I know I have commented on this before it but it does irritate me and so I draw your attention to the bizarre agenda pursued by BBC Northern Ireland, the arm of the BBC which thinks it is Irish, not British. The LEAD story this evening concerns the accidental death of a lady in the Irish Republic. Tragic certainly but in what way does this have ANY relevance to Northern Ireland. Meanwhile the Olympic coverage on this station concerns itself with the Irish connection to Usain Bolt. This is not accidental, it is part of a sustained and politically driven agenda on behalf of the BBC to broadcast the news of a foreign country as if it were domestic news. The term I use is hibernianisation – the greening of Northern Ireland by the lousy BBC.
HIBERNIANISATION.
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mr vance – now i normally dont disagree with your viewpoints, but on this your are missing the point.
the SOUTH of ireland has gotten a heck of lot more coverage of unionist affairs since the peace agreement… thats part of the deal – BOTH sides report without bias on whats happening on BOTH sides of the border.
a sinn feiner in the south would equally be complaining about the increasing “britification” of the south..
why , what did i hear on irish radio (via the internet) today – loads of ads for BT. and Tesco…
all part of the deal my friend.
what i am trying to point out is that local councils in the south are reaching out to unionists in the north – why, my own town of Cork, specifically invited Orangemen to take part in the St Paddys day parade about 2 years ago.
only it was scuppered by the lunatics in southern sinn fein.
BUT – and i stress this – i was listening to radio phone in shows , and the vast majority of Cork people actually *wanted* the orangemen in their st patricks parade… most folks talked about “getting over it”, “turning a new leaf”, and the most common response – “sure, why the f** not?”
if the bbc helps us understand each other. then thats an evil i’m prepared to put up with.
that DOES NOT excuse the bbc cavorting with real ira members and being arrested for it – as what happened last year. in that regards the bbc is indeed a shit stirrer.
maybe we should press for an independent Northern Ireland broadcasting regime and just ditch the bbc…?
for the reocord – i fully support the “dual citzenship” idea.
even though i am against unionism, i have to admire their no-nonsense approach.
the south would do well if we had a few unionists in dail eireann.
BUT – i hasten to add – the 42 day detention fiasco is something that has tarred the impression of unionists in England.
maybe they might find a home in Dublin?
i’d be all for it – it’d be like welcoming a long lost son back into the fold.
like it or not – ian paisley is as irish as i am. and we irish have got to get used to that. period…
archduke,
I know we won’t agree on this but I respect your point of view. Your point about the BBC cavorting with dissident IRA terrorists last year is also a good one.
get rid of the bbc. it gets in the way.
thats my conclusion.
i can only offer personal experience – my niece, who is quite brainy, had the choice of secondary schools to go to.
catholic upbringing. and guess where she goes to – the TOP protestant school in cork.
protestant.
mull on that for bit. and it was oversubscribed and had entrance exams and was damn hard to get into – because everyone in cork KNOWS its a damn fine school.
we southerners NEED you unionists.
the bbc gets in the way. the war is over – time to move on.
( i wish somebody would tell the bbc that)
i think protestantism is missing an opportunity here – in a recent poll 30 per cent – yes 30 per cent – expressed “no religious affiliation”.
thats a heck of lot for a formerly devout catholic state.
why people believe in kiddie fiddlers is beyond me, but hey – thats religion for you.
An hilarious example came up on Radio 3 the other day when that glorious tune which used to be called The Londonderry Air was played. The announcer used all the current circumlocution of the BBC and referred to it something along the lines of “that traditional Irish tune from the North of Ireland”!
David Vance is right to point out that the BBC is happy to put stories from the Republic on the Northern Ireland bit of its website. But another way of looking at it is that the Northern Ireland bit of the website is part of the UK bit – ie there’s an England bit, a Scotland bit, a Wales bit, and a Northern Ireland bit and they each appear on the left hand menu list under UK. A nationalist might not be amused to find stories from the Republic appearing as UK domestic stories.
Perhaps the BBC is trying to irritate everybody – Unionists like DV, but also Republicans, by harking back to the days when it was Great Britain and Ireland, not Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Didn’t Conor Cruise O’Booze stand as a Unionist in the South, for amusement value ? I don’t think he got many votes.
Lee,
Yeah, they do annoy most folks. That’s why taking away the License tax is the best punishment.
David42,
LOL – I can just hear them saying that. Sure we’re all Irish nowadays!
I have noticed a strange choice of newsworthy items on Ceefax. Quite often the London news section has items on crime in Basildon or Gravesend.
This puzzled me for a while. Isn’t there enough crime in London to report on?
Then I realised that most of these crimes would have been committed by the white members of the East-End diaspora rather than by members of one of London’s many vibrant mutlti-cultural communities.
Isn’t more that they’re desperately claiming Northern Irishness for this agent rather than covering Ireland?
Paranoia is a disturbed thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion.
Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs concerning a perceived threat. In the original Greek, paranoia simply means madness.
Being crap at Geography is sometimes characterised by a failure to post stories in the correct region of a website. Symptoms include a loss of credibility and a belief among some of your audience that you couldn’t care less about the distinctions which have resulted in hundreds of deaths in recent history.