Jimbo

On this day in 1887, in the hall of St Mary's Church on East Rose Street in Glasgow's Calton, a club was born that would soon outgrow the room. Celtic Football and Athletic Club was constituted that night, with Brother Walfrid as its driving force. The 1888 on the crest marks the year the team first took the field, beating Rangers 5-2 in a friendly that May. But the seed was sown in November 1887. Walfrid was born Andrew Kerins in Ballymote, County Sligo, in 1840. He grew up in the shadow of the Famine and at fifteen crossed to Glasgow on the coal boat, looking for work on the railways. In 1864 he joined the Marist Brothers, a teaching order. He was a teacher and a religious brother, never a priest. By 1874 he was headmaster of Sacred Heart School in Bridgeton, in the East End. What he saw there shaped everything. Irish families lived with poverty, hunger and unemployment, and too many children went without a meal. Football was never the goal. It was the means. He wanted to keep the Poor Children's Dinner Table supplied, the charity he ran to feed hungry schoolchildren, and to give a battered community something to be proud of. The blueprint was close at hand. Hibernian, founded in Edinburgh in 1875 by Canon Edward Hannan, had just won the Scottish Cup in 1887. In 1892 his own order, not the Vatican, sent him to Spitalfields in London's East End. He had taken a vow of obedience, so it was not his choice to make. There he kept organising football for poor children, and he never stopped following Celtic from afar. A telegram with the score reached him every Saturday evening. He retired to Dumfries and died there on 17 April 1915, aged 74. Celtic clinched the league title that same day. A statue stands outside Celtic Park, and a bronze bust honours him in Ballymote, unveiled in 2005.

Yet again evidence of PSNI collusion with Loyalist terrorists. On Friday 3 January 1992, a Ulster Volunteers Force (UVF) gunman walked into the McKearney family butcher's shop in Moy County Tyrone, and opened fire killing father of four Kevin McKearney behind the counter. He was 32 years old. His uncle Jack was seriously wounded and died on 4 April. A week earlier, a phone call to the family had warned that the "men in white coats" would be shot the following Friday. Butchers obviously wear white coats. Eight months later, on 6 September, the UVF struck again. Charlie and Teresa Fox, aged 63 and 54, Kevin's in-laws, were shot dead in the kitchen of their isolated farmhouse near Moy. Their children found their bodies the next morning. This week, in the High Court in Belfast, the PSNI agreed to pay undisclosed damages to settle civil actions taken by the families over alleged state collusion, and to cover their costs. The Ministry of Defence strand of the case was discontinued. A settlement is not a verdict, and nothing has been proven in open court. The Mid Ulster UVF was the same brigade at the heart of the Glenanne gang, blamed for around 120 killings in the 1970s alongside members of the RUC and UDR. Its commander from 1975, Robin "the Jackal" Jackson, was a suspected state agent and an MI5 document later named him as a suspect in the McKearney murders. He died in 1998. Another suspected agent, Alan Oliver, was linked at the inquest to the Fox killings. Intelligence reportedly warned of a threat to the McKearney shop, yet the killers came and went. The Historical Enquiries Team found no evidence of collusion, but raised other concerns. The inquests were halted in 2024 because sensitive intelligence was withheld. The government has refused a public inquiry. Kevin's widow, Bernie, says nobody will ever be held accountable.