“A MAN would need to have a heart of stone, not to laugh” by Donal Kennedy

(This was first published in The Irish Democrat in May 1988.)

“A MAN would need to have a heart of stone, not to laugh.”

Thus Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell. No cynic, Wilde was making a literary criticism of Dickens. Real death is never a laughing matter. But the British media’s treatment of death is. For the treatment arises not from the death, nor even from such circumstances as violence. It arises from who it is that deals or suffers death, and it is tailored to confound the politics of those who fall foul of British Government.

I remember how the BBC used to announce the killings by British hangmen of Kikuyu tribesmen at Kenya’s Thompson Falls or of EOKA “terrorists” in Cyprus. It was in the tones of a Victorian father chastising a child — “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” Despite myself, I used to pity the poor hangmen, shouldering the White Man’s Burden and the ecclesiastical solemnity theybrought to the “murder” of one of their squaddies in Ismalia or Nicosia! And the pride they brought to accounts of their Air Force bombing Alexandria and Port Said.

There is today another tone in their repertoire — that of a specialist explaining a new breakthrough in science. Thus on World at One, on Radio 4 on Monday, March 7th, a reporter and some “expert” described the “clinical taking out” of the unarmed IRA trio in Gibraltar, and the “surgical precision” of the SAS “operation.” They spoke too with certainty of the 500 lb car-bomb left by the IRA in Gibraltar. Hours later when Sir Geoffrey Howe addressed the Commons, the 500 lb bomb had evaporated, along with, for rational people, the last wisps of Government credibility. People appear thick enough on British ground. But rationality among them is a rarer phenomenon.

On Saturday, March 19th I heard BBC Radio News bulletins at 1.00 pm, 2.00 pm, and 3.00 pm. A BBC Reporter gave an eyewitness account of a car speeding at 40 mph along a pavement and coming to a halt amongst the mourners of Kevin Brady, who had been shot dead, unarmed, tackling a loyalist gunman at a previous funeral. The reporter told of how mourners surrounded the car, and scattered when one of the men in it fired a gun, in the direction of the reporter himself.

He told how the crowd rallied and disarmed the gunmen. The bulletin continued with the report that two bodies were later found, but there was no eye-witness account of beating or shooting. There was nothing in any of these three bulletins to indicate concern for, nor sympathy with, the civilian-clothed gunmen in the car.

.At 4.00 pm all was changed utterly. as a terrible story was born It transpired that the gunmen were British Army men, and that they had been killed. I think that, following the solemn sadness of the military identity of the gunmen, the earlier eyewitness account was broadcast, but the process of tear-jerking was well under way.

Around 5.00 pm there were two Television News bulletins — on 1TN and BBC. Footage of the incursion, the scattering of the crowd and their regrouping after the soldier had fired, and the apprehension of the gunmen were shown, but not their beating nor their being shot. The Radio Reporter’s eye-witness account was not aired and from start to finish the verbal reporting made aggressors of the mourners.

So effective was this approach that on Channel 4’s “Right to Reply” the following Saturday(March 26th) a Mr Riley, convinced he had witnessed murder on TV, attacked ITN for showing the bulletin and we were advised that many viewers had written in similar terms. It is customary when criticism is voiced of programmes, for extracts to be re-screened, so that viewers are not dependant on anyone’s say-so. But lTN’s Gus MacDonald explained that the footage was se nasty as to offend sensibilities. Coolly watched, such footage would make nonsense of imaginings and the Government’s propaganda offensive.

My impression throughout was of great courage by unarmed mourners, given that some of their number, as well as the man being buried that day, had been attacked by a gunman just three days before. But no tributes to their courage came from any media or official source. The incursion demonstrated that the British Army Command, which was supposedly keeping its troops away from the funeral, has insufficient control of its men. The unfortunate two soldiers involved seem to have got where they were by foolishness, compounded by panic. And, given the continued bad-faith of British officialdom at all levels towards Ireland, is it any wonder if the mourners thought they were the intended objects of another “surgical” and “clinical” operation by the SAS?

If the British media weren’t dishing out a belly full of laughing matters, perhaps my appetite could stomach the clowning of Mr Peter Barry, late Foreign Minister of Ireland. On Monday, March 7th he appeared on British TV, to question the handling by the SAS of their Gibraltar operation. First though, he told us that since 1969 the IRA had killed nearly 3,000 people. He was trumping Mrs Thatcher’s latest statistics of 2,600. But Mrs Thatcher was Preyaricating*. Amongst the 2,600 killed since 1969 at least 1,100 were killed by Unionists from the Security Forces or Paramilitary categories. Indeed, some were victims of persons with joint Security Forces and Paramilitary membership.

 *The Editor’s word, not mine. I wrote “lying” but the IRISH DEMOCRAT might have been open to a Libel action, before the Lady went for Burning.