Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.

But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.

Because the Mail has chosen a week when sectarian bigots in Northern Ireland burned effigies of Catholics, attached racist and homophobic banners to bonfires and hurled glass bottles at Celtic players to run this.

Whenever we’ve debated the overwhelmingly popular Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act with people who consider it the greatest affront to civil liberty ever committed by mankind, we always ask the same question and never get an answer:

“Who are the innocents whose lives you claim are being ruined by the Act?”

Nobody has ever been able to identify for us a single actual living human who has been subjected to any notable injustice by the Act, and if the Sunday Mail’s attempt today (we strongly recommend clicking the image above to enlarge and read the whole story) is the best anyone can come up with, we can understand why.

The Celtic-supporting student freely admits being guilty of the charge under which he was arrested: singing a song glorifying the IRA at a 2015 away game in Kilmarnock, apparently believing a tale of political slaughter in what’s now a foreign country 100 years ago to have some relevance to a Scottish football match.

Bizarrely the article doesn’t actually tell us whether his case ever came to court, but we do learn that he wasn’t convicted, and that being charged saw him undertake an anti-sectarianism workshop with community justice organisation Sacro, which led him to change his behaviour.

“By the end I was clear about what I’d done wrong and why. I won’t do it again.”

Sounds like a happy outcome, doesn’t it? Without the Act he’d never have been charged, never gone to the workshop, never learned what he’d done wrong and still be drunkenly bellowing sectarian hatred at bemused Kilmarnock fans now. But expressly because of the existence of the Act those things DID happen, he didn’t get a criminal record and his life (and everyone else’s) has only been affected positively.

The Mail’s strapline of “BIGOTRY CAN BE BEATEN WITHOUT LAWS”, then, sits above a story proving the exact opposite of that. It was ONLY because of the OBFA that “Paul” found himself confronting what he’d done and becoming a better person, at no discernible cost to himself. Everybody won.

The piece bemoaning that outcome tells us a lot more about the state of Scotland and its media in 2017 than we wish it did. These are dispiriting times.