Good grief! I go away for a couple of days and have missed so much.

"Ahhh thats why BNP members support Rangers"

Brakn - by any debating standards that was pretty poor. None of the incidents alluded to by Aln Bill are fictitious. So, by your way of thinking, because Aln Bill presents a Unionist point of view it therefore follows that we all become labelled as BNP supporters and by definition, racists? Did you honestly mean, BNP supporter supports Rangers, therefore Rangers fans support BNP? Sorry, but you are not on chum. In the early 1980's the National Front tried to peddle their politics outside Ibrox by playing the Loyalist card. Apart from a few impressionable teenagers they made absolutely no headway into the Rangers support, who saw them for what they were and let it be known that they were not welcome.

It was inevitable the way this debate was going to go given the subject matter. If you didn't like the subject you were are liberty to give this thread a bodyswerve.

I think that "Guest" is up to a bit of mischief when giving Graham Spiers such a glowing reference in his unrelenting quest to eliminate bigoted chants from Ibrox. I wonder how his crusade against bigoted chants at Celtic Park is getting on. If anyone can find any reference to it in any of his work please let me know. Oh he might just give it a cursory mention so he can point to some piece he has written to claim he is unbiased, but again, if anyone finds a venomous insulting artical he has written which is directed towards Celtic supporters singing sectarian songs then paste a link for me. In fact cut it out and keep it as an investment as they are rarer than Penny Blacks!

Incidentally Guest, I was at Kilbowie Park in Clydebank at the first Rangers game following the death of Jock Stein. There was a minutes silence before kick-off and I can assure you that an immaculate silence was observed by the entire Rangers support. Stein, McGrain and Dalglish were not disliked by Rangers supporters because they were Protestants who played for Celtic (another myth), they were disliked by Rangers supporters because they played for Celtic. And thats it! No underlying agenda. They played for our biggest rivals. They were never singled out for special treatment. One can only wonder if Maurice Johnstone and Neil McCann, as Roman Catholics who played for Rangers, were subjected to additional booing and jeering by Celtic supporters, and in Johnstones case physical threats, simply because they played for Rangers or because they were seen as traitors in they eyes of a significant proportion of the Celtic support.

Aln Bill - you asked what Ireland would have been like had the Republican collusion with the Nazis dring WW2 been successful.

The Republican movement in Ireland took a view that - my enemy's enemy is my friend. Hitler and the Nazi war machine were happy enough to take advantage of the assistance given by the lighting of bonfires to direct German bombers to their targets and the refuelling and resupplying of U-Boats in Irish harbours. However, the Gaelic blood of most Irish is not, and never was Aryan. Not many Irish people display the blonde-haired blue-eyed looks that Hitler demanded of his pure race.

Similar to the Irish/British relationship, many Ukrainians and Cossacks saw the advancing German army as a force who would liberate them from Stalin's oppression and gave the Axis soldiers traditional gifts of salt and bread, cheered and threw flowers onto the Panzers as they rumbled towards Stalingrad. Little did they know what awaited them. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians their bloodline was more Russian than Germanic. The population was beaten, raped and murdered and hundreds of villages were systematically destroyed to keep the population at heel. Able bodied men were forced to work for the Nazis and of course a great many thousands went to the death camps.

Obviously we can only speculate as to what the fate of the Irish would have been if the Nazi's had won the war, but history tends to suggest that once the Nazis were in a place the local population didn't enjoy the presence of their guests very much. Crucially though, as I suggested earlier the Irish do not have German blood running through their veins and I suspect that may have sealed the fate of the Irish people.

It should also be noted that a significant number of Nazi war criminals were given refuge in Ireland after the war and never faced justice for their crimes against humanity, whilst the Irish citizens who took up arms for the Allies, to fight Facism, were spat on, abused in the street and unable to wear their uniforms when on leave.