It’s a rare event indeed which causes a UK wide news blackout about a football club. Rarer still when one considers the volume of media chatter generated day after day by Celtic. That in itself shows the gravity of the situation Scottish society now finds itself in.

Let us be blunt about this – Neil Lennon is being targeted by Rangers supporting thugs in a manner designed to literally terrorise, maim or kill. Why? Because he is the Celtic manager: and much more besides. Lennon is a northern Irishman, a Catholic, and as a football man, totally unwilling to bend or be bullied: something which has served him well both as player and manger.

There may also be another reason – and here one enters the realms of speculation in trying work out the reasoning of madmen. What better time could there be to heap pressure on the head of a man already under immense personal stress in the workplace than the denouement of a football season which is about to bring great joy, or dismal disappointment.

Better, in fact, for Celtic, the police, civil society at large, and politicians on all sides to stand together to make it clear what lies behind these outrages: namely a deep, visceral loathing from people on the lunatic fringe of the Rangers support. There can be no weasel words, no dodging the issue – straight talking is required and Alex Salmond is correct when he says “the message to the fanatics is this is not going to be tolerated.”

Such sentiment must be repeated and upheld elsewhere throughout the country – and not least at Ibrox if any kind of sanity is to be preserved. In this context we are indeed – Catholic or not, Celtic or not – ‘all Neil Lennon’.