Bin Laden is history, but which version?

RADIO REVIEW:IF JOURNALISM IS the first draft of history – a notion under pressure in an era of Twitter updates and rolling online content – then radio is its raucous academic symposium. The airwaves are the proving grounds where different interpretations of a story are put to the test early on. But this means it can be difficult to achieve a coherent snapshot for posterity, as this week's coverage of Osama bin Laden's killing showed.

Tuesday’s edition of

Morning Ireland

(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) was a case in point. At that stage the fact that bin Laden had been unarmed had not emerged, but already the significance of the event was a matter of perception. The writer Colm Tóibín, who visited Ground Zero in New York after the news broke, felt it was an important moment, in American terms at least.

Interviewed by Cathal Mac Coille, Tóibín spoke of the effusive and at times jingoistic mood of the night. Very few people over 25 were there, with most apparently having arrived from bars. It was a good-humoured but odd atmosphere, the writer said, given it was about the killing of a man.

But that killing would have a big impact in the US, Tóibín said. The operation had represented a risk for Obama – after all, the botched rescue of American hostages in Iran in 1980 had scuppered Jimmy Carter’s re-election – but now he had a military success to bolster him amid his political travails.

It was a typically perceptive vignette from Tóibín, only slightly thrown off course by Mac Coille wondering whether such jubilation was “only a fleeting moment”. But it told just one side of the story. Speaking to Aine Lawlor on the same programme, Rula Amin, a journalist with Al Jazeera TV news, presented a more sober perspective.

For many in the Arab world, Amin said, bin Laden had been irrelevant since the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Where al-Qaeda once was the only channel of protest for disaffected local populations, now they used people power, taking to the streets to effect change. But Amin also said that for many Arabs bin Laden’s death showed up a contradiction between the US’s promotion of democratic values in other countries and its own use of lethal force when it was convenient.

Having ceased to be a major influence in the Middle East, bin Laden could again prove troublesome in death.

All in all, Morning Irelandshowed how flexible a medium radio is for newsrooms with limited resources. By looking beyond the usual voices – such as Robert Fisk of the Independent, who last week was on both The John Murray Show(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) and Today with Pat Kenny(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) – and showing imagination the news programme provided analysis that was diverse and intriguing. And if the contributors did not always conform to neat expectations – Amin was wary when Lawlor aired the platitude that Facebook and Twitter drove the Arab revolutions – they seemed the more insightful for that.

Given that momentous events can resonate for years afterwards, any assessment is tricky, even decades on. Marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, Pat Kenny discussed the hunger strikes and their legacy with the ex-IRA prisoner (and surviving hunger striker) Laurence McKeown, the former Sinn Féin spokesman Danny Morrison and the journalist Eamonn Mallie. All agreed that the H-Block protest was seismic in its effects, not just because of the death toll – which extended far beyond 10 hunger strikers – but for how it changed the political landscape of the North, though few at the time could have predicted the outcome.

For one who had been through the dirty protest (or “no-wash protest”, as the IRA apparently termed it) as well as 70 days of refusing food, McKeown spoke with near-clinical detachment about his experiences. The death of Sands, he said, was “a very saddening event”. But he was in no doubt about the result: “I believe the hunger strike was a victory in greater context.”

By nudging republicans into the electoral process – Sands was elected MP while on hunger strike – the protest pointed to the constitutional route that Sinn Féin would ultimately take. Morrison agreed. There was a “direct link” between Sands’s election and “where we are now”. Before the hunger strikes, electoral politics were a no-go area for republicans, redolent of compromise and bitter factional splits.

For all the violence and fatalities, the whole tragic event could be seen as having an unforeseen positive effect, leading to the peace process and, even more improbably, the sight of Sinn Féin and the DUP sharing power.

But some of Morrison’s other assertions looked more like convenient rewrites of history, such as his claim that the Troubles would never have happened if the Belfast Agreement had been signed in 1969.

Who is to say that radical republicans, unaware of the maelstrom to come, would not have rejected such a solution as a sell-out? After all, Sands and his fellow hunger strikers were hardly motivated by the goal of a power-sharing executive.

Such quibbles aside, the item – well marshalled by Kenny – was an example of how big events can have huge consequences that are unforeseen by contemporary witnesses. It is a salutary lesson for those assessing the impact of bin Laden’s demise: there are still a few drafts to be done yet.

Radio moment of the week 

Putting a positive spin on disastrous events is second nature to most politicians, but even by such standards, the appearance of the former Green Party TD and minister Eamon Ryan on Breakfast(Newstalk, weekdays) was notable. Shane Coleman, who has done a good job filling in for Ivan Yates, asked Ryan whether he had any regrets about his party's electorally calamitous coalition with Fianna Fáil. He said: "One of the things I was proud of was that our democratic system worked, in that we had a change of government." When a politician is reduced to priding oneself on being "able to transfer power" you know things must have been bad.