AN Alba candidate at the General Election has opened up on vile sectarian abuse he received during the campaign saying he was “benumbed” to anti-Catholic bigotry.
Chris McEleny, who unsuccessfully contested the Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West seat, said he had been posted back one of his leaflets with a note reading: “Here’s your leaflet back. I don’t vote for Fenians who promote rebel music.
"You’ll be doing well if you get 30 votes.”
Fenian is a slur for Catholics and Irish nationalists. It comes from the name for members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who staged an unsuccessful revolt against British rule in 1867.
McEleny said there Scotland’s sectarianism problem was “there in plain sight”.
He told The National: “I muted ‘Fenian’ years ago on Twitter which certainly helped.
“I’ve probably been called one pejoratively, directly, over a hundred times.
“It gets to the point that over the years you become so benumbed to it you forget how depressing it is that someone goes to the effort to actually post you that sort of nonsense.
“One of our staff members in the office – who’s not from the West of Scotland – saw it and they thought it was outrageous, you forget that’s the rational view of it when you’re so used to it.”
He said there must be action to tackle Scotland’s problem with sectarianism. The Scottish Government's Hate Crime Act, which was opposed by Alba, introduced specific measures to criminalise stirring up hatred on religious grounds.
McEleny added: “Scotland is almost on this sort of post-material path at the moment looking for new things to ban, new crusades to take up or the next great civil rights movement, but the elephant in the room is that we still have a sectarianism problem, it lives amongst us, it’s there in plain sight and it’s almost as if many people have just accepted this is as good as it’ll get.
“It would be good if we could address that before looking for other problems to fix.”
