Death and drama that drives news hounds into battle

Date Published: 02-Apr-2012

Many years ago when the Irish Independent first used colour printing, the legendary then-editor Vinnie Doyle said that he first recognised the need for colour photography when Concorde crashed over France in 2000, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew – and the Indo didn’t really get a real sense of flames in black and white.

Taken in one way, it was an extraordinarily callous reaction to a tragedy – but it’s a typical response from a pure bred news hound, and one mirrored by ITN foreign correspondent Bill Neely during a compulsive late night BBC documentary entitled As Others See Us last week.

Neely, now ITN’s International Editor, was recalling the night that he travelled as a young reporter to the scene of the Droppin’ Well bombing – one of the most catastrophic mass murders of the entire Northern Troubles – when he answered his own question as to why anyone would want to do this job.

There is, he admitted, an excitement about covering disasters – and it’s an admission, he added, that reporters are reluctant to make – but it showed remarkable honesty in the midst of what was a fascinating documentary.

The idea was a simple one – get four of the most familiar faces, both of the Troubles and in the wider news context, to come back to Northern Ireland now and meet up with some of those who were the subjects of their work from the Sixties through to the Nineties.

Reporters Martin Bell, Peter Taylor, Kate Adie and Bill Neely all came back to see how the North had changed since peace broke out, and to visit again what remained of those housing estates and street corners from which they reported at the height of the conflict.

Bell went on to become a hardened war reporter – not to mention a survivor of the bear-pit of British politics – but back then he was like a fish out of water with his cut-glass accent and wide-eyed innocence.

The old footage of this mop-haired young fogey at the tail-end of the Sixties, crouched in the side streets over-flowing with rubble, and with the sound of heavy gunfire behind him, was evocative and almost nostalgic.

He was one of the first from the BBC’s head office to be based in Belfast and he had two problems – one was the ever-present danger of injury or even death, but the second was trying to convince his British audience that this merited any airtime at all.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.