I'm relieved for Angela Haggerty
after the conviction in court of a podcaster who’s idea of humour contravened Scots
Law’s idea of legality.
Listening to the podcast in the
cold light of court, together with many of the vile tweets which resulted
from it, was a chastening experience. That anyone could imagine chants such as “Taig
of the day”, among others, were somehow acceptable in modern society shows how
entrenched bigotry had become. That such chants went down like a lead balloon
in court of law shows progress of sorts.
I first came across the word “Taig”
while working in N. Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Painted on a
wall in a loyalist area was the slogan “Kill all Taigs.” This was at a time
when some seemed to be taking that badly scrawled graffiti as
an actual instruction. Just as chillingly, many who were not carrying out these
murderous acts cheered, both vocally and silently, conditioned by decades, if not
centuries, of reducing others to something less than human.
Calling people “Taigs’ is not “banter”.
It’s part of a process that dehumanises people in the eyes of others. And once
a person or group of people has been dehumanised then they are considered by
some as fair game for ... well ... potentially anything. If N. Ireland
taught us anything, it taught us that.
No comments:
Post a Comment