There is something exquisitely Belfast about the idea of the BBC wanting to help curate Belfast City Council ls grand narrative project, Belfast Stories. After all, who better to shape “the story of the city” than the state broadcaster of the state many in the city once spent several decades arguing about?
The BBC, one imagines, arrives bearing the gifts of balance, objectivity and a carefully laminated editorial guideline. It has archives. It has theme music. It has a reassuring ability to describe explosions in the passive voice. If Belfast’s past is to be retold through immersive digital galleries and interactive exhibits, surely nothing says “shared future” like a corporation long accused — fairly or unfairly — of narrating the Troubles in a tone somewhere between anthropological detachment and mild bewilderment.
Enter Sinn Féin, whose suspicion is less a reflex than muscle memory. For a movement that spent years accusing the broadcaster of framing republicans as the problem rather than participants in a problem, the notion of BBC fingerprints on a flagship storytelling project may feel less like partnership and more like editorial déjà vu.
Of course, the BBC will insist it merely wants to contribute expertise. It won’t “control” the story. It will simply help tell it — gently, responsibly, and in strict accordance with its charter. And if that story occasionally sounds like it’s been translated into the Queen’s English and lightly sanded for metropolitan comfort, well, that’s just production value.
Belfast Stories is meant to be about voice — plural, contested, untidy. Sinn Féin’s wariness, ironic as it may appear in an era of power-sharing and handshakes, rests on a simple question: who gets to frame the frame? In a city where narrative has always been ammunition, even a microphone can look suspiciously like a weapon.
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