Donald Findlay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald Findlay QC, (born March 17, 1951) is a well-known senior advocate and Queen's Counsel in Scotland. He has also held positions as a vice chairman of Rangers Football Club and twice Rector of the University of St Andrews.

He is well known for a distinctive style of dress and manner, particularly the smoking of a pipe, as well as his staunch support for Unionism in Scotland and the Conservative Party. He has faced some controversy over several incidents where he sang songs or told jokes that were considered to be sectarian.^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]

1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Controversies
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Personal life

Donald Findlay was born on the March 17, 1951 in Cowdenbeath, Fife. He was subsequently educated at Harris Academy in Dundee, and later at the University of Dundee and at the University of Glasgow. His academic links with the University of St Andrews (of which Dundee was once part) saw him elected as Lord Rector in 1993 and again in 1996. After his retirement from this position, he took the position of Chancellor of the University's Strafford Club. St Andrews, allegedly, dropped plans to award him an honorary degree after one of his controversial outbursts. At this time, he was also noted to be suffering from severe depression and later revealed that he had contemplated suicide^[6].

Findlay is also an atheist, and has never married ^[7].

[edit] Career

A combination of high-profile controversies, acute legal skills and a well-cultivated image has generated Findlay a lot of coverage in the Scottish press in recent years and he now has one of the highest legal profiles in Scotland and widely considered to be Scotland's premier advocate ^[8]. He took silk, becoming a Queen's Counsel in 1988^[9], but his behaviour has been censured by the Faculty of Advocates on more than one occasion (see below). He is due to face a full disciplinary hearing of the Faculty of Advocates in June 2007.^[10] He has served as a defence lawyer in many high-profile murder cases including Jodi Jones, Mark Scott and the Kriss Donald murder trials. He represented Peter Tobin, the murderer of Angelika Kluk in the so-called "body in the church" case^[11]. Findlay is a member of the Mackinnon stables.

At present, he is also a noted after-dinner speaker^[12] and in 1997 was a high profile campaigner on behalf of the Think Twice campaign which supported a double-no vote in the Scottish devolution referendum.

In 2006 he was a defence counsel in the trial of Mohammed Atif Siddique, which saw the youth sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for collecting and sharing online information about terrorists.

[edit] Controversies

Findlay is an atheist, but is mostly noted in Scotland for his support of Rangers, a nominally Protestant team, and for engaging in controversial behaviour that has been widely interpreted as being anti-Catholic in nature.^[13] ^[14] ^[15] ^[16] ^[17] ^[18]

In 1999 he was filmed singing sectarian songs [1] (The Billy Boys) at an event organised by a Rangers Supporters Club. For his role in this event, Findlay was forced to resign from the Board of Rangers FC. After this incident Findlay admitted to feeling so pursued by the media portrayal of him that he had considered suicide.^[19]^[20]

In May 2005, shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II, while speaking at Larne Rangers Social Club in Northern Ireland he said "It's very smoky in here tonight - has another fucking Pope died?". The Scotsman reported that he went on to tell a vulgar joke about a nun, while The Herald reported that his routine was "alleged to have been littered with obscenities and jokes about Catholics" although Findlay has stated that he also made jokes about Protestantism and about the Protestant clergyman and politician Ian Paisley.^[21] It is believed that the Faculty of Advocates passed a vote of no confidence on him following the controversy over his comments.^[22] He was also fined £3,500 by the Faculty of Advocates.

Findlay was cleared of an allegation of misconduct before the Faculty of Advocates in 2007^[23] following a complaint regarding his conduct at the Rangers Supporters Club in Larne and contribution to a book entitled How Soccer Explains The World - An Unlikely Theory Of Globalisation ^[24]