Listen to the Broomloan Road stand singing on a home game on a Saturday and you can actually hear an Irish accent on the crowd! And yet some employed in our club try to play it down and one even claimed to me the other year that we only have 300 season ticket holders in Ulster!
Yet the Belfast newspaper archives show organised weekend trips to Ibrox being popular back in the 20s and 30s.
With banners honouring the players and fans bringing Northern Ireland flags and banners bearing the names of their towns, villages and counties it will be a colourful event!
This year saw the centenary of the birth of Rangers record league goal-scorer in a single season Sam English. Sam's name will live on forever within Ibrox as he was honoured with the commissioning of a silver bowl bearing his name, to be presented to Rangers top League goal scorer each season.
With ceasefires having been in place on and off for nearly 15 years and the daily background of violence having receded we've now got time to examine and celebrate Scotland's, and in particular Rangers, links with Ulster in a new light. In the past the 'Irish factor' in Old Firm relations in particular has been overshadowed by violence despite the vast and overwhelming majority of the people in Ulster, particularly the community from which Rangers draw most of their support, never voting for representatives of paramilitary groups.
I've always believed that if the club wants to tackle genuine sectarianism then it needs to support those involved in removing mistrust and prejudice rather than being dragged along by those who control anti-Protestant campaign groups and involving itself in projects which try to poison young peoples minds by giving a false view of their own history. In this regard work by the Ulster Scots Agency, amongst others, is marvelously educational and dismisses many of the myths surrounding the links between Scotland and Ireland.
Political violence has very naturally overshadowed things in the last 30 years of the Troubles. Growing up in Glasgow Ulster's problems formed the 'background music' to the Old Firm. I can recall loyalist prisoner collecting tins doing the rounds at half-time in the old Derry End for instance. Loyalist and Orange marches and the banners depicting historical figures also made me aware of our country's heritage and I started to read about history.
As time went on I became aware that what was happening in Northern Ireland was not a tribal punch-up one of whose sides I was sympathetic to simply because of an accident of birth meant I was identifying with my tribe right or wrong. No, for me the struggle was essentially about all those things which are essential for human beings to raise themselves above the beast - liberal democracy and the rules of law, frankly common decency. I saw the police and army struggling to hold back the tide of terror - and in this the Provos were always the big tiger - for all of us. The degeneracy of accepting that murder is a legitimate response to a political grievance leads to tyranny. Accept and reward that behaviour in Northern Ireland and how do you argue against the London Underground bombers?
I started doing my bit - distributing the excellent early 80s leaflets and booklets produced by the Ulster Unionist Student Organisation and speaking to groups of folks around the country. Since then I've tried to help things by speaking, selling magazines, writing and campaigning. A lot of time has gone by and although I'm very bitter about some things at least there are people alive today who would otherwise have been murdered, NI is still part of the Union and I think violence is unlikely to return on anything like the scale it was in my lifetime, and the general level of prosperity now being enjoyed throughout the Province is how it should be.
It will be 25 years this December since Edgar Graham was murdered and no-one ever did time for that, but more importantly he was a decent man who should have been allowed to live out his three score and ten - from time to time I think of what Edgar would have become and the good he would have continued to do.
Of course there are hundreds of homes across the UK and Ireland where families have been torn apart by terrorism and it's more than understandable why some people felt the need to take the law into their own hands when the state has failed them, I've felt that anger myself. However, in the long-run returning a society to some semblance of normality requires patience and in the words of former Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason 'slowly squeezing terrorism out like toothpaste.'
My view is that there was nothing so badly wrong with either Northern Ireland or the Republic that justified even one death.
But now we are able to celebrate all the good things about Ulster and Scotland - to educate the youth by making it a positive celebration and not a media caricature. That history and culture has given so much to the world - celebrate them in a positive and healthy manner.
Fly your flags and banners on Saturday and do both countries and the club proud.
Contribute to the displays -
http://www.followfollow.com/news/loadnews.asp?cid=TMNW&id=405827
Learn from history -
http://www.ulsterscotsagency.com/