Tom English: Anthony Stokes has disgraced Celtic
Celtic striker Anthony Stokes. Picture: SNS
By TOM ENGLISH
Published on Sunday 2 December 2012 00:00
ALL of his life, Anthony Stokes has been mixing in the sort of company that would stun you into silence. In his circle of friends in Dublin the Celtic striker has some of the city’s most notorious criminals, some of whom are, or were, members of the Real IRA, the terrorism splinter group that oppose the peace process in Northern Ireland and who see anybody who has turned away from violence as some kind of sell-out or “Judas”, as one of Stokes’ most hardcore mates put it a while back.
That mate was Alan Ryan, who is now dead. As he walked through the streets of north Dublin on 3 September, Ryan was shot in the body, the legs and the head by a masked gunman. Ryan was the Real IRA’s leader in Dublin, a person who had done four years in prison for his association with terrorism. He was one of the most feared crime overlords in the Irish capital, believed to be responsible for ordering the death of three of his enemies in an ongoing drugs war. Earlier this year he personally used a hacksaw to cut off the fingers of a criminal who had refused to pay him protection money. Five months before he met his end, somebody had tried to kill Ryan while he sat in the pub owned by Stokes’ father, John.
On the day of his funeral, Stokes tweeted about his mate. “Thinking of you Alan,” he said. The funeral became a circus with men in balaclavas and full paramilitary regalia complete with a volley of gunshots as his coffin left his home on the north of the city. Police officers had the place surrounded. The media were there in big numbers. Ryan was a high-profile gangster and his death was national news in Ireland.
A few weeks back, Stokes went to Dublin to attend a fundraiser for Ryan, an event that police had under surveillance given some of the people that went through the door that night. Last weekend, a female reporter in Ireland, who has bravely covered the Ryan story for some time, wrote about the fundraiser and the fact that Stokes attended it. During the week she received two death threats after some of Ryan’s sympathisers put her mobile phone number and other personal details on a website set up as a memorial to Ryan.The threat was not idle. In 1996, the fearless Sunday Independent crime reporter Veronica Guerin was shot dead in her car by a crime gang, an event that scandalised the nation and made it aware, too late, that the gangland figures in Dublin were lawless beyond anything anybody ever dared to imagine. So, when those death threats were issued last week, a Garda patrol car with armed detectives was immediately placed outside the journalist’s home.
On Friday, Celtic said they take a very dim view of Stokes’ attendance at the fundraiser and that they will deal with it internally.
Officially, they would say no more about it but we can take it as fact that the striker’s activities have gone down badly at Celtic Park. By rights, they should sack him. He has disgraced his club.
Some might say that is harsh, given that one glance at Stokes’ twitter feed shows an exchange with a bloke who says he hopes the UVF put a bullet in the footballer’s head sometime soon. But this is the world Stokes lives in and this is the treatment – utterly abhorrent and demanding of police intervention – that he has opened himself up to. Stokes’ abuser should be found and put away but what the hell was the player doing at the fundraiser in the first place?
His supporters would, no doubt, argue that he was just honouring the memory of somebody he has known since he was a kid, that it doesn’t follow that he supported Ryan in his vermin deeds and that a friend is a friend.
It’s true that Stokes was born into this, that connections to people in the underworld were part of his natural life since before he even knew how to spell the word and that it must be hard to extricate yourself from that life.
But has he even tried?
There is no evidence in anything that he has ever said that points to an awareness of a need to move on from these people.
There is a feeling that Lennon would like to say a whole lot more about this but feels, for various reasons, that he cannot. At least not yet.
There is no question but that the Celtic manager will be horrified to hear about the death threats issued to the journalist given that Lennon himself has, sadly, suffered in a similar way.
The club’s reluctance to speak out publicly should not be taken as an endorsement of Stokes but, to the watching public, it might well look that way and nobody could be criticised for thinking that Celtic have not reacted as they should have.
Again, we say: Not yet. There is a hope that they will have plenty to say in time.
You can contextualise it all you like, you can look into Stokes’ family upbringing and say: ‘Look, he never stood a chance.’
But the fact remains that a Celtic player was fraternising with crime bosses suspected of multiple murders who also had well-known links to terrorism and that the journalist who wrote about it first has been targeted by these people and last week was being protected by armed detectives camped outside her house. That’s the beginning, the end and the in-between of this saga.
Stokes has been injured all season but the damage to his ankle is as nothing compared to the damage to his reputation.
QuoteOriginally Posted by Olé Olé
) but still, that coupled with an SPL Championship and possibly a cup medal or two. I think he should stick around until the summer and then go.
Bookmarks