I was feeling seriously lazy this morning and so I dipped into the Nolan Show as something that was unlikely to provoke an episode of thinking. Nolan was making his way through the Sinn Féin manifesto and pausing after each point to create the aural equivalent of the empty chair. That’s because, it seems, Sinn Féin have been boycotting his show. Nolan made considerable comment on this, and even seemed to promise that if Sinn Féin abandoned their boycott, there would be no hard feelings and discussion would continue as if they’d never been gone.
So then there was a thinking invasion into my weary head, and the thought presented itself: if Sinn Féin are boycotting Nolan’s show, is there anyone that Nolan himself is boycotting?
As regular readers will know, I am universally acclaimed for my modesty, but at this point I’m forced to point to…myself. Moi. Mise. There was a time pre-pandemic when Nolan regularly had me on his radio show and fairly often on his TV show as well. Then suddenly all that stopped.
As it did with Crawley on Talkback. If anything, I was on Crawley’s show more frequently than on Nolan’s. Then at the exact same time, no more invites. Rien. Rud ar bith.
And the same for any and every nook and cranny of the BBC in Belfast.
The reason? Well, it wasn’t Nolan or Crawley was to blame. They were just following orders. The BBC management made it clear to them that I was persona non grata. And why did the BBC management make this terribly, terribly self-harming decision? Because a unionist pressure group, headed up by one Kenny Donaldson, met with BBC management and told them to take me off-air. And the management did. As my good friend Sir Thomas Wyatt put it, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’.
You’re probably in floods of tears by now but please, please, don’t cry for me, Argentina, or anyone else. I write this not as a self-pitying dirge. I write it so people can see that, even though we’re about to have a republican First Minister later this week, the B[ritish]BC still appears to pirouette to a unionist tune.
Comments are closed.