IS there a victim of the IRA that the Loyal Ulster media hasn’t asked to comment on that Olympics ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ clip? At times it seems like there isn’t.
This year the annual Wolfe Tones hysterics lacked… well… hysteria. Was that because it was the last Féile hurrah for the slightly comical oul’ lads with their Celtic scarves and their tricolours? Possibly, because clearly the core enthusiasm for Celtic Symphony fury has not abated one iota – in fact, the keepers of the Carsonian flame seemed absolutely delighted to have found another point of attack when the BBC’s Aoife Moore cut short her report from Dublin when a crowd of schoolkids behind her began belting out the popular refrain. So delighted, in fact, that when a more worrying incident took place at the far end of the island at around the same time it was almost entirely ignored. (Worrying, that is, if you can find it within yourself to give a fying fluck about such things.)
What happened? Well, a loyalist band took over the bar at Coleraine FC, an Irish Premier League team, to bang out a clatter of anti-Catholic singalong classics, much to the delight of the half-cut patrons. You don’t have to be a newsroom veteran to understand that for a Belfast-based news organisation, a bar at a football ground on the buckle of the Bible Belt being taken over by a crowd of hairy-arsed adults singing about how much they hate the Pope and his priests and nuns is objectively a bigger story than a handful of Dublin kids singing a song about the Ra in a city way down there out of which the Ra kicked the Brits. But that presupposes that newsworthiness sets the agenda and not the personal politics of the people writing the stories and doing the broadcasts. The Coleraine story was dog bites man; the Dublin story was Snoop Dogg bites Superman.
For loyalism and unionism, the trouble with the IRA promising to go away was that the promise was kept. It wouldn't take much for an IRA story to hit the headlines in this former Protestant Paradise, but such is the comprehensiveness of the Hucklebucks’ withdrawal from the stage that the IRA correspondents – once busier than Sandy Row lawyers after a mosque picket – are left pining for the old days and rearranging the paragraphs from opinion pieces they first wrote two decades ago.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. We were supposed to be having ceasefire breaches at every fart’s end: senior Chucks robbing post offices to keep the Provo coffers topped up; kneecaps being blown off and bones getting baseball-batted; bloody personal vendettas erupting on the streets; intelligence teams stalking future victims. Didn’t happen. Don’t take my word for it, consult Professor Google and see what dangers to the peace process the IRA has posed in the past ten or 15 years and you’ll find your answer in the pages and on the airwaves of bereft media outlets once devoted to documenting the Hucklebucks’ every blood-soaked outrage.
Which means that young people – on the rare occasions that they consider the most recent phase of the conflict here – are making their own minds up about what went on. And a hell of a lot of them have concluded that – you know what? – Michelle O’Neill might just have had a point when she said two years ago that there was “no alternative” to the IRA thinking enough was enough at the start of the 70s.
That doesn’t sit well with those in the media having to work to fill all those IRA-shaped empty spaces. And so the target is no longer those from West Belfast who slid incendiary cassettes into the pockets of jackets in C&A; those from Coalisland who bolted heavy machine-guns to the floor of flatbed trucks; or those from Crossmaglen who filled milk churns with non-dairy products. The target is those bloody kids singing IRA songs who wouldn’t be singing IRA songs if only they knew what we in these newsrooms know.
Ultimately, every Ooh, ah, up the Ra convulsion is an admission of failure on the part of the still faithful fourth estate: A failure to convince posterity that 30 years of morning and evening headlines and breakfast and teatime news should be the official record. Not only is it not the official record, to the young people at Féile or the Electric Picnic, it doesn’t even exist.
Those blokes called Nigel and Steve in the Europa wearing the green jumpers with patches on the shoulders and elbows knew how to fill a newspaper column or a news bulletin in the 70s and 80s as well as they knew how to set up the drinks, but they didn’t see TikTok coming. And now that it’s here, and because you can't send a UDA proxy gang round to shoot TikTok in its bed, most of us are deciding to sing our own songs.
