I can't begin to explain how sick I am that a football match in Scotland can have such huge implications for people here in Belfast.
Football is supposed to be the beautiful game, but I can tell you there was nothing beautiful about Celtic supporters in North Belfast beating all hell around them because their team lost the Scottish Premier League title by a point. And yes Rangers won, but why did hoops' fans have to go cock-a-hoop – get themselves caught on camera behaving like drunken animals, probably get prosecuted, and give the people of Ardoyne a bad name?
How is this behaviour patriotic and how could anyone in their right mind condone it?
As I drove through North Belfast that Sunday after the match and pondered over that Scott McDonald goal in injury time I saw children as young five or six on the Limestone Road coming down from the 'high' of battle. Those kids were having their own sectarian manifestation of the football result. And their hatred for each other had at least four Land Rovers perched, waiting and watching beside the CCTV masts which divides the Limestone Road. The road was strewn with rocks, bricks and wooden missiles.
I couldn't get to Ardoyne because Twaddell Avenue and the Crumlin Road and Shankill Roads were closed off. But as I watched the footage later on television, despair came in floods. Are we ever going to move on?
There are many football fans out there who believe that the conflict of our island is transferable to the competitive spirit that exists between Rangers and Celtic football teams, which is heightened by the fact that one is perceived to be Catholic and the other Protestant.
But in reality that is where the tiny, miniscule connection with our 30-year struggle ends. The conflict has surpassed that plateau a long time ago.
The worthwhile and admirable objective of achieving a country where no British ministers rule from Westminster, the guns become silent on both sides and we govern ourselves in an united island alongside a police force that Nationalists as well as Unionists can trust is so much greater than the petty juvenile delinquency the world witnessed on Sunday May 22.
Celtic may have lost the title but didn't we lose so much more?
