Sectarianism and racism: response to the consultation on the report of the cross-party working group on religious hatred, Submitted to the Scottish Executive

Overall our main concerns are an apparently confused view of how to define sectarianism, leading to confusion in how to tackle the problem. This is illustrated in particular by the very title of the report 'tackling religious hatred'. It seems to us that viewing this narrowly as a question of religion hinders rather than helps us to recognise and deal with the problem. The key to this seems to us the lack of recognition of the fact that there is a significant ethnic minority population of people of Irish origin living in Scotland. It is this community which bears the brunt of sectarianism. The report does not recognise this with any clarity and this is a serious concern. Until this is recognised and clearly identified there is little chance that 'sectarianism' will be eradicated from Scottish society.