This TV review first appeared in The Andersonstown News
Ryan Tubridy had a small number of Ballymurphy families as final item in the Late Late Show last Friday. He introduced them and said that with them, he’d try to convey “the enormity of what, for many people, was a forgotten tragedy in this country and on this island.”
The difference between what happened in Ballymurphy in 1971 and what happened in Derry in 1972 was that there were not cameras.
Briege Voyle talked about her mother Joan Connolly and the positive attitude she had to the British soldiers. “She made them tea, coffee, gave them sandwiches.” One of Joan’s daughter had married a British soldier three years earlier.
Briege told how her mother was on her way to help a wounded boy when she was shot in the face. She screamed that she couldn’t see, but she was left to bleed to death.
Alice Harper told how she’d cut her father’s hair the day he was killed. When he went missing, she went to the British army post and asked about her father – had he been arrested? The soldiers told her “We didn’t have time to arrest him. We only had time to fucking shoot him.” And as she walked away from them, they began to sing the pop song of the day –“Where’s your poppa gone?”
Tubridy said that people in Ireland would be aghast at this talk of a woman having her face shot off, of children being brought to refugee camps, such horrors. However, the Taoiseach, he said, had been talking to Boris Johnson this very day, so we could hope for a decent response.
At the end Ryan thanked the Ballymurphy relatives. “This is a story that’s going to continue and we’re going to watch you continue. We’re taken aback by your tenacity. The not-guilty verdict was a massive win for justice, but you’ve a little bit of road to go.”
Well, Ryan, if people were taken aback, if people were aghast at talk of a woman shot in the face, talk of refugee camps, it’s because programmes like the Late Late Show were busy trying to demonise the likes of Gerry Adams, so there simply wasn’t time or space to investigate the ghastly deeds of the so-called peace keepers who shot women in the face and mocked those searching for their father. And that inquest report – it was a massive win for truth but not for justice.
If the national broadcaster, instead of banning the voices of Sinn Féin had told the world about what happened in Ballymurphy fifty years ago, it might be able to look the Irish people in the eye. Instead, RTÉ stood with its hands in its pockets until the sound of violence had faded, then came forward as it did last Friday night, saying “How awful for you. We’re all behind you.”
Shameful, shameful, shameful.
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