THERE are many, many things in this little corner of Paradise which make Squinter chuckle like a chubby Benedictine monk who’s been at the fortified wine in Buckfast Abbey. Chief among them is the presumption by the Loyal Ulster media that they are the guardians of our collective morality.

Pat Cullen has to condemn this and that before she’s allowed to drink her tea from the good China. Michelle O’Neill is still on the naughty step for saying that the conflict which erupted long two decades before she was born was rendered inevitable by a confluence of circumstances. The Wolfe Tones and Kneecap must submit their playlists to the Ulster Scots Phonographic Society for clearance.

Squinter’s not saying for a moment that the men and women of our local Fourth Estate aren’t entitled to wield the considerable heft of their integrity as they go about their daily business. Having been in the job for over 30 years, Squinter has asked his fair share of questions and at times he’s even dared to presume that the people he’s questioning may have certain, shall we say, gaps in their ethical hinterland. But he was always aware that he was working for the Andytown News – a newspaper that was literally born out of the need for a media outlet that didn’t think it a good idea to take cues on right and wrong from Steve, the guy in the bar in the Europa wearing a green jumper with patches on the elbows and shoulders.

As usual, this week the broadcasters and reporters of Our Wee Country have been setting the stage for the Eleventh and the Twelfth. 

– Is the wonderful, world famous, illegal, lethal Craigyhill boney going to be bigger this year? 
– Where is the main Belfast parade and will there be ice cream and jelly?
– How many bands will there be and how hard will they kick the Pope?
– Will the Famine Song or the Billy Boys be voted Banger of the Year?

Regular readers of this column will know that Squinter is a grizzled veteran of the marching season. He’s been to Orange and Black and Purple parades right across these six blessed counties, from Belfast to Ballyclare to Ballymena. He’s watched King Billy slay King James at Scarva and he’s heard scripture quoted on the lane at Drumcree. So he’s well qualified to point out that it’s not all OAPs under check blankets in deck chairs sipping sweet tea from tartan flasks; there are images other than toddlers in oversize sunglasses playing tiny union jack drums. The same images are repeated year after year in the newspaper colour supplements and in the joyous evening round-ups on TV, but the extreme care and attention to detail that is required to make sure that the ‘Other Twelfth’ appears nowhere is a technical tour-de-force which even someone like Squinter who’s not allowed to attend because of an accident of birth can appreciate.

BBC Ulster and UTV know this as well as Squinter does. They know that while it won’t be featured in the hour-long TV features package, anti-Catholic and pro-paramilitary tunes are as likely to be played on the Twelfth as Abide With Me and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. The Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter know that while the lodge banners that appear in their happy-clappy pull-out-and-keep features depict teetotal and magnificently moustachioed Victorian Presbyterians and  men smoking clay pipes outside Dan Winter’s cottage, others will favour UVF Catholic-killers like Brian Robinson and UDA psychos like John Gregg. 

And while the bass drums captured on film and photo pay tribute to deceased former bandsmen and ex-grand pooh-bahs of the Order, others that don’t get print space or air time are shout-outs to scions of loyalist sledgehammer and knife gangs.

But if you do exercise your right as a constituent member of the free press to present loyalist jamborees as family fun days, then the least you can do is tailor the rest of your output to match. And that means not screaming in outrage when Shinners gather round an IRA memorial in South Armagh. It means not demanding that republican and nationalist politicians condemn what you demand they condemn. It doesn’t even mean that you have to provide details of republican marches or do celebratory features on the Easter parades. It just means that you acknowledge the simple truth that a media outlet which ignores displays of paramilitarism on the Twelfth is on rather shaky ground when it then claims the right to shine the interrogator’s lamp in the eyes of others.

The BBC have stopped carrying live coverage of men carrying swords and wearing white gloves marching beside tributes to men who carried guns and wore latex gloves. That’s to be welcomed, but the fact remains that the state broadcaster celebrates a Protestant-only organisation which not only has never risen to the challenge of excluding loyalist paramilitarism from its parades, but doesn’t even see the inclusion of still-extant killer gangs in their annual tableau as a challenge to begin with.