NI killings: how we all missed the real story
PETER PRESTON
The Observer – United Kingdom
Published: Jan 28, 2007
THEY WERE huge, defining news stories. Take 1975: a rash of CIA
assassinations stopped in its tracks by bleak disclosure; no more
agency-orchestrated murder, on presidential orders. Take 1987: the
covert killing of 28 Eta terrorists by Spanish agents and their
hitmen. See Seymour Hersh of the New York Times and Pedro J Ramirez of
El Mundo in Madrid take a bow – brave, determined journalists doing
their jobs. Then hang your British head in shame.
Northern Ireland, lest we forget, is part of the UK. It was also the
place, we should never forget, where as many as 15 men and women died
during the 1990s because a loyalist gang had RUC Special Branch
officers in its pocket. More sanctioned slaughter.
Did any battling Hersh or Ramirez figure expose that at the time?
No. And nor was it much exposed last week, when the province’s Police
Ombudsman published her chilling report. Just five or six paragraphs
buried inside the Sun and the Mirror.
Instead, we got recycling problems in the Indy , inheritance taxes in
the Telegraph and the Mail , courts short of cash in the Times and
judges getting stroppy over rape trial reforms in the Guardian.
Almost anything, in short, but a story of corruption and collusion
that would have led every front page in America and Europe.
It’s a bizarre, shaming blindness. Not uncovering the truth in the
first place is bad enough. Not blazoning it when somebody else has is
worse.
The qualities did a decent inside-page job. The Times and the Guardian
wrote suitably fierce editorials. But the shock factor seemed to be
missing. The Mail and Telegraph had nothing to say, and only the BBC
thought it worth putting top of the shop.
Why such astigmatism? Maybe because the events were history. Maybe
because, this time, Blair could hardly be blamed. Maybe because
Northern Ireland’s politics does not sell papers. Maybe because Jade
Goody was still ruling the rueful roost. But the failure was still
shaming.
A hundred thousand Turks walked in silence at the funeral of murdered
Armenian editor Hrant Dink last week. They showed how important good
journalism can be. But nobody walked the walk, or even talked the
talk, on the streets of Belfast – or Whitehall.