NI centenary parade: Tom Elliott says BBC should breakdown airtime given to Irish language march versus the Orange Order mass march

Tom Elliott, the veteran UUP man who has been returned to the Assembly for Fermanagh and South Tyrone after the May election, said he has been contacted by a number of people who are vexed by the BBC’s coverage.

He said they had contrasted the Orange extravaganza with the rally in Belfast city centre the previous Saturday in favour of an Irish language act – and suggested that a tally of their respective airtimes would help settle the matter.

According to the BBC, the Irish rally had “thousands” of participants.

Tonight Mr Elliott – who is a long-standing member of the loyal orders – told the News Letter: “All I’m picking up is indications from people that the BBC ran very poor coverage of it on Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening.

“I’ve received a number of complaints from people... they were comparing it to the Irish language parade the week before.

“[They] saw a number of clips on BBC TV that basically didn’t have near the level of numbers that the Orange event had on Saturday – but still it warranted much more media coverage than the Orange event did.

“That seemed to be the basis of what most were complaining about: what appeared to be a lesser level of coverage than there was for the Irish language parade the week before, which was much smaller numbers.

“Hopefully the BBC will reflect on that.”

Then he added: “Why don’t they come back with a figure, and tell us how many minutes of coverage each of those events got?

“I have complained before about the amount of minutes I got on radio interviews compared to the opposition.

“They were able to get back and tell me that I got one minute and 15 seconds in total, and the other person was on two minutes and 20 seconds or whatever, and they accepted that was unfair.

“So they are able to have that pretty quickly.”

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