FROM THE ARCHIVES: APRIL 29th, 1981With time and mediation efforts running out for Bobby Sands on the 59th day of his hunger strike – he died a week later on his 66th day without food – tensions in the North were increasing as the UDA flexed its muscles, the IRA upped its attacks on policemen and part-time soldiers, and people in flashpoint areas of Belfast began hoarding food. And the international media was back in Belfast for the first time in years, as Fionnuala O Connor reported. - JOE JOYCE
EVERY HOTEL in Belfast is booked out. Men, hung about with cameras and microphones, push past each other in revolving doorways. The city-centre smells of Gauloises and Camels and if you weren’t tense already, the presence everywhere of professional trouble-shooters waiting for something big certainly ups the pressure.
The foreign media have come to town in the biggest numbers for 10 years. And although television crews from Japan and Paraguay catch some attention as rare visitors, the American contingent probably attracts more official eyes and ears than anyone else. We never get equivalent feedback from the English public.
According to media-watchers across the Atlantic, the end product to date has been colourful stuff, even during the waiting. There is the film of rioting in Belfast as well as Derry, though Belfast people might think the riots here have been small stuff – but then if expensive film crews are waiting, and something happens up the road, isn’t a riot a riot?
From the greyest to the goriest, paper headlines have been prophesying doom. Rupert Murdoch's New Your Postas usual, shouts loudest, with "Ireland is braced for a bloodbath", but The New York Timessedately follows just a few steps behind with "Ulster bracing for fresh tumult". The columnist Pete Hamill is on his way here – his rival in Republican sympathies, Jimmy Breslin, has already been telling America that "Ulster is on the brink".
At this end the television bustle from Derry to West Belfast, from Ian Paisley’s press conference to the killing yesterday afternoon of a UDR man in Co Down. They have been ordered from bureau in Frankfurt, in Rome, in London as well as from the US, and many have never been here before. Very few of the old faces from 1969-1972 turn up again in 1981 and as the present faces admit readily, there have been years of total lack of interest in “the Northern Ireland Story”.
Most of the US television crews here to date seem to be working exclusively for short news bulletins. They work hard for long hours, travel at speed, and end up crammed into a tiny room at BBC headquarters were at times 25 people from all over the world are cutting and editing at the same time, while BBC staff cling to toe-holds in the corners. Their aim is at most two minutes, prime-time, coast-to-coast – a lot of time by television standards.
It is a costly business. One of the big American stations with four crews in the North at the moment reckons it’s paying £5,000 a day, at least.
Certainly we’re back at the centre of the stage. CBS and ABC, two of the giants, have four crews here apiece, about 80 people. Northern Ireland has been on nationwide bulletins, morning and evening, over the past few days, in stories which combine the day’s happenings with the ever-present threat of worse to come. Occasionally, even with your own notebook in your hand, you do wonder if the presence of the reporting machine in all its full regalia might just be a contributory factor to tension. Because it would be nice to think that the eyes of the world are waiting for a peaceful anti-climax, but theyre not.
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