Teen riots in the North see news cycle turn full circle

World of Politics with Harry McGee

I remember my first week working for the Sunday Press in the early 1990s. There was a lot happening in the North and very little else. The editor, the late Michael Keane, threw his eyes up to heaven. “If our lead story is on the North our sales go down like a lead balloon,” he explained.

I’d say for the first two decades of my career, the North was the recurring story that we returned to day after day, week after week. I spent a fair amount of my early career in Dublin heading up to Belfast, or Derry, or points in between.

After the Good Friday Agreement, the dominance of that one story began to change – and of course, there were big weeping and historical events that happened afterwards.

I will never forget covering the horrific aftermath of the Omagh bombing, which claimed 29 lives in 1998. There was the Northern Bank Raid; the row over decommissioning; the unlikely alliance between the DUP and Sinn Féin, and the even unlikelier friendship between the Chuckle Brothers, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness,

The North no longer dominated media here in quite the same way. We had the Celtic Tiger and the building boom and the never-ending tribunals of inquiry.

And then we had the crash; and the collapse of Fianna Fáil; and for the following three or four years, it was all about the Troika and memorandums of understanding.

And then we had Brexit. If ever there was a news topic with magical soporific powers it was it. Still, on a funereally slow news day you could always rely on Brexit to give you something that you could claim as a line or an advance, even if it subsequently turned out to be a puff of smoke.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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