Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 269
wrong time. Instead they both are depicted as terrorists who “got what they deserved”
(ibid. 49). The novel thus suggests that violence strikes the relatives of
innocent victims, which most of them were, in a double way. On the one hand
they have to deal with the loss of a beloved person, on the other hand they feel
the pain that the whole world believes yet another terrorist died because he deserved
it.
This form of disrespect for the dead is also taken up in Where They Were Missed.
Shortly after the husband of Saoirse’s mother’s friend has died the BBC besiege
the house of the family filming them. “It’s a disgrace, so it is, coming to juke at us
like we’re animals in a zoo, they’ve no respect, so they haven’t, no respect at all”, a
relative of the deceased critises the journalists (Caldwell 38).
The media without doubt have a wide range of influence on people watching,
reading, or listening to the news. A true, neutral and objective report is even for
the most professional journalist a hard task. News coverage thus almost always
bears the mark of the author. In the examples shown above the media even seems
to lose its representative mode. The accounts of what has happened receive a
touch of propaganda in order to fuel people’s aversion towards the other community
or the British government respectively. People who died guiltless suddenly
become connected to terrorism.
That the media took their share in worsening the conflict is also stated by
Alain Bairner. He stresses two schools of thought that treat the influence of the
media in the conflict. One of them deals with the importance of propaganda made
by the British government; the other one with the assistance of propaganda made
by paramilitary activists and their supporters. Nevertheless, both have contributed
to the persistence of the Northern Irish political crisis (Aughey and Morrow 173).
In addition foreign news coverage is supposed to have added little to the crisis.
“Instead, it is suggested that the local media in Northern Ireland have played a
significant part in supporting the rival perspectives around which the politics of
division have been centred” (ibid. 173). The expected neutrality of journalists and
broadcasters has also lapsed as the observance of media actors has shown that
they themselves very often were politically involved. Several factors such as the
“economic context of media production, indirect censorship through intimidation
and the threat of legal sanctions, direct censorship and, finally, self-censorship”
are named by Bairner as reasons for non-detached news reports (ibid. 174ff). The
British government thus partly made use of the press in their fight against terrorism.
The “banning, censorship and delays in showing of over 100 television programmes
about Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1993” have been the result of
this policy (ibid. 175).