NI centenary parade: Nolan Show devotes segment to question of whether BBC coverage was enough

The march was accorded a prominent slot on the evening news bulletin on Saturday, but ultimately this coverage amounted to only a few minutes.

Aattempts to check the BBC’s output in more detail have been thwarted by the fact its weekend editions of Newsline – among other shows – are “not currently available” online.

News Letter editor Ben Lowry was the principal commentator in the Nolan segment, and used his airtime to stress how rare centenaries are by their very nature, and to question why more resources were not devoted to it.

“Why weren’t there cameras all the way along the route?” he asked.

“And why wasn’t there a special programme on this?

“Think of the vast output that there is on the BBC. Think of the vast space there is.

“Think of the evenings on BBC Radio Ulster when there’s Irish language programmes, and a whole range of things – there’s football, there’s gaelic football...

“So why could it not find space for an absolute minimum of a half-hour programme on this?

“It’s not going to happen again in our lifetimes.”

One caller, identified only as Elizabeth in Belfast, rang in to say that she and others had been “not fit to go to it”, and thus were reliant on the media to cover it properly.

“The BBC -–not you now ,Stephen – but the BBC should have [had] more planning for this event happening,” she said.

“They had good warning. The BBC has let the people down in Northern Ireland.

“Lots of people would have loved to watch that on TV.”

There then followed three callers hostile to the editor’s view.

Brian in Belfast complained that supporters of the Northern Irish state “never mention about over 50 years the misrule” which he said had targeted “the nationalist people” at large.

Oisin in Kilkeel meanwhile said he “couldn’t care less” if supporters of the parade held their own private celebrations.

And Brendan in Belfast lamented what he said was “80 years of inequality against the nationalist community”.

He dubbed the centenary “triumphalism over a section of the community that was basically terrorised by those in power for 80 years.”

Finally commentator Phil Kelly used the remaining minute or so to attack the parade as “a show of strength by a particular conservative brand of unionism”, and stress it should have been “diverse [and] multicultural” instead.

Ben Lowry ended by stating that officialdom had failed to properly mark the centenary, and thus it was “left to the loyal orders”, who had delivered a day of music, spectacle and colour “without any trouble at all”.

“I applaud them for picking up where everyone else failed,” he said.

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