Presbyterian minister and Sinn Féin make history - but newspapers ignore it

Roy Greenslade

ROY GREENSLADE is Professor of Journalism at City University and was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1990-91. He wrote this piece on his daily blog on Britain's The Guardian media site after being at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in Belfast last weekend.

I DOUBT that many of you have ever heard of the Reverend David Latimer, a Presbyterian minister and former British Army chaplain.

And it would appear that Britain's national newspapers are determined to ensure that he remains unknown to you.

Yet Latimer made history last Friday evening by becoming the first ordained Protestant minister to give an address to the annual Sinn Féin ard fheis (conference).

In so doing, he called Martin McGuinness one of the "true great leaders of modern times". It brought the republican audience to its feet.

Indeed, the party was also making history of its own by staging the event in Belfast, the first time its ard fheis has taken place in Northern Ireland.

And another first – the Prince's Trust charity, founded by Prince Charles, had a stand in the lobby at the Waterfront Hall.

Reverend David Latimer addressing the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis

I would call that trio of firsts a news story of no little significance. Even if we accept the cynical tabloid view that "Ulster doesn't sell", we should surely expect the serious end of our press to report such a turn of events.

But there was nothing in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The BBC covered the story online in several articles, such as here (with video) and here and here (a good overview by Martina Purdey, the corporation's Northern Ireland political correspondent).

The story was covered in the Irish media, in the Irish Times and in the Irish Independent. It was the splash, as shown here, in Belfast's Irish News and made headlines in the Belfast Telegraph.

But this was not just a local story, nor even just an Irish story given that Northern Ireland is, whether one likes it or not, part of the UK.

So why was it absent from our London-based papers? If a bomb had gone off in Belfast on Friday you can bet that would have been covered.

Are we to imagine that editors believe positive political news from Northern Ireland is of no consequence? Or is it due to an absence of correspondents in Ulster's six disputed counties?

Even if that was the case, the Press Association reported the speech, so it certainly passed across the screens of the nationals.

It did happen on a Friday evening, too late for early editions, but why was it not covered later? And why was there no reaction to, and analysis of, what must surely be seen as an important development in the peace process in the Sunday papers?

I guess some will see Latimer's "performance" as a gimmick and some may well view him as a maverick (a Belfast News Letter writer certainly does) while others were sceptical too (see comments on Slugger O'Toole's blog postings).

Whatever opinion people hold of Latimer's 20-minute speech at a Sinn Féin conference, it has to be seen as a landmark moment in the bridge-building exercise between Catholics and Protestants.

I have written many times before about the failure of the British press to cover Northern Ireland properly, and its major consequence - an absence of knowledge among British people about the realities of life there.

This further example is particularly significant because it shows how good news is ignored in favour of bad news.

Latimer's appearance was the kind of bombshell political intervention that was momentous. But the British electorate don't know that.