AFTER a short pause for rest and rearmament, the attack on the Casement lines from the BBCNI salient has recommenced. In the wake of a punishing weekend barrage designed to soften up the GAA defences, British Broadcasting troops again went over the top on Monday morning on the sound of the whistle from the Officer Commanding, Ormeau Avenue Quadrant, and later attacks were pressed from a range of positions across the BBCNI operational area.

Personally speaking, Squinter’s war-weary already as he listens to the BBCNI World Service on his wireless at the scullery table. And it’s not the artillery shells launched over the phone by Norman from Bangor that have exhausted him and made him ready for a Queen Camilla-style break in the sun, but the draining familiarity of BBCNI’s union-friendly coverage. There are people who have been hospitalised over the years with boredom after reading the latest of Squinter’s print and social media lamentations about the local Beeb and its coverage of politics from a unionist baseline as well as its embrace of basic unionist assumptions across the broad range of its output.

Just as the BBCNI reflects first and foremost the mainstream unionist position that Casement is a political and social bugbear that needs fumigated, so examples of the state-licensed broadcaster cleaving to pro-union orthdoxy abound elsewhere, nowhere more so than in its coverage of a  story some years back about fin-de-guerre life in the Bandit Country (©Loyal Ulster) of South Armagh. Herewith a case study which Squinter held up at the time as an exemplar of Ormeau Avenue Big House journalism.

August 2021 and a PSNI review on policing in South Armagh recommended the closure of Crossmaglen  police station. (For the record, we should pause here to reflect on the fact that the PSNI HQ in Crossmaglen is a police station in much the same way that the Russian Navy’s Kirov-class destroyers are the swans at the Pickie Pool in Bangor.)

The review said that the people of South Armagh viewed the barracks as “militaristic” (not surprising, given that it’s quite literally a bombproof from ground and  air). It also recommended that police stop carrying G36 assault rifles to help old ladies across the road. This will have come as a particular  blow to then Chief Constable Simon Byrne, who famously had his picture taken with a group of constables doing  Rambo impressions at the barrack gates. To his credit, Mr Byrne had persuaded the officers to remove the  headbands and the Bowie knives from between their teeth before the photo.

The report also found that the local community had “significant trust and confidence issues” with local policing – and it wouldn’t have taken Mr Byrne to be a Connect 4 expert to link the chasm between residents and the police with the Chief Constable’s antics for the camera. In response to the report, Mr Byrne said the barracks was “a relic of the past” and had “no place in modern policing”.

Now how might a story like that be covered? A chat with locals in the town square on  how they feel about having an Afghanistan-style forward operating base outside their front doors? Talk to reps about the difficulty of attracting investment to a garrison town? Ask residents how they feel about being living with helicopters and high-tech weapons quarter of a century after the ceasefire?

Well, because this is Bandit Count... sorry, South Armagh, BBC Ulster went straight to that acknowledged expert on republican border communities, Lagan Valley MP and DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who, not surprisingly, had Our Boys firmly to the front of his mind. “It’s a politically naive document,” he told the Beeb, adding: “The recommendations in this report would make Patten blush.” As for the people living in the shadow of the fortified monstrosity, well... Sir Jeff’s priorities lay elsewhere.  He said the review was a doorway to the “creation of all-Ireland policing structures” and dismissed the review as “politically unacceptable”.

Coming up to three years later, Fort Crossmaglen remains and the town still has more guns on display than the Klondike at the height of the Gold Rush. Might that be anything to do with the fact that the biggest and most influential news outlet in these here parts let its readers and the Chief Constable know that it considered the leader of Loyal Ulster to be its primary concern when it comes to daily life in the rolling hills of South Armagh?

Perhaps. And if Casement remains derelict when the Euros kick off in June 2028, will the BBCNI’s shrill concern for the public purse evinced by its coverage – concern coincidentally shared by one Sir Jeffrey Donaldson – have proved a key factor in the outcome of the Casement conflict?