FOR my entire life I have believed that things in Northern Ireland will get better. That they had to. When I was growing up, every horrific death that was on the news would bring forth voices that would say as much. This needs to stop, this has to be the end, make this tragedy the last one we must suffer. It never was though. They just kept happening, people wedded to violence kept on killing, kept on destroying lives, traumatising generations and generations of people.
Since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, the killing has mostly ceased, but not entirely. But our children aren’t fed the daily diet of brutality and death that we had normalised and become desensitised to growing up. But regardless, we are still stuck in the ‘it’ll get better soon, it has to’ cycles of old.
We’ve no government. But if we hold on, keep believing, we might do some day. Paramilitaries are still active, our terror threat level is severe. But it might be OK, we just need to wait it out, to hope it will get better. We seem to be always waiting, hoping that things will get better here. We are perpetually waiting, perpetually hoping, like it’s our full-time occupation.
The eyes of the world were on us last week. Whatever your thoughts are on the American President, the stark reality is that wherever he goes, the world’s media follow. The spotlight was firmly on us, and what did we bring into that spotlight? We brought kids rioting, masked men marching on our streets, politicians calling the President pro-republican, others complaining about the lack of a flag on his Presidential car and a big fat empty seat of government that has cobwebs where political leaders are meant to be.
I was covering the Presidential visit for Canadian news channel CBC, and the Good Friday Agreement in the days before that for Al Jazeera - both with millions of viewers. I spent most of the week in Belfast in hotels that were bursting at the seams with the world’s media, all ready to beam the Northern Ireland story to billions worldwide.
There was a moment, when I was standing at the side of the road alongside German, Dutch, American, Canadian, English, French, Spanish and Middle Eastern media crews as masked men in paramilitary uniforms marched to the beat of a drum from a troubled era, that I was thoroughly ashamed of this place. And that was before the rioting had kicked off.
We had an opportunity to show off the best of us to the world, that we were a stable country, we are doing well, we are welcoming to visitors, a good place to invest in. All true things to be said about Northern Ireland that were sadly lost in the noise created by those - a minority, it has to be said - ceaselessly intent on holding us back. The story of our lives.
The media simply hold a mirror up to society and this is what was reflected back: a broken, dysfunctional, warped place where people clap and cheer for angry, militant and violent behaviour and encourage our young people being violent towards the police. A constant jarring, a constant conflict of views, on the streets and in our corridors of power. Regardless of what else is going on, this was newsworthy, this was the story, this was our story, that’s how the news works.
It was a depressing few days, and I have to admit, the perpetual hoping that things would get better was harder to conjure up.
But that hope was restored somewhat when President Biden visited Ulster University in Belfast. The world’s media shifted their focus to the brand new building in the city centre, a big glass beacon of light and hope for the future. It focused on the young people who are carving their future there and they themselves provided such a sharp contrast to those intent on violence and destruction.
But isn’t that Northern Ireland in a nutshell? Our hearts are kicked about like a football, our souls are scrubbed with the Brillo pads Northern Irish society frequently provides, then hope comes along again, picks us up and tells us things will get better, to hold on.
And we do, because it’s what we do best - hold on and hope.
