The first house I rented with my wife-to-be was in Ebor Street, in south Belfast. This red-brick terrace was at the heart of the loyalist Village area, a well-struck free kick away from Northern Ireland’s National Football Stadium at Windsor Park. The street ran down to the equally unionist Donegall Road, which linked the locality to other working-class redoubts at Sandy Row and Donegall Pass.
A less notable nearby landmark was the playing fields at Boucher Road, a flat and windswept complex of sports pitches, set among car show-rooms, industrial units and out of town shopping centres. This otherwise unprepossessing site came alive most summers, when it doubled as one of the city’s biggest outdoor concert venues. It hosted world-renowned artists like Bruce Springsteen, Kaiser Chiefs and Liam Gallagher, as well as tens of thousands of music fans.
I once sat in my Ebor Street garden enjoying a roistering performance by the Foo Fighters, one of the US’s most successful rock bands. You could make out most of Dave Grohl’s lyrics, which drifted less than a mile down the Boucher Road. Indeed, the performance was reportedly heard ten miles away, in the city of Lisburn. Some less tolerant Belfast citizens even complained about the noise — which was enough to wake babies and agitate pets — on local phone-in shows.
This August, if the proudly British residents of the Village and other areas want to enjoy some late summer sun, they will be subjected to charming ditties like “Get Your Brits Out”. This track, by the Belfast rappers, Kneecap, features three minutes of abuse aimed mainly at politicians in the unionist DUP. The chorus is the unsubtle refrain, “Get Your Brits Out”, echoing the republican slogan “Brits out”. This tagline, sprayed on gable walls during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, was aimed either at the armed forces or the IRA’s unionist neighbours, depending on which account you believe.
Kneecap has revived this insult in post peace-process Ulster, as well as revelling in other motifs from violent republicanism, like punishment shootings and balaclavas. The group is set to play the Vital festival at the Boucher playing fields at the end of August. Concerts at the venue were traditionally much-anticipated celebrations. People in Northern Ireland, whatever their background or beliefs, came together around a shared love of music. This year, a band that, at best, trades in venomous politics and, at worst, stokes sectarian hatred, will be allowed to broadcast its bile across much of Belfast.
Against that extraordinary backdrop, BBC Northern Ireland recently asked young people whether they “stand with Kneecap”, in an article on its website. You might have expected the journalists to visit areas like Ebor Street or Sandy Row, where the group’s language would be considered most insulting and inflammatory, even if they provided a nationalist counterpoint. Instead, the broadcaster conducted its “vox pop” only on the Falls Road, in Sinn Fein’s west Belfast heartland.
It regularly manages to make sly, borderline insulting sallies like this, under a cloak of impartiality
Many of these youths would have been shaped by the same virulently anti-British sub-culture that spawned Kneecap. To no-one’s surprise, they voiced strong support for the group and its messages, which included calling for MPs to be killed and shouting, “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”. The transparent tactics of the reporters should not be particularly shocking either. The BBC in Northern Ireland has long been one of the “Beebiest” parts of the BBC. It regularly manages to make sly, borderline insulting sallies like this, under a cloak of impartiality.
For example, BBC NI’s breakfast news programme, Good Morning Ulster, on Tuesday discussed the events in London ahead of VE Day. This item consisted of an interview with an historian, Dr Tessa Dunlop, who started her contribution with an impression mocking blimpish, ex-Colonel types who enjoyed “pomp and ceremony”. She then asserted that the tradition of celebrating the end of the second world war was rooted in Margaret Thatcher “revving up jingoism” during the 1980s. The programme’s researchers could feel pleased with their work. BBC NI had covered an important national event, offsetting any unionist criticisms that it spurned celebrations of British history and patriotism. But it also made sure to douse those sentiments in a shower of cynicism and left-wing analysis.
The corporation’s news and politics programmes are particularly obsessed with the “debate” over Northern Ireland’s constitutional future. The campaign for a border poll, and an all-Ireland state, has disguised itself as a “conversation”, and this strategy has been rewarded fulsomely by some BBC producers. They can default to this topic on any slow or not so slow news week. They are, after all, only exploring both sides of a contentious question, for the umpteenth time (not indulging their personal obsessions).
Just like its national parent, some BBC NI employees soon drop any subtlety when they leave the corporation. The former producer of Good Morning Ulster and the flagship political programme, Hearts and Minds, Mary Kelly, wrote a column in support of Kneecap in this week’s Irish News, ridiculing the group’s critics and demanding that any outrage should be “directed at Israel”. While the “kill your MP” and “fuck Israel” stories were covered widely, including by the BBC, the push is well underway to turn the band into victims of a supposedly pompous, right-wing witch-hunt.
Our national broadcaster has, of course, come under increasing pressure for its one-sided coverage of the war in Israel. And, after the recent elections, it was criticised for casting Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns as primarily a former beauty pageant contestant and Gregg’s employee, rather than an ex-government minister and now Mayor of Lincolnshire. If you thought the intent of those antics was obvious, you should see what the BBC gets up to in Northern Ireland.
