It now appears to have reached the point of no return between the fans and the board and Desmond Jr’s speech may have been the breaking point
20:04, 23 Nov 2025Updated 20:11, 23 Nov 2025
The Celtic board walk out of the AGM
Ross Desmond’s astonishing scorched-earth speech at Celtic‘s AGM might just have been the moment that turned the ‘silent majority’ of fans against the board for good.
That’s the view of tonight’s Hotline Live panel as they scratched their heads at the scenes inside the incredible shareholder meeting on Friday.
There was booing, a red card display, a walkout, a walk-back-in, a 30-minute suspension and a now-infamous speech from Dermot Desmond’s son, all within the space of about an hour before Peter Lawwell finally pulled the plug on the meeting early.
It appears to have reached the point of no return between the fans and the board – with many punters feeling their ambitions, particularly in Europe, are not being matched at board level.
The relationship with the more militant sections among the Celtic fanbase, such as the Green Brigade, is even more fractured and while Desmond Jr didn’t name them when he took the flamethrower out, his scathing dig at ‘certain sections’ of the fanbase clearly pointed in that direction.
Reacting to the madness on tonight’s live show, our man Craig Swan believes that, until Desmond went to town, there was something approaching an attempt at reconciliation from the board.
But after that? Any questions that the ‘silent majority’ may be on their side went up in smoke.
He said: “There’s always been this feeling around these situations that there’s a noisy minority that make the most of these calls, and it seemed to me the intention of Ross Desmond was to point the finger at them.
“However some of the wording has spilled into what has been classed as the silent majority.
“There’s a lot of Celtic supporters who are not part of those (minority) groups. They didn’t like what they heard, and didn’t like the tone of what they heard, and I can understand that.
“Celtic have every right to defend themselves if they feel they have to. And as Michael Gannon said in his piece, there were some conciliatory tones in some of the stuff that was coming out of the video, in terms of the mistakes they’ve made.
“You can sit here and say ‘well, of course they’re going to say that, it just gets people off their backs’ – but at least it was an admission and an explanation.
“But I think the statement from Ross Desmond turned a lot of fans who you would class as the silent majority against the board. That was strong, and I think a lot of people felt very, very uncomfortable with that.”
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