FROM Tokyo and Moscow to Seoul and Boston, the world unites on March 17 to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, a festival of gaudy green silliness that gives councils and local businesses an effective license to print money. The Visit London website boasts that their events feature “spectacular pageantry, wonderful floats, marching bands from across the UK, sports clubs and Irish dancing schools”.

These events are aggressively, confrontationally fun and commercial. Generally speaking, they are about as politically inflammatory as Riverdance or The Corrs. It’s a business opportunity for enterprising city councils, it’s an excuse for citizens to wear daft hats and get a bit drunk, and that’s it.

Unless, that is, you happen to live in Glasgow, one of the world’s most Irish cities.

True, Glasgow City Council has actually just approved a St Patrick’s Day march. Unfortunately, rather than the gloriously shamrock-ridden affairs everyone else gets, Glasgow has approved a Loyalist parade by the Regimental Blues, who call themselves, with interesting use of capital letters, a “newly formed Pressure Group standing for The Protestant Loyalist Community of Scotland”. About 75 sorry souls will march in honour of such noble sentiments in two weeks’ time, while everyone else in the world – and even those beyond it, on the International Space Station – has fun.

In earlier years, Glasgow’s political leaders have discussed holding a proper St Patrick’s Day parade to honour the contribution of Scotland’s Irish minority to our history. The idea was angrily rejected by then Labour MP Jim Sheridan, who denied the Irish were an ethnic minority and also suggested – really – that such an event would cost taxpayers money. Tory MSP Mary Scanlon agreed: “I do not want a Scotland divided on the lines of nationalism and unionism; that is not my Scotland.”

Why are Scotland’s politicians and public institutions so uniquely squeamish on this issue? Let’s be clear: it’s not because most Glaswegians or Scots are anti-Irish. Some Scottish people are truly bigoted, and some of them occupy high places in society. However, the days where having an Irish name constituted a real barrier to getting a job in the private sector are more or less gone. There’s racism in Scotland, but the Irish very rarely take the brunt of it.

However, being Irish – or of Irish descent – is still considered a private affair, celebrated in homes or in closed-off pubs and churches. Any public recognition of the huge contribution of Irish immigration to Scotland is considered violently, aggressively political. If you mention this on social media, you’ll be inundated with comments about schools, Catholicism and the Old Firm. Believe me on this one.

But I’m not talking about any of these things. I’m simply suggesting that there should be an official recognition of the Irish community’s contribution to Scottish society. That includes a recognition of the discrimination they’ve suffered too. The very fact this all feels a bit daring is depressing.

Glasgow City Council pours money into its annual Mela, a multicultural festival linked to South Asian immigration, and people regard this as a good thing for community cohesion and a good thing for business. It’s also a really good day out. Nobody would call it inflammatory. Nobody would say it was simply inviting trouble from the far-right. Nobody is that silly.

However, a silent majority in Scotland – a liberal silent majority – still consider that assertive Irishness undermines our sense of civic national pride. There is a silent majority who believe that assertive Irishness exposes divides around ethnicity and religion and, worse, football. And ultimately both sides are as bad as each other: so many Scottish liberals think.

Let me explain how this works in practice. The other day, I encountered some anti-Irish racists on the Subway. I knew they were racists because they were stamping about singing the Famine Song: “Thousands in Glasgow alone, From Ireland they came, Brought us nothing but trouble and shame, Well the famine is over, Why don’t you go home?”

I’m proud to be from an Irish background. But in Glasgow, I know how I’m supposed to react. I’ve been trained for this, I know the drill: keep quiet, let it pass, don’t make a fuss. If you react, everyone will think you’re as bad as them.

That day, though, something snapped. I’d had enough, and I confronted the louts on their racist “banter”. By some sixth sense, they must have been able to detect my generations-old ethnic heritage, because they dismissed me as a “Fenian bitch”. Some fellow commuters tutted and looked the other way.

Looking back on that incident, I’m not angry at the louts. They are idiots who know no better. I’m angry that I felt ashamed when I raised a complaint. Because I know that a section of polite Scotland was looking on, judging me for failing to let sleeping dogs lie. By asking some guys to stop singing a genocidal song about me, I felt keenly conscious of my ethnicity and my family’s religion – even though I’m an atheist – and of being a woman, alone.

I also felt that, by simply standing up for one of Glasgow’s largest ethnic groups and their right to exist, I was in danger of being seen to “make it all worse”.

Should we just ignore them and they’ll go away? That’s the silent consequence of Scotland’s liberal consensus on the Irish question: it’s fine being Irish in the comfort of your private home. Just don’t chuck it in people’s faces – the last thing we want is to incite bigotry, after all.

While liberals cringe about football and religion, and refuse to stand up to Orangemen because it just “inflames the issue”, Scotland still has a problem with its Irish past. And it’s not going to get any better until we accept that. I’ve got a modest proposal for Glasgow’s middle-class civic leaders. Let’s celebrate our city’s Irish heritage, and be proud of it together – not be cowed by bigots.