Like most supporters these days I try to avoid consciously thinking about all things Celtic as it tends to bring a dark cloud over my head which is not easily cleared. However as I sat watching Sky Sports Soccer Special on Tuesday night it became impossible to cast the disgraceful and shambolic situation our incumbent custodians have created at this once great club to the shadows of my mind.

The gloom began with news filtering through that Jos Hooiveld had just scored his third goal of the season to put Southampton two goals in front of Peterborough and en-route to increasing their lead at the summit of the competitive Championship table.  By all accounts he has formed a formidable partnership with fellow central defender Jose Fonte and is already stating he wants to extend his loan spell beyond January and, quite frankly, you cannot blame him.  As my mind wandered back to some of the horror shows the Celtic defence has conjured up this season I pondered on why this guy had been allowed to leave on loan.  Yes sure he had suffered from a series of niggling injuries that had disrupted his availability and prevented him from getting a consistent run in the team, but did our manager and coaching staff really think we had such a multitude of riches up our sleeves that we could discount him as having something to contribute?  Or an alternative chain of thought is that could word have come down from above that the squad needed trimming so get rid?  I hypothesise as these are questions I cannot answer but whatever the truth may be his loan move is symptomatic of our current issues.  Bad decision after bad decision based on wrong priorities.

As the bottle of Rioja began to take a proper hammering another goalflash appeared on Sky Sports 1.  Barry Robson had equalised for Boro at Doncaster with a 20 yard drive into the bottom corner.  This story was to develop further with him also scoring a penalty to seal the victory and close the gap on 2nd placed West Ham to one point.  If the Hooiveld question had gently prodded at my feelings of angst I was now resigned to the fact that my Celtic thought free evening was well and truly banished.  Robson was a player I admired greatly and was sorry to see leave.  A real roll his sleeves up type of player with a sweet left foot.  What he lacked in pace he made up for in guile, and in summary he was a winner.  The night he was hooked against Rangers at Parkhead in a must win game was the night I finally gave up on Strachan as a manager that I could trust.  As it transpired Hesselink scored a last minute winner so his substitution could be hailed as a tactical masterstroke but in my usual cynical style I put it down to luck as for me Robson was one of the most influential players on the pitch that night.  The jeers that rang around the stadium as he left the field would suggest I was not alone in those thoughts.  Sipping away on my tasty glass of Spanish I was now trying to remind myself why Barry had been allowed to leave the club.  Again I did not have the answer but I recalled my suspicions at the time that he was used to broker the deal to offload Willo Flood and Chris Killen and that Mr. CEO was pivotal in that whole process, but again this was just my hypothesis.  On whether it was ultimately a bad decision or a good decision I’ll let you be the judge but I for one would not be disappointed if Barry Robson was taking to the pitch for us at Fir Park this Sunday in place of…..well take your pick.

As I approached the bottom of the bottle the worst of the storm was over.  However a pal of mine was obviously not aware of this as he reminded me of the situation that led to the demise of another old favourite of mine, Bobo Balde.  Ostracised from the squad like someone who had committed a heinous crime against the club, the only problem being no-one was aware of what that crime actually was. Ironically in an act of desperation he was recalled for a game at Tannadice where the team achieved their first clean sheet away from home in 35 attempts (and no folks that is not a typo). This return was temporary and Bobo duly resumed training with the reserves until his £28,000 per week contract expired.  This was a situation that infuriated me at the time and still rankles to this day. A little less hypothesis is required in this case as Bobo was quoted as saying “I don’t want to be at a club where I am not wanted, but I want to make clear it is rubbish to say I am just taking the money… I have been told that I am not in the top two defenders and that I am down to sixth on the list. The manager and Peter (Lawwell, Chief Executive) told me this”.  So yes there may have been a clash of personality with the manager but there it was out in the open that Mr. CEO was meddling in football affairs a little more than his remit should require. I do not believe for one second that financial matters were not deemed more important than football matters in this whole sad and ugly episode.  Good decision?

So where I am going with this Rioja induced ramble?  Simply that Peter Lawwell’s time as CEO of Celtic PLC is up.  To use his own words “the key Company objective remains football success” and on this objective he has failed miserably. His decision to defer, not reject, his past two bonus awards is basically an admission of this fact.  Well in my humble opinion Celtic FC is too important to too many people to allow this failure to continue.  Will something be done about this?  Of course it won’t.  Good decision, bad decision, you decide.

I’ve never been lucky. I’ve never won a couple of numbers on the lottery. I don’t do it anymore. It a tax on dreams. I’ve never won any raffles and I’ve never won on any tips on horses that everyone else seems to win with. I left Ireland in 1996 to try my luck in Glasgow. That’s in Scotland where the weather is worse than Ireland.

No sooner had I stepped off the boat that a strange breed of animal appeared on our lovely little island. She went by the name of “The Celtic Tiger” and she was a little beauty.

The Irish have been leaving Ireland since we existed. Its in our DNA like some predetermination phenomena. Sometimes it was because we running from oppression, famine or just impoverishment. When I left, we got rich.

Back then Ireland was a completely different landscape. Dublin had just won the All Ireland and Sky Sports was only the preserve of one of your local pubs. The Ford Cortina was the most popular car in Ireland and Manchester Utd wasn’t the 33rd county. Mobile phones were a curiosity, a brick you had seen in Gordan Gekko’s hand in the movies and the internet didn’t exist. The churches were packed on a Sunday morning and although we suspected our politicians were probably crooks we didn’t know it for a fact. I’m not getting wide eyed about these times at all. It wasn’t great. Most of the older kids on our street had disappeared on Transatlantic airplanes only to be seen again every second Christmas. Our parents were not poor but they were not wealthy. They struggled with ESB bills and uncontrollable interest rates for their home loans. Pitch and putt courses were filled everyday with middle aged men with no jobs. The daily roll call of death and destruction that we saw on our TVs from the North was depressing. But it might as well have been a million miles away. Our Taoiseach of the day would condemn the violence daily.

Lucky me, it all changed as soon as I left. When I came back to visit, the cars were BMW X5s and Mercedes. Everyone’s house was worth a million quid and everyone had some top job working for Google or Intel or somewhere equally Multi-national. The old Dublin pubs became wine bars. Temple Bar was transformed from a no-go area, where we previously only ventured to try to served a couple of pints of Harp when we were 15, into the world Mecca for drinking connoisseurs. Roads were changed and moved and re-routed and then tolled. You could take a wrong turn on some fancy new motorway and ten minutes later you would be in Wexford. Then came the Euro. You couldn’t roll out of bed without having to pay someone a tenner. But it was fine because there was plenty to go around. It was like walking on some Irish moon. All was changed, utterly, as the great man said.

We were held up worldwide as a shining example of what a country could do if it kicked itself in its proverbial ass. Its was cool to be Irish and oh how we loved ourselves for it. “Releasing Equity” became the new National Sport. John Mc Cain’s “Joe The Plumber” lived in Ireland too. Except in Ireland, he was actually having great fun and had ten fellas from some country in Eastern Europe working for him. He had two homes in some far flung land that he had not learned about in school. He never actually visited these homes because he had no time as he was busy working, spending time in his golf course or skiing. The Transatlantic flights leaving Dublin airport were not fully of hopeful emigrants anymore but were now full of eager shoppers going to New York City for the weekend.

We heard Martin Mc Guinness for the first time. He had been on the television for a couple of years but now there was an end to the violence. The Irish had stopped killing one another and we were being feted in the White House. The peace process was our Berlin Wall crumbling We realised that we were a part of the problem-and the solution.

When I came home on these frequent visits I was truly astonished how much things were changing almost weekly. Every time I boarded a flight to leave Ireland again I was bemused as every nationality poured through the gates going the other way. I felt like the most stupid emigrant in history as the plane lifted off from Dublin.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Dublin won the All-Ireland again last week. But the emigrant planes are taking off again. The Celtic Tiger, in true Irish tradition, has emigrated too. She’s packed off to Asia or China or somewhere else. She isn’t coming back.

Now I sense a moment of inertia. We no longer see the Church as a moral compass but more like a bunch of cranks and shockingly, criminals. Our captains of industry now are sitting in international doorways with their begging bowls. Our politicians have got even greyer and cannot hide behind the convenient cloak of our country’s wealth like they used to. They’ve been exposed as corrupt and they can no longer hide their cash with a bookie in Cheltenham. There is no cash.

But the Presidential election has reignited something within us as a nation. And its not a debate about the colour of our money. Its a debate about who we are and where we are going. There are those who find Martin Mc Guinness as an opportunist. That is missing the point. Martin Mc Guinness is not just standing as another candidate. Martin Mc Guinness is standing before us as symbol of unity. A reason why, despite the mistakes of our past, we can be better. If nothing else he has become the catalyst for a national conversation. We all have made our own mistakes and we are all responsible for them, individually and collectively. I hope that we can have the courage to want to change ourselves. I left Ireland in 1996. In my head I’m still there. I hope at the end of October that it is Martin Mc Guinness who is lighting the candle in the little window of Aras an Uachtarain for stupid emigrants like me.