THE roadblocks are gone. They seem like another world to Squinter now, memory-holed in a flickering sepia-toned newsreel that seems to be from another century and not another decade.
And thank god for it. By the time the ceasefires rolled round Squinter had had enough of cheerfully confused squaddies from Birmingham with stubby pencils and spelling issues; shabbily-uniformed UDR amateurs so bigoted and hostile they quite literally weren’t allowed into Catholic areas; and sullen RUC men who always seemed to be internally ruing their life choices as they ran your P-check.
But roadblocks remain, only these days they don’t involve raised, black-gloved hands and circling torches. They involve journalists demanding to see your moral credentials before allowing you to complete your journey towards participative society.
The Old Lady of Royal Avenue, aka the Belfast Telegraph, is the patrol commander of the Belfast-based Royal Roadblock Regiment. There’s barely an area of community endeavour that doesn’t involve having your ID and movements examined by the BelTel before either being allowed to proceed or being asked to step out of the vehicle.
Take the past few days, for example…
Some ill-advised Scottish schoolteacher has had the temerity to produce a board game about the Troubles. That immediately sent the newsroom racing for the Land Rover since, of course, the game is necessarily going to involve protagonists other than those courageous chaps who ‘put their lives on the line and saved us from sliding into the abyss.’© In other words, such a board game is going to involve ‘terrorists’. And if that’s not a good reason for a roadblock, the BelTel doesn’t know what is.
The poor Scottish bloke probably thought he was on to something. War games are a crowded market and buyers and players aren’t particularly sensitive about upsetting the dead – how could they be? The game corpses come courtesy of history ancient and modern: Alexander the Great, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic. The poor Scottish bloke probably thought a new addition to the canon could prove popular – and lucrative. The poor Scottish bloke probably thought that if you can pretend to be a Nazi online without a dickybird being said about it, then there’s nobody going to have a neck thick enough to object to somebody pretending to be in the Ra. Is there? But the poor Scottish bloke hadn’t factored in the inevitability of being pulled in by the BelTel and asked: “Is this your boardgame, sir?”
Victims and survivors will be triggered by the game, we were told by a victims group. But only IRA victims and survivors, of course. It didn’t occur to the BelTel to find out whether victims and survivors of the British army might be triggered. Perhaps victims of the state don’t play board games. Perhaps they don’t read the BelTel. Perhaps they don’t do either.
And with a shouted command from the patrol commander, the clank of an armoured door and the whine of a Rolls-Royce Mk 3A engine, the roadblock was gone and the Scottish game creator had been served with an exclusion order.
But it was back in place the very next day when it emerged that the BelTel’s Most Wanted had been spotted in East Belfast. Rap trio Kneecap are booked to play the AVA music festival on the Titanic Slipways in May, and if that’s not a reason for the Royal Roadblock Regiment to go to DefCon 1, Squinter doesn’t know what is. Unionist politicians, the BelTel told us, were up on their hind legs about the gig, and while the hind-leg position is the factory setting for unionist politicians, they do manage to get a little aggressively higher when the Irish language hip-hop combo is the fury du jour.
The appearance of Kneecap will send out a message to nearby communities (ie Protestants) that they are not welcome at the festival, the story told us. Music events are no place for political statements, we were further apprised, which may come as something of a surprise to the blood-and-thunder band community. Community cohesion and good relations would be damaged, the story continued.
Having been stopped at the roadblock, it remains to be seen whether Kneecap will be allowed to proceed. What also remains to be seen is whether anyone at the BelTel will ever have their own credentials checked at their own roadblock.
This year, as in every other year, the BelTel had an entertaining and colourful, super-soaraway Twelfth of July picture supplement, both in the paper and online. But while the BelTel is fastidious in checking the bona fides of game-creators and hip-hop artists, that insistence on strict ID is sadly lacking when it comes to participants in the BelTel’s Twelfth party.
Look, there’s some lovely pictures in the BelTel of the Freeman Memorial Flute Band enjoying their big day out. Look, there they are smiling and laughing without a care in the world. Look, there they are pounding their drums and tooting their flutes as if their lives depended on it. Look, aww, there’s even a group of adorable small children in little Freeman T-shirts.
Had the BelTel been forced to stop at one of its own checkpoints before publishing the pics, we’d have found out that the Coleraine band is named after UVF man Geoffrey Freeman, who blew himself up in 1975 on his way to kill Catholics. Elsewhere in the charming and engaging picture special you can find bands who, when they’re not posing delightedly for the BelTel on the Twelfth, are marching in UVF parades – and that’s not the Peaky Blinders caps and waxed moustaches UVF, that’s the balaclava UVF sledgehammering front doors to get at the Catholics inside.
Can Squinter imagine a time when the BelTel will do a picture special of Kneecap bouncing kids off their knees, enjoying an ice-cream or wearing novelty sunglasses? No. Because their majority unionist readers – paper and online – would have a collective fainting fit if they did.
Not that the BelTel is the only media outlet whose otherwise admirable sense of appropriateness goes out the window on the Twelfth. The BBCNI has UVF bands in its extensive evening coverage and in its online picture specials even as its radio phone-in hosts require guests to pass through the Corporation’s morality checkpoint. The News Letter, naturally, is equally promiscuous about who it lets join its voluminously and unrelentingly joyful Twelfth celebrations. Even Belfast Live takes a break from its vital mission of documenting Eamonn Holmes’ every burp and fart to show us the cheerfully human side of bands who next week will be showing a rather different face to the city.
Squinter has a certain amount of sympathy for the aforementioned organs in that a fair chunk of the photographs they print are supplied by agencies and it’s highly unlikely that the BelTel, BBCNI, News Letter or Belfast Live desk jockeys tasked with putting them on the page or online have the vaguest idea of who they are. But that’s exculpatory only if we accept that the Twelfth is a kind of media Wild West where all the rules of care and consideration are thrown through the saloon swinging doors along with the misbehaving drunks.
Which brings us back to the boardgame guy and Kneecap. The BelTel – and indeed BBCNI, the News Letter and Belfast Live – can continue putting up roadblocks at the gates of society if they like, but when they wave certain vehicles through while they have others pulled in to the side then we’re entitled to look askance at their right to raise the hand or circle the torch.
Perhaps they can consider this modest column a roadblock of sorts. Granted, republicans like me were historically the target of checkpoints rather than the instigators of them, but then we’re all on a journey, aren’t we?
Even if we keep getting stopped along the way.
