Beadle’s About

By AM Saturday, January 23, 2010

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Suzanne Breen and the Sunday Tribune are to be complimented for the sterling investigative journalism they are conducting. Tonight, as every Saturday night, is filled with a sense of expectation that tomorrow’s paper will be awash with new revelations. Belfast readers will have to be up earlier than usual. A former republican prisoner laughed as she told me Sinn Fein members were spotted buying the paper in bulk so that nobody else would get a chance to read them. If true, they must envy the Chinese for internet censorship. She read hers on-line.

Good investigative journalism always stimulates the mind. The sillier the responses of those being investigated the greater the whetting of the appetite for even more insights. Hiding the papers is as bad as having concealed the abuse issue to begin with.

Now if people were waiting on their curiosity to be assuaged by the BBC they will wait a long time. It seems to think the less society knows about contentious issues the better for it. Having hidden out in Haiti for almost a week, BBC television yielded to public interest and finally noticed the elephant charging through the news room. Even then the instinct was to feed the beast rather than corner it. The beast in question was not the Sinn Fein President per se but the issue of cover up and denial that growing numbers of people now suspect he was involved in. A queue of abuse victims is beginning to form outside his door demanding the justice they feel he has long denied them in his desire to place party before people and his own extended career before everything else. As James McErlean was fond of saying in the jail. ‘Lord pity me and screw the rest.’

Not that the BBC did a particularly good job in its handing of the matter. Rendered anaemic by the plague of the peace process which has suffocated all its vital signs it now flounders in the same news league as the doddering old Irish Times. The once proud paper of record just about manages to shuffle along in an advanced state of senility and timidity seemingly terrified of dropping any clangers about the peace process. Clumped together, BBC Northern Ireland and the Old Lady of D'Olier Street make a rare pair. Debilitated by investigative Alzheimer’s each forgets what it came for when they arrive on the door to ask the probing question. It is like watching a car being pushed with a rope.

During his televised interview Adams looked rattled as he was gently put through allegations of inertia in response to separate acts of serial rape and torture against a teenage girl and a ten year old child committed by his colleagues in the Provisional movement. Rather than give a plausible account of his role, whatever it was, he fell back on the hoary old defence that the paper tearing shreds from his credibility, the Sunday Tribune, was engaged in a campaign of untruths against him and the party he leads.

Whatever the strength of Sinn Fein’s case when it resorts to allegations of untruths and evasions its leaders invariably fail to get their well burst credibility ball over the line of believability. They are stopped short every single time. People just think they are being winded up when listening to Sinn Fein. They half expect the late Jeremy Beadle to jump out at the end of each Sinn Fein interview.

In a country of 5 million people, it is easy to find six million who don’t believe a word Sinn Fein says.