purposes) Rangers had the chance to take top spot, if only briefly. However, as it transpired Dundee weren’t there simply for the gate money but instead to play football. A strange match as the script was binned in the first half when Dundee's Fink put the home side ahead. 

Rangers, of course, are playing with a never say die attitude and managed to equalise through Bouanani just before half time. The second half and it looked like normal service had been resumed as Raskin fired home spectacularly for the Gers and it looked for all intents and purposes an away win was on the cards only for Dan Neil, the hero of the League Cup win over Celtic, to be robbed of the ball and for Jones to restore parity. Both sides huffed and puffed desperately seeking a winner that wasn’t to come and a point apiece seemed right on the night. Rangers fans undoubtedly disappointed having snatched a draw from the teeth of victory were left to rue what might have been. How much of a bearing this has on the season remains to be seen but currently Celtic are riding high with a four point gap to Rangers with Hearts a further four points behind.
 
Kilmarnock helped continue Motherwell's miserable run of form, inflicting the Steelmen's fifth defeat in a row coming out on top of a five goal thriller at Rugby Park. A 3-2 victory and a pleasing Saturday afternoon for Neil McCann and his men. Motherwell on the other hand are a shadow of the team they were last season and the future of Alfred Johansson must be in doubt. How long the Fir Park board give him is a yet unanswered question but I suspect we might not need to wait long for the answer.
 
Hibs hit rock bottom with a sixth home defeat of the season, giving Falkirk their first win at Easter road in 20 years. A fine 2-1 victory for the away side and much soul searching for under fire Hibernian manager Reedijk.
 
Elsewhere Aberdeen managed to miss a penalty from the boot of the usually ultra reliable Nesbit but it mattered not as the striker redeemed himself in the 59th minute with a contribution to the Dons 3-1 victory.

St Johnstone and Dundee United ended with a share of the points, a 1-1 draw keeping them 5th and 6th separated only by goal difference.
 
In the Championship Stenhousemuir continue to lead the charge after a 1-1 draw with Raith Rovers. Partick Thistle now third after a Friday night victory by a solitary goal over Ayr United at Somerset Park.
 
League One, and the fight already looks to be between free scoring Ross County and Hamilton. It’s hard even at this early stage to see the title not going to one or the other. Ross are scoring for fun and after demolishing hapless Queen of the South at Palmerston also by 7 goals to 1 find themselves with a plus 32 goal difference.
 
Second placed Hamilton with a mere plus 20 after a hard fought 2-1 victory away at Airdries Albert Bartlett Stadium.
 
Cove Rangers are rooted firmly to the bottom of the league on 6 points having suffered yet another defeat this time at Peterhead where the home side ran out comfortable 2-0 winners. It takes a special breed of person to run around in shorts and T-shirts even in the middle of summer in Peterhead but in winter, with the cold winds blowing from the North Sea, no thanks. I always thought Pittodrie in Aberdeen was the coldest stadium in Scotland but nothing prepared me for Peterhead. Never felt cold like it. Once and once was enough. If you’re ever tempted to watch them at home make sure you’re well wrapped up. A trip to a psychiatrist first might be a good idea too.
 
League Two and Stranraer top the table on goal difference over Clyde. Stranraer taking care of Spartans by 2 -0 and Clyde overcoming bottom side Annan by 4 goals to one.
 
It’s been a fascinating weekend for sure and right now let’s enjoy the Celtic victory without worrying too much about Thursday coming and Celta Vigo. That said it’s at Paradise so who knows. Perhaps I’m foolish to be confident but I expect a better performance at home from O’Neills men and we might finally get points on the board.
 
That’s for the future though and we might have to brush over this like we did the Benfica score line. Masterfully avoided going into great detail, if I say so myself, I mean let’s start the week on a positive note right?

So that’s Scottish football for another week no rants, no feet stamping and no cushions thrown at the tv it’s been a most satisfactory forty eight hours.
 
Can Celtic make the 15th title, their 15th in 16 years? Time will tell but outwith Rangers I can’t see where the challenge will come from. Last seasons three horse race that gripped Scottish football fans doesn’t look like materialising and we’re back to the shoot out between the Glasgow giants.

Enjoy your week, whatever you’re doing do it well, do it safely and have fun

Til next time …… 🐼 

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

FifteenYears

Barry Gilheany ⚽ Was it pressure from being installed marginal favourites for the fixture that all Leeds United look out for but may also secretly dread – home to fallen Premier League giants Manchester United on Sunday just gone 2pm kick-off? 

Was it the fear or expectation that the Manchester United outfit that has performed so dreadfully this season would actually turn up and achieve some sort of redemptive result? Or was it school day memories of the consequences of defeat in this horrible fixture? Whatever the reason and, with my therapeutic hat on, it is most likely to be the latter explanatory factor, I watched Sunday’s encounter with my insides taut with tension and anxiety just as I had felt the previous night. 

Promotion or the avoidance of relegation was not on the agenda; we have made a decent start to the season and are confidently expected by most pundits to move on from last season’s 14th place finish towards possibly a European competition qualifying position. By contrast the long running soap opera to rival the one next door to Old Trafford (Coronation Street in neighbouring Salford for those totally unacquainted with such icons of British popular culture) that is Manchester United has taken up a mini forest of column inches in the sporting press with no little schadenfreude. In the words of Barney Ronay, the incompetence of Manchester United’s top brass is of the character of:

one of those high street legacy chain shops just before it collapses, piles of Quality Street by the door a rat in the lingerie department, destined to become a pop-up vape shop run by Albanian money launderers.[1] 

Regardless of the result yesterday, the United from across the Pennines were always going to be the story. They have made the worst start to a season for forty years; forty years ago in 1986 they turned to an ambitious Scottish manager named Alex Ferguson to reclaim the glory years presided over by another West of Scotland footballing icon, Matt Busby. With the extinction of the coalfields of Scotland and the near extinction of the shipbuilding industries and the soccer cultures associated with both, it is hard to see them turning to another patriarch hewn in the Lanarkshire coalmines as Matt Busby was or the Govan shipyards which was the making of Alex Ferguson and who both became peers of the realm. With the open dissent expressed this week by Lissandro Martinez against the recruitment of Jason Wilcox (who played a bit part role in the rise and spectacular fall of Leeds under Peter Ridsdale) as Director of Football at Old Trafford, it has been truly Manchester Dis-United.

And yet the pit of anxiety ran deep in my stomach just as it was when we were negotiating our path back to the Premier League in 2024-25 and our survival the following season. For the truth is that Leeds United v Manchester United is a bitter and toxic fixture that develop its venom in the 1960s and has persisted through eras of contrasting fortunes for both Uniteds. For 25 of the seasons since I became a Leeds supporter we were not even in the same division thanks to relegation (Manchester suffered that fate for one season only in 1974-75). Yet every home fixture of both sides was soundtracked to the chants of “We all hate Leeds scum” at Old Trafford and simply “Scum” at Elland Road. Elements of both sets of supporters descended to the level of the gutter with “tragedy chanting,” the “Munich 1958” song commemorating the destruction of the Busby Babes in the airplane crash in Munich in 1958 spewed out at Elland Road was matched by ditties such as “Always look for Turks brandishing knives” in reference to the fatal stabbing of two Leeds supporters in Istanbul in April 2000 prior to a UEFA Cup semi-final first leg contest with Galatasaray.

But why does this fixture take up so much headspace among the rival sets of fans? What is the historical and geographic logic behind it? It lacks the ethno-religious dimensions of the Old Firm derby in Glasgow (which used to characterise the Merseyside derby); the historical resonance of the El Classico fixture between Real Madrid and Barcelona. There is not the geographical proximity and the economic rivalries underpinning the Liverpool v Manchester United animus. It has none of the intimate, visceral bitterness of the Tyne-Wear derby between Newcastle United and Sunderland (which descends from the opposite sides that both towns took in the English Civil War) or the South Coast derby between Portsmouth and Southampton (which has its roots in a seamen’s strike in the 1950s). It is hardly a war of the roses either between Yorkshire and Lancashire as the location of Old Trafford gravitates more to Cheshire. It cannot be traced to one specific game such as the 1970 FA Cup Final replay between Chelsea and Leeds which bequeathed Leeds’s fans second most bitter hatred.

The answer is probably to be found in the footballing cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, on the pitch, on the terraces and in the media coverage of football. Some observers date the rivalry to the signing of midfield maestro John Giles by Don Revie from the Old Trafford club in 1963 when Leeds were still in the old Second Division. In Leeds’s first season in the top flight in 1964-65; Revie’s charges went toe-to-toe with Manchester United who were the eventual winners of the League title but gained some measure of compensation in victory over their erstwhile rivals in the FA Cup semi-final after two bruising encounters settled by a late goal by Billy Bremner in the replay. 

Leeds’s physical style of football, though by no means an outlier for the time, and the frequent accusations of gamesmanship levelled at the club ensured that they had no shortage of keen rivals. By contrast Manchester United were, in the perceptions of Leeds fans, held up by the print media as the embodiment of the club that could do no wrong. Still riding the crest of waves of national sympathy after the Munich tragedy, the Holy Trinity of Best, Law, and Charlton brought to the Red Devils a mixture of panache, swashbuckling excitement, and class. George Best as the Fifth Beatle brought glamour and celebrity; sexy football before Ruud Gullit coined the phrase. Their zenith was reached with the winning of the European Cup in 1968. The contrast with the supposed dour, mechanical (dare I say anti-football) character of the upstarts from Yorkshire was held up and Leeds fans had their noses metaphorically rubbed in the moniker of Dirty Leeds; a meme which never seems to lose its durability down the generations.

Survivors of the Busby regime at Old Trafford such as Pat Crerand recall respect being shown to the growing force that was Leeds United but never affection as Don Revie’s earlier teams did not go out of their way to make friends and influence people because of their alleged aggression and meanness. However as Man U’s star waned after their European Cup, that of Leeds United rose with two League titles, one FA Cup, one League Cup and two Inter Cities Fairs Cup trophies plus three League runners up positions, two other Cup Final appearances, Cup Winners Cup final appearance and European Cup semi-final appearance in the period 1968-74 when the Stretford Enders were nosediving to the indignity of relegation by 1974. 

From 1969 terrace battles were to be a regular occurrence as true enmity was born and both clubs’ fanbase attracted notorious hooligan fringes in the 1970s. My fellow TPQ columnist Caoimhin O’Muraile recalls frequent school fights between fans of both clubs. With the departure of Don Revie to take up an ill-fated appointment as England manager and the monstrous injustice that was our defeat in the 1975 European Cup Final recalled so vividly and starkly in the documentary film Paris 75 the star of Leeds United similarly faded and unlike the other United relegation when it came in 1982 came with an eight-season period of exile. The double sale of Scottish internationals Joe Jordan and Gordon McQueen to that lot across the Pennines in the middle of the 1977-78 season came as particularly bitter blows to Leeds fans and provided glaring evidence of the club’s lack of real ambition. More defectors were to be added to this roll of dishonour in the decades ahead.

With the return of Leeds United to the big time in 1990 under Howard Wilkinson, the cross-Pennines rivalry was renewed with an intensity that shook even Alex Ferguson who from his participation in Old Firm derbies as a Rangers player in the 1960s presumably would have known a thing or two about the animosity involved in club rivalries. The point of maximum ecstasy for Leeds United fans was reached in 1992 by becoming the Last Champions (the last winners of the old Football League Championship before the dawn of Planet Premier League) at the expense of Manchester United whose Devon Lock like collapse in the home strait led to us winning the title with a game to spare. A talismanic presence in that team was the enigmatic French forward Eric Cantona who Wilkinson had signed as an emergency replacement for injured forward Lee Chapman. Fully cognisant of the risks of signing a free spirit with a history of clashing with football authority figures, he looked to have signed at £1m the bargain of the season as Leeds fans formed an almost sexualised relationship with this Gallic force of nature who from the top of the open top bus proclaimed to the citizenry of Leeds during our title celebrations “I don’t know why, but I love you”. 

The sense of betrayal was all the more acute when just six months, after a casual inquiry from Sir Alex about the availability of another Leeds player, Howard sold him to them for the paltry figure of £1.1m. Season after season salt would be rubbed into this open wound for Leeds fans as Cantona became key to Man U’s dominance of domestic football in the 1990s winning four Premier League titles and two FA Cups before sailing off into the sunset in 1997 aged just 31.

A decade later at the turn of the millennium Leeds again looked poised to mount a serious challenge to Manchester United’s dominance with the full flowering of the crop of the 1997 FA Youth Cup winning squad who were unleashed onto the Premier League and European competition. It seemed only a matter of time before the trophy cabinet at Elland Road would be replenished season after season. However the collapse of the house of cards in the wake of two successive failures to qualify for the Champions League and the consequent ensnarement of Leeds United in a vortex of debts and unsustainable financial commitments as a result of the catastrophic management by the PLC board that ran the club led to the sale of the only assets that a club has – players. The biggest name in the Dutch auction that followed was Rio Ferdinand, signed for a club record fee for a defender at £19m from West Ham in November 2000 and then sold for another record fee for a defender £30m; this time again to our nemesis - and once again our export would be central to a third decade of Man United dominance. Our descent into relegation (and near extinction) was book ended by the sale of local lad Alan Smith who was the beating heart of the O’Leary Babes squad to, guess where, Manchester United for £7m overnight, becoming Public Enemy No. 1 in Leeds; the latest entry into the rogues gallery of defectors never mind the economic rationale behind these sales – considerations which football emotions override by default.

Now to Sunday’s proceedings. To their credit, they effectively deployed a 3-4-3 formation which largely thwarted our attack apart from one downward header by Swiss defender Nico Elvedi which was palmed away by Man U keeper Lammens. The opposition were winning two thirds of individual duels, and their quick breaks were sounding alarm bells in the home defence. It came as no surprise when after fluffing a header in acres of space near the goal, Bryan Mbeumo gave the visitors the lead in the 34th minute from a cross by the Belgian Diallo. A typically spiky encounter saw some juicy tackles which had a stricter official than Darren England been in charge could have seen two yellow cards leading to red for Leeds captain Ethan Ampadou, Swedish defender Gudmundsson, and Man United’s Santos and Baleba.

But come the second half total change as Leeds really came out of the traps. By the 53rd minute, we were level thanks to a seemingly well-rehearsed set piece moved in which Bosnian defender Muharamovic flicked on a corner to Dominic Calvert-Lewin who outmuscled Mbeumo to deftly trap the ball and pivot to score from close range. Now there was only one United in town and had Tanaka and Stach shown more composure in the penalty with their shooting boots, we would have gone ahead. Manchester did respond with some breakaway attacks but with no serious end product. Leeds kept forcing the pace of the game and almost forced a winner in stoppage time against a Man U defence lacking the composure they showed in the first half.

The general consensus is that a draw was a fair result. It is a sign of the progress that we have made since our return to the Premiership that Daniel Farke expressed some disappointment that we had not got all three points while acknowledging that one point was a satisfactory outcome. For besieged Man Utd manager Michael Carrick this result should buy some time until the next Spurs and Fulham type performance. But at the full time whistle I was still breathing heavily to relieve the tension in my system. There certainly is a market for a fan podcast run by Paul known as “Leeds Therapy.”

Marching on Together

References

[1] Barney Ronay Analysis Managerial magic bullet merchants are derailing the United supremacy The Guardian 19 October 2026 p.41

⏩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. 

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A Morning Thought @ 3299

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

11-September-2026

Experiments with free public transport, introduced in some of the world’s biggest cities to tackle the fuel price crisis, are proving successful.

In Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam and Tehran, Iran – which both have around 10 million people, more than London – people are shifting, in numbers, from private vehicles to buses and the metro.

A bus picks up passengers in Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Thuan Van / Tuoi Tre

In Australia, pilot zero-fares schemes have been extended, due to their popularity. In India, eight states now provide free public transport for tens of millions of women. Jakarta, Indonesia, the world’s most populous city, has introduced a partial but generous free transport scheme.

“There are many smaller cities around the world where public transport has been free for years, but now it is being tried out in megacities”, Coral Jones, chair of Doctors in Unite and organising group member of Fare Free London, said.

All cities are different, but this shows that it can be done. Given the endless increases in fuel prices, and the climate crisis, our call on the Mayor of London to consider the potential seems very reasonable.

Fare Free London has a public event on “How to Make Public Transport Free”, on Tuesday 29 September in London. Details, and free registration, here.

The US-Israel war on Iran that started in February, and the resulting fuel price increases, were the trigger for the largest zero-fares schemes.

Ho Chi Minh city (population 10.5 million) introduced free bus travel on 1 July. In July, there were 8.5 million bus trips, 39% more than in the same month of 2025.

Le Hoan of the city’s Public Transport Management Centre said that passenger numbers rose steadily through the month, and that the fare-free policy “also generated positive spillover effects for the metro”, where fares are still charged, but passenger numbers rose by 15% anyway.

Transport operators said that “challenges remain” – too few bus shelters, pavements blocked by illegal parking and street vendors, overcrowding in the rush hour and older passengers struggling with the digital management system. In response, the city authorities are accelerating the use of technology and looking at introducing bus lanes.

Duong Duc Minh, deputy director of the city’s Institute for Economic and Tourism Development research, said that expanding services, and making them fare-free, would help ease traffic congestion, reduce emissions and “provide practical support for low-income residents by lowering living costs and improving access to employment opportunities”.

Ho Chi Minh city, in contrast to London and other cities in the global north, is battling to encourage people not out of cars, but off motorbikes. For every 1000 residents, there are about 100 cars and 800 motorbikes, the city’s Institute for Development Studies estimates.

Nhan Dan newspaper quoted a resident who said:

People will not easily give up their motorbikes simply because bus travel is free. They will only switch when buses offer roughly the same journey time and similar convenience.

Bringing the metro into the scheme would help, and the transport authority abolished fares there too – for one day only – on 2 September, National Day.

Hanoi (population 8.8 million), Vietnam’s second city, has also made bus travel free, for one year from 1 July, inside the ring road around the city centre.

In mid-March, when the US-Israeli bombing began, Iran’s capital, Tehran (population 9.9 million), made public transport – including both the metro and buses – free, as part of a package of emergency wartime measures. In July the city authorities announced the scheme would continue “until the end of the current conflict”.

Murad Qureshi, a former Labour member of the London Assembly, said free transit is seen as a tool for civilian defence. He reported: “Officials are exploring land value capture (taxing the increased value of property near transit hubs) and direct military-emergency funding to bridge the budget gap left by the removal of ticket revenue.”

Fuel prices are a sharply contested political issue in Iran. Petrol price rises were one of the causes of anti-government protests in November 2019, which led to a violent state crackdown. This month a fuel shortage and long queues at petrol stations have been reported.

The world’s largest city by population, Jakarta (population 41.9 million) in Indonesia, in May last year made public transport free for 15 groups of residents, including over-60s; civil servants, education and provincial government workers; workers earning the minimum wage and residents of low-cost flats; war veterans and people with disabilities; and students.

Fares were abolished for everybody else, too, for one day on 24 April (National Transportation Day) and for three days in June (for the city’s 499th birthday).

Not all the zero-fare schemes are so successful. In April, the government of Punjab province (population 127.7 million) in Pakistan made all public transport services free – but this did not apply to the privately-run minibuses, taxis and rickshaws that provide most transport services.

The zero-fares scheme was used by about 800,000 passengers per day, and ended in mid June. The provincial government also subsidised farmers and registered motorbike owners in response to the fuel price shock.

Schemes in Australia – with a smaller, and on average richer, population – fared better. Victoria state (population 7.1 million) abolished public transport fares in April, extended the scheme to the end of May, and then set fares at half-price until the end of the year.

In Tasmania (population 580,000), the introduction of zero-fares in April boosted metro ridership by 37% and bus use by 46%. In May the government announced that fares would remain at zero until July 2027.

In India, eight states with a joint population of more than 400 million provide free public transport to women and transgender people. (The states are: Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and 36West Bengal.)

When Tamil Nadu last month extended its scheme to deluxe and express services, the state chief minister C. Joseph Vijay said the scheme “ill enable students to travel to colleges located far from their homes, help women commute to workplaces and allow them to access medical care”.

The scheme in Karnataka has been running since June 2023. More than 3.1 billion free rides have been taken by the state’s women.

A report published last year by the Sustainable Mobility Network showed that women in zero-fares cities saved between one third and one half of their transportation expenses – money “redirected towards strategic household investments, such as children’s education, emergency funds and health care”. The schemes also faces problems including overcrowding, compromised safety and negative staff attitudes.

Republished from Labour Hub, with thanks

🚌Fare Free London, Fare Free Greater Manchester and Fare Free Yorkshire are working to establish a national campaign for free public transport, provided as a public good by publicly-owned companies.

🚌 Fare Free London’s event, “How to Make Public Transport Free”, is on 29 September at 7.00pm, at the Golden Lane Community Centre, Fann Street, London EC1Y 0SA, and on zoom. Agenda: Q&A with Julie Frêche, vice-president for transport, Montpellier metropolitan area, France – which made public transport free in 2023 / Panel discussion with trade union and community groups / Fare Free London annual meeting. Register to attend (free) here on eventbrite.

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Megacities Make Progress With Free Public Transport Schemes

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