THERE’S a lesson to be learnt from the unedifying weekend episode in the County Derry village of Tobermore when a bilingual sign was removed from a local park by people unhappy with the Irish language in ‘their’ locality.

And that lesson is not that a DUP councillor is happy to describe Tobermore as a “Protestant village” or that certain of its residents can’t countenance the thought of a society in which different cultures and traditions can exist and prosper beside each other. That lesson is that the unionist media continues to facilitate and enable the hostility of the DUP and others towards the Irish language and Irish culture.

The incident was widely reported not as a crime – which it was – but as the act of a concerned/frustrated/ angry community taking matters into its own hands. The framing of the story in this way, combined with a complete failure to question the DUP rep on the illegality of events in the village, was yet another illustration of the baseline unionist assumptions from which the vast majority of the media in the North proceeds.

The remarkable amount of coverage given to what was by any standard a minor incident (though freighted with current and historical cultural baggage) was particularly noticeable given that while the Tobermore sign was being dug up and stolen, roaming gangs of rival masked UDA men had virtually commandeered the town of Newtownards in pursuance of a bitter and violent feud over drugs and control. Huge PSNI resources were deployed, both on the ground and in the air, but the police were still unable to stop homes being attacked and they were reduced to looking on as UDA men guarded homes that they believed in danger of attack from their fellow thugs.

Newtownards has for years been the scene of deadly intra-loyalist rivalries and at times it appears that the police have all but ceded control to the various factions of the UDA currently seeking to expel each other in a battle for supremacy in the multi-million drugs trade. But the most cursory glance at the unionist media’s priorities this week show clearly that the bogus fears of a handful of hardline unionists in a tiny village were of more interest than loyalist paramilitary violence convulsing a major Belfast dormitory town.

Meanwhile, the DUP says it will continue to “engage constructively” with the Loyalist Community Group, an umbrella group representing loyalist paramilitary groups, including the feuding UDA. It is a source of some frustration that while in times of difficulty for unionism the DUP are happy to discuss political developments which affect us all as well as our families, friends and neighbours with a deadly and illegal paramilitary gang, they lack the same urgency when it comes to engaging with the UDA on its unending criminality. For if they were engaging with the UDA on their parasitical activities at the same time as they’re discussing politics with them, we might expect to see things get better instead of worse.