The Political Beat

Former Ireland correspondent Denis Murray describes the changing nature of political Journalism.

The BBC in Northern Ireland began dedicated political coverage in the 1960s with the legendary W.D. 'Billy' Flackes, a great journalist with a unique machine-gun delivery. In my memory, it was always Billy looking straight into the camera with several pages of script in his hands.

He was much respected and trusted and, rather like another Ulsterman, John Cole, two decades later, he enjoyed a kind of cult figure status. Billy had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Northern Ireland and its affairs but what he did was largely straight reporting. There was rarely any analysis of what the facts might mean. (Legend has it that when a London interviewer asked him, in the way they did in those days - 'so what's the solution to the Northern Ireland problem?' Billy replied - 'Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there isn't one?')

His successor was Brian Walker, who took a more academic approach. For him, analysis was all. Reporters brought in the facts and he told the audience what they meant.

Billy and Brian were both broadcasting during the worst of times. In tandem with the appalling violence, there was the proroguing of Stormont, there was Sunningdale, the UWC strike, the Constitutional Convention. It must have seemed like Northern Ireland was in freefall.

I became Pol Corr, to use the journalistic shorthand, in 1984. I was much written up in the papers at the time as the first person with a Catholic background to hold the post. I had been Dublin correspondent for a few years but I thought this would be a relatively easy job after the conspiracies, plots and backstabbing in the Dail. It turned out to be rather different.

Jim Prior's 'rolling devolution' Assembly was in place but only three parties were involved; the UUP, DUP and Alliance. Both the SDLP and Sinn Fein had boycotted it. But all the parties gave weekly news conferences and issued statements to the media by the truckload with the result that the real place for political debate was on the airwaves.

Then along came the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. I told the Ulster Unionist leader Jim Molyneaux that he'd better get ready for it. He laughed and gently chided me for being yet another journalist who listened to rumours. I told him where and when it would be signed and what was in it. He still didn't believe me. So it came as a huge shock when it turned out to be true.

No-one talks about the Anglo-Irish Agreement now but it was an historic milestone. An Irish civil servant who helped draft it told me 20 years later that he regarded it as his best work because it had made everything else possible.

Covering the Agreement and its aftermath was an extremely difficult time for the BBC. We were seen by some as the paid mouthpieces of the Northern Ireland Office, propagandists on behalf of the Agreement. The Ulster Clubs were set up, a public and legal but somewhat shady organisation. Its Chairman, Alan Wright, said to me before one of his news conferences - 'You people are so biased.' I told him I couldn't say that every report was internally and exactly balanced but that the broad wash of the coverage overall was. I suggested that he should monitor a month of our news programmes and make his findings public. He said - 'We started recording ye last week.' I met him about six weeks after that and asked what had happened to his survey. He said - 'Ye had a lucky month.'

I was succeeded by Tom Kelly, later Jim Dougal, and then came Stephen Grimason, who had the greatest journalistic coup of us all by becoming the only journalist to get his hands on a copy of the Good Friday Agreement - BEFORE it was agreed.

Now the political chair is taken by Mark Devenport, a former Ireland Correspondent for network, and as fine a journalist as it has been my privilege to work with.

It's been an amazing experience to report on politics here. Time and again the unthinkable has become the possible, then the probable and then the actual. That will continue to happen.