Here we have a man in a position of real international leadership who supports the workers of the world, the poor, and migrants. He also has an acute awareness of the human damage being done to the natural environment.

He has spent many years among the poor in Peru. He is a mathematics graduate, speaks five languages, and has a global perspective. He has a multi-ethnic ancestry, and his parents and grandparents moved around a lot. So, like the rest of us, he’s a mongrel and a migrant.

Here in Leith, it was the immigrant Irish community that significantly boosted the Catholic church. From the early years of the 19th century there were many Irish seasonal workers on the farms of Scotland.

The Martello Tower (the Tally Toor), built in 1809 as a coastal defence during the Napoleonic Wars, has the Irish harp and ‘God save Ireland’ scratched deep into the stonework. Although a protected monument, now it is half-buried within the restricted docks area.

The census of 1841 revealed that 1 person in 26 in Leith was Irish-born. Immigration intensified during the mid-century potato famine. Many were itinerant workers, living in camps, building the canals, the railways, the bridges. The camps moved on with the work.

On the whole, they didn’t get on very well with the static Scottish population. But Leith has its own marker of much better relations. Over the door at no 2 Yardheads is a stone tablet marking the building of the ‘first artisans dwellings’, part of the Leith redevelopment scheme of 1885.

The thistle at the top says we’re in Scotland. The shamrocks on either side and the medieval Brian Boru harp are clearly a tribute to Ireland and the Irish. Maybe they built that block. Maybe the flats were first occupied by Irish families. If so, it would be the first secure accommodation many of them had ever lived in.

I don’t know of any other contemporaneous positive recognition of the Irish contribution to 19th century Scotland.

To the beleaguered Catholic population in post-Reformation Scotland, they not only bumped up the numbers, they also brought well-educated and confident priests. The Presbytery house at Stella Maris church on Constitution Street was the first house built for Catholic men in Scotland since the 16th century Reformation.

They formed their own football club in 1875. Hibernia is the Latin name for Ireland. There was a clause in the constitution requiring all players to be Irish-born and Catholic. They were chucked out of the Scottish Football Association for a year because, as it was bluntly put, ‘the SFA is for Scotchmen’. Fair enough. The clause was removed.

Poor though they were, Hibernian FC played a generous and creative part in the formation of modern club football in Scotland.

But it seems the Catholics couldn’t get away from trouble of some sort. As recently as the 1950s John Cormack, on his soapbox at the Foot of the Walk, rounded off his weekly anti-Catholic rants with ‘One, two, three, no Popery’.

And down to the 1980s the Orange Order used to assemble on Leith Links for their annual march along Duke Street, up Leith Walk, and on to the city centre. On one occasion, the minister of South Leith church Rev Jack Kellet said, his wife nipped smartly across the street between marching units, to howls of ‘Feinian bastard’. The minister’s wife!

In Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Mark Renton’s father is a lapsing Orangeman. His brother Billy joins the army and dies in Crossmaglen, well known as border bandit country during the Troubles.

Is he a ‘hero who died for his country’, as his Orange uncles describe him at the funeral, or as Renton prefers, ‘a prick in a uniform’? Readers are left to come to their own conclusions. Elsewhere in the fiction there is a brawl in the Persevere pub between Orangemen and the self-consciously Catholic/Irish Spud Murphy and his mixed-race uncle.

After the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, this has mostly faded away. But as a portrait of Leith in the 1980s, Trainspotting would be incomplete without bringing out these community tensions.

Diversity and migration are built into our world. They are healthy and creative. Suppression of them is poisonous.

We pray every blessing on the papacy of Leo XIV. May he bring peace to a troubled world.