#and also partly bc i slept like shite last night

[commander-damneron]

Okay, this threw up so many red flag that I'm having to make an actual reblog since I don't want to write an entire fucking essay over about 20 replies.

First off, I grew up in that same community. Or at least, I'm assuming it's the same one, since no one, to my knowledge, has ever called it "the Irish Catholic community of Scotland". Most people just consider it the Scottish Catholic community. Which usually acknowledges that there's a lot of Irish influence and the vast majority of Scottish Catholics are of Irish immigrant descent, and when I say "descent" I mean within the past few generations. For context, when I was growing up, I was considered to be reeeaaally Scottish by the other Catholic kids because my last fully Irish ancestors were about 4 generations back. There's a lot of Irish grandparents and great-grandparents among Scottish Catholics my age. So I suppose the way she describes it isn't wrong, it's just deeply fuckin weird. I guess we can't blame her for twisting her words around like that though, I get that she doesn't want to lump herself in with us filthy Scots.

Which does bring me to the other thing this flagged up in my brain. Because describing Scottish Catholics like that conveniently cuts out the parts of the community that aren't Irish or of Irish descent. I know I just said a lot of Scottish Catholics I grew up with are, but that's because at the time I started primary school, the majority were. My mum went to high school with a lot of other parents of kids in my P1 Catholic primary school class. While I never went to that high school, by the time I stopped going to church at around 13, that ubiquitous Scots/Irish landscape had changed, because Scotland had a large influx of Polish Catholics immigrants.

To be clear, I am in no way saying that's a bad thing. I sat through my fair share of my grandparents complaining about all these Polish coming in to church and now they're even having a separate Polish mass some weeks and all the usual xenophobia, and going from confused (I was 8 and thought they were very nice) to angry (I was 13 and my grandparents were full of shit). The Polish priest who was the first to start holding mass in Polish in our church, and who I was an altar server for for about 4 years, was the loveliest wee man you could ever meet.

What I am saying is that it it's suspicious to me use a term to describe Catholics in Scotland that so clearly excludes that large part of the community, especially as someone on the east coast, which I'm assuming Laura is, given that she's apparently shortlisted for Livingston. To be clear, this matters because of Scottish Catholicism's Irish roots and also because Scottish Catholicism is a bit weird. They majority of Irish immigrants settled on the west coast, since that's where they arrived, and is why Catholics on the west coast and especially in Glasgow are so... let's say loud and leave it at that. That's where my grandparents are from and where my mum spent her early years. Over time, some of them moved east with their families, as did my grandparents, and they've been here ever since, up to and including me being born here. The most common pattern among kids in my P1 class was "Irish great-grandparents/grandparents moved to Glasgow, Glaswegian grandparents/parents moved here". Similarly, as far as I personally witnessed, Polish immigrants did something similar, in that they often settled near to where they arrived. The ferry arrived in Rosyth, back when we still had passenger ferries between Scotland and mainland Europe. A lot of flights landed in Edinburgh. By the time I left the church, there was a huge Polish community on the east coast of Scotland, which was also notably larger than its west coast counterpart.

All this is to say that I fully do not believe that Laura McConnell can be a Catholic living on the east coast of Scotland and only be familiar with Scots/Irish Catholics. She just can't. I grew up a half hours drive from the constituency she's running for, and, again, we had such a large and thriving Polish community that we ran mass in Polish. So I can't help but find it suspicious that she notably excludes them here, especially because it'd be very easy to use them to throw other Scots under the bus. I've already spoken about the xenophobia against them in my own family, and they weren't the only ones with those opinions in our church, I imagine the rest of the country was at peast similar. I'm not saying outright that this was an active choice in how she phrased an already ridiculous tweet, but I am saying that if one of her political stances is somewhere in the realm of "hard on (EU) immigration", I wouldn't exactly be surprised

Labour candidate Laura McConnell is unionist because apparently the UK has long been a defender of Irish Catholics???

And she doesn’t trust those nasty Scots from Scotland (where she is a candidate).