I started my St. Patrick’s Day on the grounds of my new Church in a heated discussion with a local Television journalist. My argument was that the Press do not use the power of their prophetic potential but instead fall for sensationalising news that they could actually play their part in eliminating. Sadly, St, Patrick’s Day in the “Holy Lands” area of Belfast, beside Queens’ University and Fitzroy Presbyterian Church, has been a big but bad news story in the past few years; are the press interested in good stories, I hear you ask? 2009 saw the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations end in a full scale riot between drunken students and the police. Forums headed by MPs, high powered committees in the city Universities, residents meetings and TV documentaries left many of us frustrated at the seeming hopelessness of the situation.
Against my natural inclinations I was not going to give up hope and at 9.30am on the morning in question to be part of our loaves and fishes attempt at a miracle – setting up a refreshment table to be a calming presence in the area. My feeling had been that in previous years the police and media, as they did no more than go about their business, were perhaps a catalyst of the trouble and perhaps a few meek Christians might be less volatile. It was therefore a little disconcerting when as soon as we set up our table there was a TV camera stuck in our faces. Asked if I would be interviewed I suggested I would prefer if they left. When the journalist asked why I suggested that the press should play a more prophetic role in such flashpoint incidents and that if they were interested in anything other than creating a story they would have been more strategic in their approach rather than arriving in first thing in the morning suggesting to the entire area what the day was going to bring.
I shared with the journalist the words of the novelist Ben Okri and a previous story from Northern Ireland where the press told the wrong story. Okri writes, “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations.” How the story we tell can shine liberating light on our fallen human predicament or keep us behind the bars of our darkness came to me in the use of a real live news story by the British press in 1996. In any ordinary year it was no big deal; just the simple election of a Students’ Union president at our University. What gave this year’s election news worthiness was that two years after the Terrorist Cease Fires in the first days of a brand new peaceful Northern Ireland, the past had become involved. Two of the candidates were children of major movers in our divided history; the daughter of Bernadette Devlin and the son of John Taylor, both former MPs, the former Nationalist the latter Unionist. There was an invisible third candidate, a wee Presbyterian girl called Michelle McAuley; an independent.
On the morning of the election one British broadsheet had a photograph of all three on the front cover with day of reckoning type story. The day after the election the story was relegated to page seven of the local Northern Ireland press because it hadn’t ended up the big story; Michelle had beaten the past into history. The press did not want to know. It was the reservoir of our secret value. Northern Ireland was not prepared to move on. To ask if we wanted a different future, an Alternative Ulster as punk band Stiff Little Fingers had once called for, seemed to be as stupid as Jesus asking a begging cripple if he want to be healed. Yet, Jesus was shrewd. It is always a vital question in redemption; do you want your identity to be erased and a new one to be born? Northern Ireland didn’t want healed. At least the press didn’t. They didn’t want to tell the astounding story that the students of Queens University had given. The old story was front page, any born again possibility was demoted to a paragraph deep in the papers trivial stories. We needed the new story but were denied its telling! Our story tellers had failed us.
I guess my problem, as a minister of religion who strategizes transformation, is to understand that the press are not focused on bringing positive change to our society but to make sure that in the competition of other news papers or television news stations they have the best story. At least that was the argument I was given on St. Patrick’s Day morning. As well as the students whose drink consumption would leave them prone to a riot we have to deal with all the other forces around the community whose own vested interest will need to be met no matter what that means to law and order. The power of the story is transformative. The press are our story tellers. Oh for a prophetic press who were about shalom rather than ratings!
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