"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." - The Old Man & The Sea by Ernest Hemmingway.

There is a scene in The Old Man & The Sea where the old man hooks a huge tuna or marlin and it is so big that he can't land it in the boat. He tethers it to the side as best he can in his weak and feeble state. He tries to make his way back to shore with the added weight of a gigantic fish. The sharks begin to scent blood, then circle, then attack the old man's trophy fish. Such is the power of symbolism in contemporary times. It could not be more appropriate or telling.

2024 started with a peculiar and perverse request for the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Celtic FC Boys Club and Celtic FC. Everything that had populated their world to the beginning of this year took a turn that even they didn't think possible. After decades of being ignored, ridiculed and stymied at every turn, the last few months have given some hope that earth shatteringly transformative decisions (once rendered and denied by the most egregious individuals at the head of the trident of Scottish football, politics and law) may take place and soon. 

For some perpetrators, death has been the ordering principle of human affairs and that everything that populated that world was wished upon the victims - 'go away', many thought, as the scale and scope became apparent to even the most arrogant and untouchable individuals hell bent on covering up abuse or distancing themselves and their degenerate institutions. 

One can only speculate, but as children and young men the victims must have had a very strong inner life. To be abused and sullied by the time you reach puberty can never be insubstantial and must feel like the enduring nightmare never will be alleviated. Struggles manifest themselves in the minds eye before taking on a physical appearance and this must be part of the mind set relating to the conversations that victims are gearing up for at the request of lawyers and that of Celtic FC. What inner conscience and justification is being formed by the elites at Celtic FC to request such an ongoing punishment - I cannot fathom, and doubt any decent human being can. 

The victims, once dazzled by the allure of playing for their boyhood team were soon the victims of an intimidatingly powerful force and even though many complaints were made, it was the victims who were left to pick up the pieces of abused and broken lives, careers and physical shame. Now it's being requested they endure the psychological trauma all over again. What is the sliding scale of payment? What is the gradient of financial compensation? What is it based on? What is the X/Y axis on which these psychologists and lawyers for Celtic FC are basing their claims on? How can you measure the darkest period in someone's life?

And what of the ultimate gate keepers in this national shame - the SFA? They have failed not only the victims and as custodians of Scottish football, they have failed society. In these so called progressive times, it seems that the controlling dogma holds sway over impartial investigation and forensic inquiry. Scotland should have had an independent inquiry into this abuse scandal. The SFA should have been at the vanguard of such an inquiry and they should have appointed an independent body outside Scotland to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis of what happened when and by whom and why action and safeguarding didn't take place. Why hasn't the SFA applied their own psychological rigour to the individuals and institutions responsible for such reprehensible crimes? Well, when you paddle in the same moral cesspool, which is what the SFA and Celtic FC have been doing for decades, you are ideologically aligned.

The SFA could have - and had the power to - properly investigate this when the facts and evidence became irrefutable. They consciously choose not to and by demonstrable action - became a willing supporter. It's a fact that powerful institutions protect and facilitate paedophiles. The BBC and Savile is a perfect example of this. The SFA have turned a blind eye to not one but two generations of victims at Celtic Boys FC and Celtic FC. Some of the victims are aged well over 60, some didn't live long enough to see justice. The SFA are systemically corrupt and can be thought of accurately as the sporting equivalent of the BBC. I long to know that the SFA will be clinically assessed in the same way the victims are about to be as psychologists seek the truth to understand why the SFA manifestly projected collective sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies towards victims of sexual abuse to aid a member club. 

The superficial continues to haunt these men decades later. Proof if ever it were needed that even in these inverted times of everyone's 'truth', there is still such a thing as the wrong kind of victim and the wrong kind of institution being held responsible for such perverted criminality. The questioning of these men in this context is unconscionable with the added insult of being symbolically profound in the most negative way possible. Was the enduring wickedness meted out not enough? Must they be publicly humiliated yet again? 

This conspiracy sought to fracture young lives with a fixation never witnessed in Scottish sport before and never will again. The ever-present, hiding in plain sight was a daily factor of malevolence that permeated every level of Celtic Boys FC and at the mothership. The dread of young lads petrified to be alone with the 'wrong one' would have been suffocating. I say 'wrong one' because there were many. They were a paedophile ring. The assaults on innocent kids by rapacious perverts is a nauseating history that Celtic FC must never be allowed to forget and must never be able to undo through a prism of psychological questioning. 

I have written about this extensively over the years and it has always come from a critical, cultural, cynical and criminal perspective. This piece (if you haven't already pick up on it) distresses me most due to the psychological nature of it. What additional damage may be caused by this approach? Victims explain by way of a coping mechanism to edging out those things that are literally vomit inducing in reality to the point that psychological adjustment is needed to cope with such fears and to negotiate a life beyond abuse. The victims are being dragged back decades. It is morally repugnant to do so. 

Blessed with talent, these young men must have naturally been the top aggregate of their peer group. The mindset in this situation is unfathomable. Take your best percentile of talent and abuse, exhaust and demoralise it. Incredible actions. Recurring terror was a feature of Celtic Boys FC not an anomaly to assert control and induce shame. Sadistic volatility was a character and a culture at Celtic Boys FC and facilitated by Celtic FC. You can only feel heartache at the realisation for some lads that their fate would be inextricably linked to their team-mates. 

There is a reckoning coming and certain individuals know it. Judgement is heading their way and I wish the victims Godspeed, God's blessing and God's willing. 

For they are no longer the abused, abandoned and adrift.