DONALD Findlay, QC, the former vice-chairman of Rangers Football club, a man raised to an eminent position in society, has seen in person the devastating consequences of sectarian violence. In 1996, in his capacity as a Queen's Counsel, he defended Jason Campbell, the accused murderer of Mark Scott, 16. Mark, my friend, had just watched his favourite team Celtic beat Partick Thistle, and was walking through Bridgeton in a large crowd of fellow Celtic supporters on their way into the centre of Glasgow.

Campbell, a notorious Rangers fan, randomly selected Mark as his victim, and came from behind him and slit his throat. Mark died on the street as he tried to stem the flow of blood pumping from his body. The sectarian motive for the attack was later confirmed when Campbell unsuccessfully tried to secure a transfer to the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, supposedly as a political prisoner.

The following year Findlay also defended Thomas Longstaff, a close friend of Campbell, accused of the attempted murder of another young Celtic fan, in an attack that was described by Detective Sergeant Shaw - the man leading the hunt - as a ''carbon copy'' of the previous murder.

Findlay, a devout Rangers fan himself, has therefore seen the extremes to which this fanaticism swings. He has seen the consequences of those who act upon this entrenched tribal hatred. He has read the case notes on the murder of Mark Scott, my friend, the 16-year-old Glasgow Academy schoolboy, who walked down the wrong street at the wrong time, supporting the wrong football team. And yet in an atmosphere of euphoric celebrations over a successful season's football, he can still stand up and chant sectarian songs, that have offensive, threatening, anti-Catholic lyrics:

''We're up to our knees in Fenian

blood,

Surrender or you'll die,

We're the Bridgeton Boys.''

It was a ''Bridgeton Boy'' who murdered Mark, and it was on a Bridgeton street that Mark stumbled and finally fell. I take extreme offence at the language of such bigoted songs, and I take extreme offence at the actions of Donald Findlay, QC. One has to wonder how an intelligent man such as he, holding such anti-social prejudices, can represent the law in an honourable and respectful fashion.

As for myself, I am left now, in the wake of Findlay's revelations and last weekend's spree of violence, with the sick hollow emptiness that once was anger but now is just futility. The rational mind tries to but cannot comprehend such mindless violence. Sectarianism provides a superficial reason, but it is no excuse. What cost shall we continue to pay for the liberty to chant such violent, anti-social, anachronistic lyrics, in response to a game of football?

The grumblings of this swollen underbelly of a bigoted sub-society are becoming louder and more frequent. Men such as Donald Findlay must therefore stop feeding it the old sectarian chants and Protestant anthems, which this thuggish and most violent element choose to digest literally.

In a week in which we bear witness to the ongoing agony of the families of the IRA victims, who have not yet been granted the final dignity of recovering their bodies, our attention should focus on the latest victims to be added to this history of hatred.

As a Scottish student studying in England, I am aware of the general ignorance south of the Border of the prevalent problems of sectarianism, which has particularly blighted my home city, Glasgow, in recent years. My voice is by no means an objective one, however, tainted as it is by the loss of a close friend three-and-a-half years ago, at the hands of a mindless sectarian bigot. None the less in the light of recent events and the general apathy of the English tabloids to record the unacceptable levels of sectarian violence in Glasgow, it is a voice that now demands and warrants a hearing.

On Saturday night, Donald Findlay, QC, the then vice-chairman of Rangers Football club, was attending a private party alongside players and fans, to celebrate his team's triumphant season. During the course of the celebrations Findlay sang a medley of Protestant anthems which featured anti-Catholic lyrics. The significance of such an act can only really be appreciated if one fully considers the backdrop of hatred and violence that so forms the history of this society and continues to shape and blight the present.

It has been argued in recent years that with so much control of Scottish industry passing out of local hands, those who wanted to be bigots no longer had the power to reward their own. Discrimination at work was therefore rare. Moreover the political associations that used to divide across confessional lines are, in the modern political context of Scotland, irrelevant.

Cardinal Winning seemed to ally Catholic long-standing fears about an independent Scotland last year, when he announced his belief that Scottish nationalism represented a modern future that could embrace all of its citizens irrespective of ethnicity or blood-lines. It seemed therefore that with its major economic and political underpinnings removed, sectarianism was a spent force.

Unfortunately the later half of the '90s has seen sectarianism surface in a new and more gratuitously violent form. Its centuries-old tribal roots remain intact, nourished each week by the sectarian chants and post-pub banter that are so infused in both the working and middle-class west of Scotland culture. But what in this arena seems like a controlled means of satisfying man's tribal instincts to belong - identified as they are by who they are not - seems, on the other hand, to trigger, or at least to provide some sort of sanction for, the violent actions of a sub-working-class section of society.

Perhaps these murderous assaults would have taken on another form, had there not been the pretext for violence in the songs that record a history of hatred. The fact remains though that the pretext, whether or not it be the civilised rational pretext which most adhere to, is there and ready for this violent sub-society to exploit.

Cara Henderson,

St Hugh's College, St Margarets Road, Oxford. June 2.