CONNECT/Eddie Holt: The tempestuous love affair between violence in the North and television broadcasting has fuelled much unrest and drawn harsh criticism. But in our age of 'reality TV', the real is better conveyed by 'unreal' TV drama
The recent Late Review (January 11th) clash between Tom Paulin and Germaine Greer shows that, peace process or not, television and the Troubles remain as explosive a cocktail as ever. Discussing two films (one, Bloody Sunday, shown last Sunday and the other, Sunday, to be shown on Monday on Channel 4) on the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry, Paulin erupted at Greer's intimation of sympathy for the Paratroopers who had shot unarmed demonstrators. "Rubbish," snarled the normally affable Paulin. "They were thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people. They were rotten racist bastards!" No effete equivocation in that. This was cultural TV, but not as we know it, Jim. Often derided as being aimed at the smug, sniffy, hypocritical "chattering classes", the Late Review was broadcasting troopers' language.
Certainly, the fury and intensity of this exchange is unlikely to be prompted by such cultural TV staples as, say, a Booker-nominated novel, a new play or a Monet exhibition. Then again, it was ever thus: television and the Troubles has a history, such that combining the two is like mixing fertiliser and sugar and lighting a fuse attached to the mix.
Indeed, it's reasonable to argue that television detonated the Troubles in the North. Inherently unstable because of competing Irish and British nationalisms, the state was political nitroglycerine anyway. When television jolted it, the mix exploded.
Three episodes of 1960s TV were seminal. The first came from the US. When television news of the black civil-rights campaign gripped viewers throughout Europe, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) copied in detail the protest tactics of Martin Luther King, adapted in turn from Gandhi, to highlight injustice. That blueprint came, of course, from a different America in a different time. "Civil rights" has quite another ring there these days, but that's another story.
The second TV detonation occurred in the Republic when the infant RTÉ broadcast passionately patriotic celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. The third was the late Gay O'Brien's RTÉ footage of RUC men attacking civil-rights marchers in Derry in October, 1968. Television's entangled roles of observer and player are easy to recognise, but their unravelling seems booby-trapped in the case of the North.
When, after the unionist pogroms of 1969, a resurgent IRA went on the offensive in the early 1970s, television might reasonably have asked itself if it had sent out certain people to kill and die for the competing nationalisms. In a sense, it did ask that question - or, most spectacularly, the Government in the Republic did - and the censoring Section 31 was introduced. Whether this move saved the entire island from a disastrous civil war or simply saved the 26-county state, at the expense of largely confining and prolonging violence in the North, is, like the current state of civil rights in the US, another story.
For its part, British television since the 1950s censored practically everything broadcast about the North and ruthlessly marginalised it. As a result, political media managers flagrantly manipulated public perceptions - it was invariably those bloody, impossible Irish causing grief for "honest broker" Britain, and that remains a dominant, perhaps the dominant view in Britain today. Yet, for all the censorship and propaganda - from all competing sides - it is not merely coincidental that the simmerings and then outbreak of serious violence in the North happened in the same decade as television's first dramatic growth in popularity and power.
Despite governments' attempts to separate them, the pair, like tempestuous lovers, repeatedly embraced and exploded. The influence of communications technology on politics - from the printing press spreading Martin Luther's reformation, to newspapers developing democracy and the radio "wars" of the second World War - is undeniable. Likewise, television and the North (and Vietnam), and the lack of television in the Falklands/Malvinas, the Gulf War and Afghanistan.
Propaganda is made by omission as much as by coverage.
So, what of Tom Paulin's outrage at Germaine Greer's intimation of sympathy? As a Northern Irish Protestant (albeit from a declining socialist tradition within that community), his position played Greer completely offside. She was, to labour an analogy, a cultural and political eunuch in this spat. The casting of the Protestant James Nesbitt as Sunday's central character (the Protestant civil rights-supporting MP Ivan Cooper, inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King and, presumably, by Martin Luther, too!) helped to defuse any charges of sectarianism that might be levelled at the production.
Fair enough. Yet when unionists argue that a film of, say, the IRA's Bloody Friday should also be made, that seems fair enough too. There would be greater technical difficulties, of course, but - approached with integrity - not insurmountable difficulties. Like the Bloody Sunday dramas, any Bloody Friday film would inevitably attract fierce criticism, but that's not a reason not to try. Certainly, criticism of the Bloody Sunday dramas, such as Ruth Dudley Edwards's Mail on Sunday offering that "[It's] a piece of IRA propaganda", or the Sunday Telegraph wailing: "The Bloody Sunday wound will never heal while films like these are made" is arrant propaganda itself.
The Bloody Sunday wound will never heal while such criticism is taken seriously. Yet - and Paulin has said as much - perhaps these films have not come along at an ideal time for the peace process. They could further alienate unionists, a community which has suffered as well as inflicted suffering. Surely the truth is that sensitivities on the North - most crucially, in the North - are so volcanically umbrageous that you either make, with integrity, films that try to tell its story, or you end up with the ominous seething of a "whatever you say, say nothing" paralysis.
Looking back now, 30 years after Bloody Sunday, the ferment of the times remains startling. Unionism attacked civil rights; sectarian tensions grew and erupted; the British army came between the opposing sides but soon leant heavily on nationalists; in turn, this boosted militant republicanism, which, revitalised, attacked. In this context, Bloody Sunday can be seen as a boomeranging display of vengeful imperialistic violence. Then the awful lies and cover-ups, terrible, murderous counter-revenge and ancient race hatreds resurrected.
The rest we know - but not as viscerally because television coverage was soon castrated. The generation too young to remember Bloody Sunday and those born since have, characteristically, a different attitude towards the North.
In the Republic, as well as in Britain, a dominant perspective came to regard the whole Northern affair with disdainful disinterest. No doubt, the sheer length of time the violence persisted (arguably because of a lack of TV!) had an effect. Fatigue set in, but fear - usually expressed as condescension or incomprehension at the atavistic passions in this reliquary of colonial, tribal Ireland - persisted too.
It's ironic that Tom Paulin, frequently a benignly bewildered figure when confronted by popular culture, should have produced his most passionate public proclamation on a "mere" television drama. Then again, that's because he understands its significance: it will touch more Irish and British people than a Monet exhibition ever could. Given its subject matter, it will also touch explosive emotions. Funny how, in this period of increasingly unreal "reality TV" (Popstars?), the reality of something which really matters can be conveyed by something as unreal as a television drama, dressed up in the documentary style.
"The law is the law and must be respected," barked a bullying British army toff in Bloody Sunday. There's a cold sense in that position, but whenever you hear it invoked by a bully, you know that moral authority has nothing to do with it. It is an abuse of a position, which, in principle, is principled - if that's not too old-fashioned an assessment in the light of the new-style Late Review guff. These Bloody Sunday films (as well as honest stories from the unionist and British sides) and the discussions they give rise to are to be welcomed - especially in this bloody age of renewed civil rights repression.