THE local media does get rather consumed with the concerns of unionism doesn’t it? Meanwhile Irish concerns continue to be understood through the prism of unionist attitudes.

In 2017 when the late Martin McGuinness collapsed the Executive in response to Arlene Foster’s attitude to concerns about RHI, the same media gasped in surprise. They portrayed it as a bolt out of the blue, framing it entirely as a response to the Cash for Ash scandal. It took a long time for them to understand that it was the final straw after a decade of scandalous disregard for equality, human rights and Irishness. 

The current environment suggests that for many in the media nothing was learned from that. 

There is no doubt that political unionism, however, understood exactly what was going on at that time, and this past four years are its attempt to get back to its roots, telling Catholics and nationalists to know their place, portraying republicanism as criminal. 

Remember those images of Emma Little-Pengelly bouncing a sliotar on a hurl in St Paul’s GAA club in 2024? It all now seems terribly performative in the face of the snarling approach of Gordon Lyons to Casement Park, a minister who seems to think he has zero responsibility for the lack of development of this strategic project. 

Also in 2024 Paul Givan was céilí dancing in Bunscoil Aodha Rua in Tyrone, telling us all that we are on shared journey with An Ghaeilge. It’s a far cry from the hostile treatment of Irish language Commissioner Pól Deeds by the DUP's Phillip Brett at that infamous TEO Committee hearing.

However, most of the broadcast media seem blind to the resumed overt and coordinated tactics of every party in unionism to perform equality while simultaneously attacking any meaningful expression of Irishness or the legitimacy of our nationhood. It’s like Queen Victoria having an Irish wolfhound parading at Buckingham Palace while peasants starve in Mayo. Irishness must know its place, m’lady.

In October 2026 the DUP is nakedly attempting to cast Irish nationalism and republicanism as the common scoundrel in order to protect its seats in the 2027 Assembly election. The TUV plays ball with this, as does, increasingly, the UUP. However, the BBC in particular has chosen, as always, to portray this as “both sides” arguing, when it's not hosting another unionist navel-gazing chat.

There has been no serious moment when the real and expressed experiences, fears and trauma of the nationalist and republican community caused by the Orange applications to march in Drumcree and the Ormeau Road have been explored in dedicated broadcast programmes. Instead, what we are subject to, ad nauseam, is what side of the political bed Carla Lockhart is getting out of this morning. It might tear the life out of you, if you didn’t realise how increasingly irrelevant it is.

The Assembly might well keep teetering until May, lurching from crisis to crisis, so marginal unionist seats stay red, white and blue. It might even collapse – again. Yes, we are in the middle of a manufactured moment of unionist outrage – again. And most of the media focus on that - again.

But all of it is in response to the confident demand for all-island Irish nationhood, a demand fuelled by political unionism’s political bankruptcy. And when change comes, the media will ask, “Where did that come from?” Again.