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EU Mythbuster: No. 2 - Northern Irish Journalism
Finding a good journalist in Northern Ireland seems to be incredibly difficult, as illustrated by Jim Gracey's article in today's Sunday Life. It's been obvious for some time now that Gracey is pushing the Maze agenda, but today he gave a free platform to Jim Boyce (IFA President and supreme self-publicist) to paint any fans who dare disagree with the white elephant proposal as an enemy of Northern Ireland's football team.
Gracey betrayed his own agenda when he said "All 10,000 block-bookings from the last World Cup qualifying series have been renewed and a waiting list is dependent on how many more will be permitted under new Health and Safety regulations."
Anyone who has spoken to the IFA recently will know that due to the work-dodgers at Royal Mail, the association still hasn't received all the renewal forms that were sent out, and it's been reported that as of Friday they were still receiving forms posted on 2nd February. Therefore they're not making any comment about the number of block bookings sold at this point. The waiting list is dependent on how many people renew their block-bookings, not health and safety (another favourite scaremongering rumour put about to spread the lie that not agreeing to the Maze is tantamount to treaason). So why pretend it's sold out? Well Gracey has to resort to this kind of statement in order to make anyone believe that Northern Ireland will ever fill a 42,000 seater stadium.
That's just one reason why fans are saying no!
Follow up:
Anyway, back to Boyce. In an attempt to silence any potential protestors before they've said a word. Boyce said "Any disruption of the game will do the cause of Northern Ireland football no good. In fact it would provide enemies of our game with ammunition to use against us."
Gracey, of course, didn't see fit to challenge the blethering idiocy evident in Boyce's statement, saying "[Boyce's] fear is that any images of unrest in the stands could be used to tarnish the name of Northern Ireland football as a whole." This word fear keeps cropping up in the report. Could it be that Gracey is trying to inject a little fear into the readers in the hope of demonising and/or negating any protest?
Disruption of the game? Ammunition? What do Boyce and Gracey think the fans are going to do, storm onto the pitch and take the players hostage? Ignoring the fact that Boyce is clearly more interested in how it will look than addressing the cause of the discontent, it just takes a brief look at the OurWeeCountry forum to see that regardless of their disgust at the Maze plans, supporters generally don't want to do anything but show support for the players.
Boyce continued to rant "So why the need for public protests when we are engaging fans in the decision-making process? I would appeal instead to them to trust us and leave the issue in our hands," apparently oblivious to the fact that he'd just contradicted himself in the space of 2 sentences. Besides, members of the Amalgamation have made requests to be allowed to present their case; requests to which the IFA were less than receptive. Oh, and the it was allegedly suggested to the IFA that they ballot block-bookers as a guage of fan opinion. It was only when they refused to even respond to this suggestion that the Amalgamation carried out their own survey of fans, which found that between 86.5% of fans disagreed with the Maze proposals, which the IFA went on to back regardless of this survey and of a small protest at IFA HQ.
Since the Maze debacle really took off last year, the local press have been unashamedly biased in their reporting of the issue, particularly the Belfast Telegraph sports team. Their unquestioning acceptance of every word that eminates from the NIO, despite refusal of various Freedom of Information (that's a laugh!) requests shows that there really must be a complete lack of journalistic talent in Northern Ireland. There certainly is in the Belfast Telegraph offices.