I think we were originally supposed to be in the Dairy Farm Library, and I hope nobody in here is a library worker. I'm a member of the library and I think it's terrific but I haven't been up in a while and I have a few testy letters lying on the telephone table in the hall to prove it. And if you're the person who's put a request in for 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', then I'm sorry and I'm leaving it back later this week.
If you'll bear with me for a couple of minutes, I'd like to start with a bit of a personal story and the reason for that is that it has coloured and shaped a lot of my present perceptions and attitudes towards this profession.
My sister Julie was 14 when she was killed by a British Army plastic bullet in 1981. I was a journalism student at the time. As you can imagine, my mother took it hard - it's not a natural thing for your youngest child to go before you do.
But what made it a thousand times harder for her was to watch as the sights of the media - local and British - were turned on her dead child. The next day's Belfast Telegraph quoted army sources to the effect that a full-scale riot was in progress at the time. I should add that the inquest later found that the area was quiet at the time and that Julie was an innocent victim.
That wasn't enough for the Telegraph, however. The same report also helpfully pointed out that it was believed that she was from a leading republican family.
Most of the hate mail my mother received was of the "wee republican rioters deserve all they get" kind. My mother telephoned the Telegraph and asked to speak to the editor, but she couldn't get through. She jumped in a black taxi and went to the Telegraph offices in Royal Avenue. She told the receptionist that she wanted to speak to the editor and was going to sit there until he came down or the office closed. The editor didn't appear, the office closed and my mother went home.
The media, electronic and printed, British and Irish, widely reported the non-existent riot and then moved on. The Sunday Times went one better, though. Chris Ryder, a well-known local journalist, reported that doctors had found that the dead child had an abnormally thin skull and that the plastic bullet impact wouldn't have killed a normal child.
This came as news to us. Already traumatised by the murder of her child, the reporting of it and the hate mail that it brought, my mother retreated into an armchair in the corner of the living room under a large framed picture of Julie and quietly knitted until she died too.
She never had the heart to call the hospital, so I did. Needless to say, Chris Ryder's story was complete nonsense, but as a Sunday Times journalist, he had done his job well.
Individual members of this community, like Julie, frequently fall victim. But an entire community, too, can be vilified. The words ‘West Belfast’ suggest many things to people outside this community. When they think of West Belfast, they're more likely to think of violence and extremism. Not in a million years would they think of the kind of positive, empowering things going on all around us in festival week, for instance.
That negative image of West Belfast was first planted in the mid- and late-70s, when large numbers of displaced and unsettled nationalists flocked westwards, making this one of the biggest population centres in Ireland, if not in Europe. No-go areas patrolled by armed IRA men; daily and nightly riots and shootings and bombings all over its roads and streets; increasing numbers of nationalist and republican politicians being returned by increasing numbers of voters. It's not surprising to me that visiting English journalists preferred to sit at the bar in the Europa and write what they wrote.
But things are changing for the better and not just because we're on the verge of peace. They're changing because people like the West Belfast Festival Committee are not only telling different stories, but making different stories too. The negativism is not going to stop overnight, though.
This year the St Patrick's Day Parade went into Belfast City centre. A massive crowd of around 40-60,000 thronged into the streets around the city hall, previously the bastion of Ian Paisley-led loyalist gatherings. Bands played, people laughed and danced. Face-painted children in their St Patrick's finest watched street entertainers from their father's shoulders. It was a fantastic day. I was so proud to be there with my own daughter on my shoulders in her green and white ribbons.
Writing in The Scotsman about the parade, Malachi O'Doherty saw it all differently. I should point out that Malachi used to live in Riverdale – I live in Riverdale now. There the similarity ends. "Much of Belfast did not know where to look when the Catholics came to town," he wrote. "Just as the office workers were coming out to do their lunchtime shopping in Boots and Marks & Spencers, into the city filed this ragtag parade of the poor... these people are physically different from the people with jobs and good clothes. They are paler and skinnier and they talk in coarser accents that professional people lose."
Sadly, the Scotsman picture editor hadn't consulted with Malachi and illustrated the piece with a lovely, vibrant, full-colour picture totally devoid of the pasty-faced, malnourished troglodytes who ruined Malachi's day. Far from it: the people in the picture were the people I spent the day with: smiling and laughing; old and young; turned out in their spring best and, well... beautiful. Perhaps if the picture editor had consulted Malachi, he would have been able to supply an illustration which suited his thesis better: the rickets ward in the RVH circa 1927, for instance. It's clear that while the bad old press days haven't gone away for good, they don't come as frequently. We have ourselves to thank for that.
Given my early experiences of the Belfast Telegraph and the Sunday Times, I first saw my career developing a very long way away indeed. Then the Andytown News stepped in.
Being editor of the Andytown News isn't like being the editor of the Lurgan Mail or the Mourne Observer. The Andytown News punches way above its weight. We're putting two local weekly newspapers out with considerably less resources than other newspapers with perhaps a third of our circulation - and yet we find ourselves quoted in Whitehouse briefing papers; discussed in the House of Commons; referred back to as some sort of ultra-reliable barometer of nationalist opinion in lengthy learned pieces in what we please to call the quality press. If West Belfast really is the cockpit of the North, the Andytown News has become its instrument panel. Which is why we get asked on the TV and radio quite a bit...
Once upon a time, I was quite keen and did the Barry Cowan rubber chicken circuit with some enthusiasm. I stopped for a couple of reasons: first, half the time the BBC neglects to pay you and the money isn't great anyway. Secondly, I became disenchanted because of the fact that despite my best efforts (and admittedly I'm no Dan Rather) and those of others, BBC Northern Ireland continues to treat this community like some recently discovered tribe in Papua New Guinea.
When the West Belfast Festival was in its infancy, I agreed to go on Good Morning Ulster to talk about the event. Deluded fool that I was, I fully expected to be quizzed about who was headlining the last-night concert, or what artistic and cultural gems lay in store for festival goers. The presenters opening gambit was to remind listeners that the festival was also an internment commemoration, neglecting to add that it was designed to take people away from the exhausting and depressing ritual of internment night rioting and fighting. Next I was asked why the music was played so loud when it was obviously alienating unionists and Protestants all over the city.
When I was asked how the festival proposed to attract members of the unionist community, when so much of its content had a green or nationalist tinge, I said that those who considered Irish people celebrating Irish culture in Ireland alienating would have to answer that question for themselves and I was going on to speculate whether the BBC thought the Notting Hill Carnival would be more fun if there were less of those damn darkies and they turned that awful jungle music down, when I was cut short for the weather and traffic update.
Well, you might say, that was a wee while ago. But while driving to work the other morning, I heard festival director Caitriona Ruane come on the same programme to find herself subjected to what was essentially the same interview. After three or four minutes of unrelenting hostility, Caitriona protested that she was hoping to come on and talk about the many wonderful events taking place in festival week. "Well now's your chance, go ahead," came the reply. The listeners were left to add for themselves, "if you must..."
Radio Ulster asked me on to discuss the funeral of INLA leader Gino Gallagher, which was taking place just two minutes away from the Andersonstown News office. On my way into work that morning, I counted 72 RUC Landrovers on the footpaths on the Glen Road, and I think that was one of the first times that the RUC donned the new black, space-age riot suits that they now favour. The operation was designed to stop six men in dark glasses, white shirts and black ties from carrying the coffin. Not surprisingly, something of a standoff had developed as relatives and mourners pleaded with the RUC to back off and the RUC refused.
"Well, Robin, any sign of paramilitary activity there?" I knew what the presenter meant. I knew the shorthand that he meant the six blokes with hankies over their faces and the starry plough pins in their berets, but I couldn't resist it. "Yes indeed," I said, "an awful lot in fact" and went on to tell him how many Landrovers there were and how hundreds of latter-day Robocops had brought the area to a standstill. I could sense the presenter's discomfort down the phone. "Yes," he replied, "but they're only there doing their job. How about the INLA? Have they turned up yet?
I learned later there had been a number of complaints from listeners who thought I was a BBC reporter on the scene instead of an Andytown News hack looking out his window. I marked that one down as a small victory. Later, the NUJ's Belfast branch received an official complaint from an old sparring partner of mine who shall remain nameless. I got a call from the Union, whose only dealings with me up to then - and since - have been via direct debit subs at the end of every month. The guy on the end of the line coughed and said, ah, he had received an angry call from a veteran union man and would I like to explain myself. I offered to retire to the dark room with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver, but the official was big enough to say that wouldn't be necessary. So I told him to catch himself on and hung up. I've still got my press card by the way.
So as to avoid charges of parochialism, I should point out that it's not just the West Belfast community which gets BBC Norn Iron treatment. Many of you may recall an incident at the Derrynahirk Inn in Lurgan a while back, when punters were subjected to a terrifying ordeal at the hands of heavily armed and masked RUC undercover unit in boiler suits who opened up, burst into the bar and ordered customers on to the ground.
Not surprisingly, some of those customers are still having difficulty coming to terms with their ordeal and a recent report by a team of respected psychologists revealed the depth of the trauma suffered by those men and women present - all of whom thought they were in the middle of Greysteel Mark Two. On the TV, Newsline 6.30 did a piece on the report which was furnished with interviews with a couple of the psychiatrists involved in compiling the report and clips from a reconstruction of the event filmed some time previously for a Spotlight piece on the incident. And what do you think the BBC newsroom finished their report with? A probing with Ronnie Flannagan perhaps? A scathing response from Amnesty International? Well, no... they brought on an old soldier, a white-whiskered Tommy who had seen action in Burma and the Malay Peninsula. In my day, he sneered, you just got on with it. You straightened your spine, threw back your shoulders and got stuck into the other lot. We'd no time for this girlie psychiatrist rubbish.
And that was the end of the report. I laughed out loud at the time, but after the laughter subsided, I realised what I had just witnessed. Somebody at Ormeau Avenue had decided that because those people receiving psychiatric care after their horrifying experiences were nationalists, the report needed some 'balance'. These weren't suffering human beings; these weren't damaged men and women; these were nationalists; these were Catholics, Let's get somebody to put the other side... the other side to what, I ask myself. The other side to mental illness? The other side to broken minds?
For the BBC, there always has to be another side. There has to be another side to the West Belfast Festival. There even has to be another side to injustice. And in that respect their journalism does as much to foster and promote division as those about whom they write and speak.
For the press, too, there has to be another side, another story. There are many stories to be told about every human being - there were many stories to be told about my sister who knew she wanted to work with children in a nursery when she grew up even though she was a child herself. That story never got told. What got told was the other story, the other side: that she was a nationalist in a riot who died because she had something wrong with her head.
If there is another side, and if that’s it, then I’m glad I’m on the side of the Andytown News.
Go raibh maith agaibh and enjoy the rest of the night and the festival.