Celtic’s wall of silence over Remembrance Sunday shame rooted in fear of Green Brigade

A Remembrance Sunday tribute ruined in nine seconds, but it is a subsequent wall of silence from Celtic that most perturbs the rest of Scottish football.

Green Brigade boos, offensive banners and pro-IRA chants were as grimly predictable as the three points that followed for the in-form Scottish Premiership champions on Sunday.

Post-match frustrations vented by Kilmarnock manager Derek McInnes, however, betray a growing sense within the game that Celtic – and, in turn, its far-left ultra followers – are becoming unaccountable.

“I don’t get any decisions,” McInnes said in response to the “awful” show of disrespect, before adding Celtic “even decided when the minute silence stops”. “I’m not a politician or anything, but it’s our ground, it’s our minute silence,” he added.

Celtic’s Green Brigade group of radical anti-establishment campaigners have dialled up their incendiary gestures year-on-year since the group was formed in 2006. After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, pre-match commemorations were met with the banner: “If you hate the royal family clap your hands.” The group also held up pro-Palestine messages immediately after the Hamas terror attack in Israel on October 7 last year.

However, this latest act – and the willingness of the match referee to abandon Kilmarnock’s commemorations in record time – has caused as much offence as any. One banner held up in the away end declared: “From Balfour to Starmer, The crimes of the empire live on, Britain is committing genocide in Gaza.”

“These scenes were disgraceful and disrespectful,” the shadow veterans minister Edward Mountain MSP said in a statement sent to Telegraph Sport. “As a veteran, Remembrance Sunday is deeply personal to me. I find it very upsetting that some fans did not hold their silence to remember and respect those who served our country.”

‘I look to the board – are you going to do something?’

Footballing executives past and present also came forward on Monday to urge Celtic’s board to finally take the Green Brigade to task. “The more I see, the more angry I get,” wrote Roger Mitchell, a former Scottish Premier League chief executive and one-time potential Celtic suitor, on his social media account. “How can anyone, far less a social institution like a big football club, allow this to be shouted down? In terms of branding, it is beyond insane. Look, the Green Brigade are a lost cause, so I look to the board. You gonna do something?”

Behind the scenes, there is known to be willing among at least two Celtic directors to at least finally show a firmer hand against the group. Yet, nearly 48 hours after the scenes on Sunday, the club have declined to respond to all requests for comment. Any private contact with the North Curve Celtic – a fan collective that includes the Green Brigade – also appears unlikely after the group doubled down on the stunt, saying it was highlighting “the hypocrisy and shame of the British establishment and others who selectively mourn the loss of life and fail to support an armistice to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

The Green Brigade is housed in a safe standing section in area 111 of the stadium when Celtic play at home. Initially, the group had been warmly welcomed by the club’s wider fanbase, injecting much-needed atmosphere as the team adjusted to a new 60,000 capacity stadium. Raucous singing from the old Jungle standing section on the halfway line had been much missed.

However, the group of about 1,000 members has since become as suspicious of authority as any other fanbase in Britain. According to the group’s own website, the Green Brigade is “notoriously difficult for fans to join” and members often keep their identities hidden, with their faces being blurred in photos posted online.

Dealings with the club are often inevitably tense even though executives have rarely been critical in public. A ban at the end of October last year was imposed, but Celtic claimed the sanction was because of “unacceptable behaviours” leading to safety concerns rather than Palestinian flags and other anti-Israeli sentiment. They have been back on the terraces since December last year, however, and tifos calling out their various enemies have become regular again.

Antics continue while club looks the other way

Critics, however, grow angrier that the brigade’s antics carry on as the club allegedly looks the other way. One senior executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the influence of Peter Lawwell, Celtic’s powerful club chairman who sits on the European Club Association board, is a significant factor in governing bodies failing to take the club to task. No charges are anticipated over Sunday’s stunts, he points out, even for a firework that went off during the cancelled silence.

A lack of accountability for the club is also a bugbear for many journalists on the Scottish football beat. Their complaint is that the club’s dominance domestically enables them to limit the flow of information and access, with accreditation withdrawn for some wishing to cover the team.

Last year, The Athletic website was among outlets to go public with complaints, with former editor-in-chief Alex Kay-Jelski, now the BBC’s director of sport, writing in an open letter to fans: “Since we launched football in 2019, we have tried to work with the club as we have with all the other big teams in Europe but, as is their prerogative, they decided not to allow us access to press conferences, home games or their media team to check basic news stories. That made the basics of our job almost impossible.”

After events on Sunday, fans were quick to note that outlets covering the team week in week out took dramatically different approaches to reporting the pre-match disruption. The BBC omitted any quotes from McInnes attacking the disruption from its coverage, instead making only a passing reference in its live blog coverage, stating: “On Remembrance Sunday, the minute’s silence is disrupted and cut short here at Rugby Park.”

In sharp contrast, the likes of the Scottish Sun delivered stinging criticism of Celtic. “It’s not shocking any more, just tedious,” wrote Bill Leckie. “It’s self-entitled, attention-seeking rubbish that serves not a shred of purpose bar make the watching world think less of their club for doing nothing about it.”

For Celtic, meanwhile, the silence still deafens.