SCOTLAND:There has been a steep rise in cases of religious hatred and religiously motivated crime in Scotland, mainly targeted against Catholics living in the west.
Official figures released yesterday revealed that the number of sectarian incidents reported to police jumped by 50 per cent, with more than 440 Scots convicted of religiously motivated verbal and physical assaults in one 18-month period.
The Catholic Church said the statistics provided proof that religious bigotry was embedded in parts of Scottish society.
Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Scottish church's senior cleric, said: "Sadly, this document shows that Catholics in Scotland are still many times more likely to be the subject of a sectarian attack than any other group. During the period of this study, Catholics were five times more likely to be the victims. This is of great concern to me."
The report from Scottish Executive statisticians is the latest in a series of initiatives to combat sectarianism. The figures analysed 726 cases between January 1st, 2004, and June 30th, 2005, where people were charged with religiously aggravated offences. I64 per cent of cases, the abuse or assaults were motivated by hatred of Catholics and, in most of the remaining cases, by hatred of Protestants. There were frequent attacks on the street or close to football matches, mostly by drunken young men.
Although many incidents took place in Glasgow, a large minority of offenders lived in different parts of Scotland.
Prof Steve Bruce of Aberdeen University, editor of the recent study Sectarianism in Scotland, said that as nearly 90 per cent of the offences involved verbal abuse and breach of the peace, this suggested that religious intolerance was a minor problem.
The figures, he said, showed that religious intolerance was evenly distributed between Protestants and Catholics, as the two-to-one ratio of incidents was roughly the same as the relative size of those populations in the west of Scotland.
"I'm pleasantly reassured that 90 per cent of these cases didn't involve violence," he said. "That puts it far, far below wife-beating, racial attacks and below gay-bashing."