SSE Arena management and its various licensees aren’t known to be lacking when it comes to basic forward planning, otherwise they’d be picking up their P45s this week along with those Rangers fans filmed singing The Billy Boys there on Friday night.
They always make sure the bars are well stocked. Every time I’ve been in attendance there’s plenty of crisps and popcorn and hot dogs. The programme stalls rarely run out and T-shirts and fridge magnets are invariably there for anyone who wants them. Which makes Friday night’s depressing scenes all the more difficult to understand.
As well as making sure that patrons are well fed and watered, as well as making sure they have all the overpriced merch they want, the venue has a responsibility to ensure the place is well run. And that means briefings and meetings designed to apprise staff of any exigencies peculiar to the band or show gracing the SSE’s stage. Or it should.
I have no idea what communication took place between the venue and the producers of the show in question – ‘Rangers: The Journey Back’. And I have no idea what steps were taken in an attempt to ensure the audience refrained from offensive, racist or sectarian singing. All I know is that what happened was a stain on the reputation of the SSE; and it was another depressing example of the refusal of key aspects of loyalist culture to acknowledge change, much less come to terms with it.
The chances of a large crowd of Rangers fans getting, ah, boisterous at the event after a long, hot day of bonhomie and Buckfast were as high as Friday’s mid-afternoon sun. Because – let’s face it – Rangers fans aren’t known for their commitment to DEI and good relations. It's not that long ago since they erected a large banner at Ibrox reading ‘Keep woke foreign ideologies out. Defend Europe’. For fans whose team is chock-full of foreigners and for fans who were in the vanguard of the Faragean drive to leave Europe, it was an intriguing message. Then just last week the same fans hoisted another banner with a picture of a bloke firing a shotgun over the words ‘Take aim against the Rebel scum’.
HOT WATER: Rangers face potential sanctions for a number of offensive banners at Ibrox, including this one which forced the club into a robust response 
This kind of thing was tailor-made to upset progressive snowflakes like me, the Scottish police, UEFA and the Scottish First Minister, but it was even too much for the club itself, which has not been noted down through the years for its willingness to clamp down on anti-Catholic and racist sentiment within Ibrox. Rangers launched a series of pro-migrant showpieces in the wake of the foreigners-out banner – a response which infuriated that large section of the fanbase which takes its ‘No-one likes us, we don’t care’ chant not as a bit of tuneless fun, but as a mission statement. And when the club condemned the Rebel shotgun banner as “unacceptable”, it was another betrayal of the staunch core which sees an aversion to rosary beads and priests as a prerequisite of membership of the Rangers Family.
So as the SSE Arena suits gathered ahead of the Rangers musical, they wouldn’t have needed a football expert to alert them to the simple fact that the coming Rangers event was a red flag in terms of community cohesion, and they wouldn’t have needed to look into the bottom of their empty teacups to see that the future was highly likely to involve some less than inclusive behaviour. In other words, the SSE was amply forewarned, but it decided that it didn’t need to be forearmed and the arena was handed over to the guldering louts to chant Vatican-obsessed slasher fantasies till their blue and white hearts’ content, without so much a friendly tap on the shoulder, much less a robust warning.
Those stout-hearted guardians of our moral souls, the BBC Ulster phone-ins, decided on Monday to give the SSE Arena Rangers story a by-ball. Perhaps they thought that after their record-breaking run with Kneecap their audience had had enough of stories about controversial words being said or sung at concerts; or perhaps they thought that revelling in the spilling of Fenian blood was not as indictable an offence as asking people to kill their MP. If the latter was the rationale, then I’d gently suggest that for outlets so normally tuned in to the loyalist zeitgeist, they need to familiarise themselves with the Rangers canon. Paramilitaries are, of course, an integral aspect of the Rangers experience for the hardline fans and the exploits of the UDA and UVF are celebrated with gusto. Both those organisations have diversified over the years to the point where they’ve got sovereign-ringed fingers in a lot of criminal pies: loan-sharking, drugs, people-trafficking, prostitution, protection rackets and general noncery. But they remain best-known for wading in Fenian blood.
And so when their supporters sing a song about how much they admire the knifeplay of the Billy Boys, it probably needs to be taken a little more literally – and seriously – than three rappers in shell suits singing about killing Tories.
