Present Tense:A few years ago someone in RTÉ was telling me how delighted the station was with Prime Time's ratings. The current affairs flagship was pulling in big ratings every week, and those jumped even higher for the special investigations. There was just one problem: the North. Any time the story was about Northern Ireland, ratings slumped. From deep within Montrose, you could almost make out the collective click of remote controls as viewers switched over to something else.
Around the same time, the Daily Telegraphreported that journalists in ITN had noticed that whenever a bulletin led with news about Northern Ireland, thousands of viewers switched off. It was posing a problem for editors, because putting the North as a lead item was like pulling the plug on a perfectly healthy heart rate.
And when, in 2001, BBC1's Question Time came from Belfast, a Bradford viewer wrote to the BBC website: "Please, never broadcast from Northern Ireland again. The audience are too obsessed with local issues. Their narrow, bigoted opinions are of no interest to an English audience. What a shower!"
The shower washed in again this week. RTÉ's Questions and Answers came live from Belfast, and at 303,000 viewers the ratings were average for the show, although it would have been interesting to see if the same figures would have held up if the show hadn't been broadcast on the eve of the election. Because the broad coverage of the elections in recent weeks, across radio, TV and print, will have been the latest test of a theory that suggests that, while Northern Ireland is an important and relevant story, boy is it boring.
For many years now, Northern Ireland has offered a challenge to editors and journalists in the Republic and, probably more so, in Britain. "Years ago, when I was editing the Guardian," Peter Preston wrote in the Observer last year, "two instincts tugged at the attention week by week. You knew that some stories - say, particular shifts in the Northern Ireland crisis - were reader-repellent. Lead the front page with them and sales dropped, usually by around 10,000 copies."
"You knew, too, that this was a common curse around Fleet Street because the red tops virtually abandoned Irish coverage."
He wasn't saying that the story wasn't worthy (in fact, the anecdote was used as proof of journalism's duty to prove otherwise), but he was admitting something that has been known for some time in both countries. To varying degrees, the public finds the political inertia tedious, is tired of the familiar cast of characters spouting the same old lines and is baffled by the narrow-mindedness and intense parochialism.
The British press has largely ignored this election, turning to it only on polling day, so as not to bother its readers until absolutely necessary. In that regard, it is now treating the region as it would any minor foreign country. It is understandable that most of the British public has little idea of the region's political subtleties, because they became used to giving it some attention only when they heard a boom. The North became a story drummed out to the rhythm of bomb blasts, and people began to ignore the intervening intransigence and inertia until the habit became too difficult to break.
Here, of course, there is far more attention paid, although it would be interesting to know how much of the extensive coverage of constituencies and characters actually engaged viewers, listeners and readers in the Republic. What's more, the southern media continues to show (occasionally dutiful) interest in the North to the point that we show more interest in it than it does in us.
Viewers in the Republic are also long used to switching off Northern news bulletins, which, despite the modern peace, remain incessantly grim. If you can manage to stick through the lead stories over the course of a few evenings, you'll find it such a litany of misery that it becomes almost bleakly comic.
But another thing you'll notice is just how uninterested the Northern media is in what happens in the South. When seven fishermen drowned off the Wexford coast in January, it was treated as a minor story on their TV bulletins and in their newspapers. If seven fishermen had died off the Antrim coast, RTÉ would not have put it several items down the news, nor would the newspapers have relegated it to the inside pages.
Decades of self-examination and a political landscape in which every brick and every paving stone is of relevance has created a bubble in Northern Ireland.
The southern media might look in regularly, but it will be interesting to see how much longer its public will follow. There's a generation growing up that will not see this story as being one about stepping gingerly away from carnage. This election was about water charges and house prices as much as it was about fighting a territorial war by other means. Increasingly, Northern political concerns have as much relevance here as do those in Bradford. That may be a wonderful sign of progress, but it won't make it any more interesting.
