The Oxygen of Publicity

Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow talks to Vicky Cosstick about his experience of reporting in Northern Ireland.

“I don’t think many of us are proud of our role during that time, and it wasn’t ultimately constructive”, says the renowned journalist, speaking of his years covering the Troubles for ITN. The news editors were only interested in bombs and violence, he says, while the conflict “appeared to be a civil war, a war without end” and the media became a “trumpet for each side’s atrocities.”

At a time when there may be, arguably, too much news he has, I have to say, gone out of his way to give me an interview and is a more than gracious interviewee. This is part of my “legacy” research, to help answer the question of how today’s post-Agreement Northern Ireland is perceived and presented by the media, and follows my previous Northern Slant article. For Snow, as I suspect for other journalists of his generation, his response to that question is influenced if not determined by his own years spent covering the conflict.

Snow’s first experience of the IRA and the Troubles was covering what became known as the Balcombe Street Siege in London in December 1975. He went on, as a cub reporter from 1976, to cover Northern Ireland for several years.

It may seem bizarre today, but the local commercial TV station, UTV, was shut over the weekends. Snow and a camera crew would commute weekly, taking the last plane on a Thursday night to Aldergrove, along with the Northern Ireland Westminster MPs who were returning to their constituencies for the weekend. All the news crews stayed in the Europa Hotel: “There would be a loud bang and we would rush up to the roof to see where the smoke was coming from” – or they leapt into a taxi, because the driver would nearly always know what was going on.

“It was very exciting, and it tested you: attack, consequence, grief, argument, wounded, dead”, is his memory now. “We were an essential concomitant to both sides. They both needed publicity. It was unconscious, of course, but in retrospect I can see we exacerbated the conflict.”

Sometimes, the Europa itself was bombed and the media would all be sent off to a rural hotel, which was very safe – but they would much rather have been closer to the action. The violence could be upsetting, but Snow had witnessed violence elsewhere, in the Middle East and Central America. “I’m not ashamed to admit that I have cried at times,” he says, “but it did all feel very remote from a London life.”

In his view, both Catholic and Protestant were equal in terms of violence. “We [the media] were party to it, but not partisan. But in the end I found it impossible not to feel resentful of the way the Catholic population had been dealt with over the years.”

Meanwhile, Snow recalls, bonhomie between unionists and nationalists was common. Independent Republican MP Frank Maguire, who preceded Bobby Sands, and Ian Paisley got on like a house on fire. “The broadcast ban on Sinn Féin was totally counterproductive. It gave them a mystique and meant we couldn’t challenge their odious behaviour on air.”

Snow also fondly recalls one episode. Aldergrove was shut due to a bomb scare and he was delegated at Heathrow to find a way to get the MPs to Belfast. They took the shuttle to Glasgow, and he asked the pilot to arrange taxis to meet them on the runway and ask the railway station to hold the train to Stranraer. On arrival in Glasgow, they dashed to the station, only to see the rear of the departing train. The station master explained that when the train driver was told the train was being held for Rev Paisley, he left straight away.

Snow covered Northern Ireland into the 1980s, and returned for the peace process, which he says was also tremendously exciting. “We quickly began to understand there could actually be peace. We could see the effect of the Blair-Clinton relationship. People began to grow confident, so we worked overtime to give the peace the oxygen of publicity.” Peace came about, he says, because there was strong leadership.

Over the past few years, he is glad to have returned to Northern Ireland several times to participate in or host what he calls “something optimistic”. For example, last November, he took part in an “In Conversation” event at St Anne’s Cathedral with Professor Paul Moore of Ulster University at the invitation of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Fund.

He admits Channel 4 News is weak now on coverage of Northern Ireland. He has presented perhaps only four times from Northern Ireland since 1988, much fewer than from Scotland and Wales. His image of Northern Ireland now is a sort of “peace salad – it has a few naughty bits in it, but residually, the population is at peace now. The oxygen has gone out of the story.” Most of the other members of the Channel 4 News team are too young to remember much about the Troubles. “We are desperately ignorant of anything beyond the violence.”

But there is a real concern, he admits, over Brexit, and he points to the very thoughtful piece presented by Gary Gibbon recently which explored whether, in the light of Brexit, attitudes among unionists are shifting towards the “unthinkable”, the possibility of a border poll and a united Ireland.

In a recent Tweet, his Channel 4 News colleague Alex Thomson wrote, somewhat ironically, that it was “Simply astonishing it has taken more than a generation to get the Ballymurphy Massacre story told”. He was promoting The Ballymurphy Precedent, a film supported by Channel 4 and made by Callum Macrae, which will be released soon.

With the Ballymurphy inquest starting in September and other events – the next stages in the Renewable Heating Incentive (RHI) scheme enquiry, the 50^th anniversary of the first Northern Ireland civil rights marches, and ever-increasing concerns over the DUP influence on government policies and the failure to restore devolution – perhaps Northern Ireland will be back in the national news again.