COVERING THE NEWS IN ULSTER

TV thrives on conflict. So TV has thrived on Ulster, the six British-controlled counties that make up Northern Ireland.

Sporadic pictures from this strife-torn region have shown mostly Molotov cocktails, bombings and other violence between Protestants and Catholics.

What American TV audiences are rarely shown or told, though, is that despite an undertone of peril, life here goes on somewhat routinely these days. The key word is somewhat .

“Actually,” said a grinning Ray Hayden, drinking beer in a dingy Belfast pub, “I felt more threatened in New York last year. I kept looking over my shoulder wherever I went. I was scared the whole time.”

“We watch CNN (Cable News Network),” said Norman Stockton, as Hayden nodded. “You think there’s violence in the United States 24 hours a day if you watch CNN.”

Baby-faced Hayden is the industrial reporter and sardonic Stockton is the political reporter for “Good Evening Ulster,” the main commercial news program serving Ulster. It is produced by Ulster Television here, one of 15 regional companies that make up Britain’s ITV, or commercial TV system.

About half a mile away in this battle-scarred city of 360,000 is the Ulster headquarters of the competing London-run British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), which includes both TV and radio.

For Britain, the centuries-old Ulster conflict has been a critical, sometimes bloody story. Violence is diminishing. In the last 18 years alone, though, nearly 2,500 have died in the feud between Protestant extremists wishing to remain under British control and Catholic extremists seeking to end British rule in Ulster and unite with the Irish Republic.

Hence, the barroom nonchalance of Hayden and Stockton notwithstanding, there is an ongoing threat of violence here that extends to Ulster Television and especially to the publicly financed BBC, which is still perceived by many as an outsider.

“We’ve been covering the story of violence for almost 20 years,” Rowan Hand, the BBC’s deputy editor of news and current affairs here, remarked coolly in his office. In one week last year, the BBC lost three camera-crew cars to gunmen from the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA), although the crews were allowed to go free.

“It was really hairy last year when there were huge loyalist (Protestant) rallies, and we had people with cracked bones and equipment destroyed,” Hand said. “One of the most frightening things that can happen to you is getting out and finding yourself in the middle of a mob.”

Charges of bias come from both sides. “At best it’s an angry call, at worst a punch in the mouth,” said Graham McKenzie, the BBC radio news editor here and former producer of “Inside Ulster.”

The 46-year-old McKenzie speaks with great intensity. “Reporters here have lived under continual threats since 1969, and during that time we’ve been popular with one side and then the other. When we report that the IRA is blowing things up and the Catholics are having hunger strikes, the Protestants accuse us of condoning it.” And vice versa.

It’s the universal blame-the-messenger response to bad news. “I got phoned up by an irate lady who told me I didn’t know what it was like to live here,” McKenzie said. “Obviously, she felt I was from Mars. But I do live here.”

McKenzie surveyed the gray-walled newsroom. “There are few people in this newsroom who have not suffered, who don’t know someone who’s suffered or whose family hasn’t suffered from violence. There are even some people here whose relatives have been murdered.”

McKenzie used to be a BBC radio news reader in London, a different world and a different mindset. “Nobody ever rang me up and complained there. People treated you like you were a celebrity. But here, you’re the guy who puts out alleged lies. It’s so bad that some of our guys don’t even admit they work for the BBC in their own communities. They say they are civil service.”

Ulster Television is viewed by many here as more populist friend than foe, and the BBC as the large, impersonal representative of London.

“A politician advised us not to cover a parade the other day,” McKenzie said. Advised? “We all knew what that meant--that we shouldn’t go there. We went anyway. Walked around in tight circles. No one went off by himself.”

Perhaps violence at whatever level ultimately becomes routine. Instead of disrupting your life, doesn’t it become your life? “You get used to it, yet it has brutalized everyone,” McKenzie replied. “I think it has changed the attitudes of the people, both Catholic and Protestant. They are less caring than they were in the 1960s. The human animal adjusts. It used to be that when two people were killed it was a story for months. Then it was a story for days. Now it’s forgotten.”

In another area of the newsroom sat Margaret Gilmore, 30, who is returning to the BBC in London after two years in Belfast. “I spent most of my time covering bombs, shootings and politics,” she said. “It’s a funny thing to work here. Everybody knows who’s doing what. Everybody knew who was carrying out murders of Catholics in Northern Belfast last year and everyone knew the Catholics would go in and get him. And they did.”

Everyone has a story too, and Gilmore’s is about a Protestant parade that she covered last year:

“Someone came out of the crowd and started beating up our crew. Then, about a half-mile away, what the police call ‘serious riots’ began to break out. It was about 300 rioting youths. The Army (British) and police started moving in and shooting plastic bullets to disperse them. And then some masked men started occupying these nasty, run-down residential flats, and they began ripping everything out and throwing everything out the windows. Then these masked men had literally a conveyor belt of petrol bombs going. One would get a bomb ready, another would prime it, another would light it and another would throw it. It was incredible.”

Were her two years in Belfast frightening? “There were moments,” she said, “but you learn where to be and where not to be. Like we had a lighting man parked where he shouldn’t. Someone put a gun to his head and told him to hand over the car.”

The irony is that other areas of Britain--Glasgow, Scotland, is one--have much higher crime rates than Ulster, even with its warring Protestants and Catholics. So Ulster Television’s Ray Hayden may be right in fearing New York more than Belfast.

Yet Ulster Television itself was bombed a decade ago and is still wary and not universally loved.

“When you go into certain areas, you expect to be approached by the hard men and advised what you can and cannot do,” said Coln McWilliams, news editor at Ulster Television. “Often as not, the Catholics will give you a punch and then tell you not to be there. The Protestants warn you first.”

Not everyone is warned, though. Five years ago, when McWilliams was still a reporter, he was checking on a man murdered by Protestants when he discovered that the victim was a lifelong friend.

“The then-news director told me to grab a camera crew and do the story. That’s when it hit me. Before then, I was doing stories about families I didn’t know. But this was a family I knew, one that lived just down the road from me.

“The Protestants had picked him up the evening before and burned him with cigarettes. Then they tied up his feet and strung him up over a beam and kept constantly dropping him on his head. Again and again and again.”

Had his friend been involved in politics? “No,” McWilliams said. “They killed him because he was Catholic.”