Rangers and unionism - its a question of identity Rangers have always had a special relationship with Northern Ireland. Rangers Football Club has been influenced by the exchange of people and ideas between Scotland and Northern Ireland. On the pitch, the club has been ably represented in earlier times by the likes of Billy Simpson, the tormented Sam English and Billy McCandless – famously referenced by the Rangers-leaning poet John Hewitt. Rangers have a loyal and fervent support in the province, one that thinks nothing of sending thousands to games at Ibrox as though they were travelling from Kirkintilloch or some other town in close proximity to Glasgow. Shortly after Rangers entered administration in February 2012, a fundraising meeting was held in the Harland and Wolff Welders Club in east Belfast. The late Sandy Jardine, who would play a significant role in mobilising supporters and acting as a source of continuity throughout the crisis, represented the club on the evening. The meeting was attended by MLAs including Gregory Campbell and Danny Kennedy, as well as a number of other elected representatives. Linfield vice-chairman Billy Kennedy was also in attendance, representing a club with which Rangers share historically close ties. Indeed, friendlies between the two sides, usually at Windsor Park, are a regular feature of the summer calendar. Fans travelling back and forth for games follow in the footsteps of earlier labour migrants, shipyard workers who travelled from Queens Island to the Clyde, most famously in 1912 when Harland and Wolff established a presence in Scotland. The location for the crisis meeting in 2012 was, therefore, entirely apt. Also in 1912, Sir John Ure-Primrose welcomed Sir Edward Carson to Glasgow as he sought to impress the graveness of the Home Rule situation – a different constitutional crisis that coincidentally marked the same period in the previous century – on to a complacent public. Sir John was a liberal unionist, a former Lord Provost and Rangers chairman. At the time, the workers would have derived a sense of pride from working in the pre-eminent industry of both Glasgow and Belfast. With the exchange of people came the inevitable ebbing and flowing of cultural, political, social and economic influences, all of which might be said to have contributed to a version of Britishness with reference points and concerns unique to Ulster and parts of Scotland. Rangers, it might be argued, was historically influenced by such forces, but the club has come to play a central role in their perpetuation and this is a cause of unease for some fans. A recent conference at Queens University sought to relate the Scottish question to wider UK concerns about constitutional relationships and identities. Writing afterwards, the Scots-born Professor of Political History and co-author of the Official Biography of Rangers, Graham Walker, observed that the marginalisation of Scotlands loyalist constituency – perhaps best represented in the Better Together campaigns unambiguous hostility towards the Orange Order – mirrored the perceived marginalisation of the Protestant working-class in Northern Ireland. Martin Mansergh, meanwhile, has predicted that Scottish independence would result in a reconsideration of the Ulster-Scots strand of unionist identity, an identity which arguably straddles the sea. The precise ramifications are impossible to predict, although Peter Robinson has stated that Northern Ireland would remain in the UK with England and Wales, reminding us that the Union has a functionality removed from existential questions of identity.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 11:55:01 +0000
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