(unofficial transcription)
We sometimes speak now, in very recent years, about diversity as if it was a novelty, as if it were a concept of which we have no experience in times past. And in doing so we sometimes display multiple amnesia.
We have forgotten what this continent was like, not so long ago. We have forgotten the religious tensions. We have forgotten the extent to which religion and state were intertwined. We have overlooked the fact that it is not only in the last number of years that there were difficulties with radicalised groups.
I live and work in Northern Ireland for the last number of years.
And there that past is ever present and it is a constant reminder of the extent to which considerations, which we had hoped had gone were still with us.
For more than four hundred years, there have been significant tensions in that place.
Tensions based on regions, religion, language, origin, identity, sense of self.
When I First went to live and work in Belfast, a place that I knew reasonably well, somebody said to me “there are 57 ways of knowing the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant”.
Your name, the school you went to, how you pronounce the eighth letter of the alphabet; that’s the one after g, the colour of your hair, whether one has freckles, whether you put milk in the cup before or after the tea.
Some of these have a base in reality. The reason for putting milk in the tea is revealing. The Catholic logic of this is that, if you put the milk first in the tea, you don’t break the china cup. And if you put milk first you are a Protestant because only Protestants had china cups.
And diversity in Northern Ireland has become an elaborate system of separateness where children hear a different version of the history of Northern Ireland on their parents’ knee. They go to different schools. Ninety-five percent of children go to schools that are separated by religion. They live in different places. More than ninety percent of public housing is segregated.
They play different games, they follow different sports, and they grew up to replicate exactly those things in their own children. I have identified what I describe as two syndromes in Northern Ireland. The first is “the looking glass syndrome”.
If you look into a mirror, all you see is what’s behind you. You never see through to the other side. And everything then is self-referential.
And the second syndrome is what I call “the see-saw syndrome”.
If I am down this is because you’re up, and the only way I can get up is by bringing you down. So equality for example is the limited commodity. If I have more, you have less. The glass is always half empty for me or half full for you. There is a disadvantage race that everybody seems to want to win.
Somebody says that the problem with people in Northern Ireland is; they can not live together. The actual problem of course is that they do live together. And that’s a reality with which we have to connect.
It seems to me that one of the significant challenges for public broadcasting in our times is to ensure that people can not live exclusively in their own cultures.
And it brings us to the question of why the issue of diversity is important for broadcasters and particularly for public broadcasters? To me there is one simple response to that question and that is, if we are funded by the public, than we must serve that public. And if we want that funding, that licence fee, that tax to come from all the public, than we must serve all that public.
There is no escape from that logic. It’s not an easy task because we have been very good at excluding people for a very long time.
The Christian bible says “the poor are always with us”. Well, they are not in broadcasting, they are rarely seen in our mainstream programming.
Women have been excluded from the airwaves for a very long time. They are now more present on air and in the control room, but still underrepresented in management and that situation may be disimproving rather than improving.
People with disabilities are rarely seen as much as they should be, except in programs for or about themselves.
One of the constellations of age is that, and I was glad to see the old footage from NOS earlier in the day, because it’s possible to remember just how things were, and how much has changed, but it’s also possible to realise just how little may have changed.
I think that the fundamental challenge to us, as I said, is not to allow people exclusively in their own cultures. One of the real challenges of leadership, and broadcasters have roles of leadership, is to bring people to unfamiliar destinations. Where there is a mirror to provide a window. So that they can see through into the totality and the richness of the societies in which they live. We have seen remarkable change in our time in broadcasting, and I think that one of our key roles is to persuade the audience of what the Belfast poet Louis McNeeth called “the need to rejoice in the drunkenness of things being various”.
It is a good model. It is a good principle and I commend it to you.
I thank you for your patience in listening.
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