Iraq

While the British media obsess about the situation in Iraq Ireland's coverage is dismal.

This column has been known to suggest (eg. last week) that the mainstream media usually blocks access to people calling for immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

That complaint is now unsustainable, at least in relation to the British media, and at least when it comes to British troops. The events in Basra, and the fact that they were captured in dramatic images, sent media into a tizzy of "debate", and a Sky News interactive poll found more than 80 per cent of viewers favouring immediate withdrawal. The percentage of the station's chosen pundits who took that position was much smaller, but nonetheless it could be spoken.

The anti-war march in London, and the larger one in Washington, also got some attention – though organisers of both are still waiting for the troops-out majorities on both sides of the Atlantic to get back on the streets in their pre-war numbers.

Meejit suspects Britons' passive anti-war position has been strengthened by the obvious lacunae that remain in the media coverage of events in Iraq. On the night of the photogenic violence in Basra, the BBC's Baghdad correspondent on the News at Ten stammered that there were, uh, conflicting accounts, with Iraqis saying British tanks had knocked down the jail wall, and the British saying, uh, they were negotiating at the time when the wall, um, fell. It was a straight-up challenge to viewers: who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?

British viewers, listeners and readers at least got a peek at some of the latest disastrous happenings in Iraq. This State's most official and officious organs, RTÉ and The Irish Times, seem to have decided that Iraq is still not a story. One activist summarised the attitude: "War? What war? That debate is over."

Thus on RTÉ, while Sky and BBC were videowall-to-wall Basra, the TV news barely touched the jailbreak, shrinking it from two down-the-list minutes at 1pm, to 30 baffling seconds "in other news" at 6pm, to nothing at all at 9pm. On the radio, Morning Ireland and News at One completely ignored the story, and Five Seven Live squeezed a few reassuringly pro-British minutes out of "defence analyst" Paul Beaver.

And while the Irish Examiner and the Irish Independent splashed burning pictures from Basra on page one, The Irish Times stuck the story inside, on the foreign page. As days past, it provoked no Times features coverage; eventually, after two days, an editorial appeared that was pointless even by the paper's usual standards: the events "raised serious questions about security in the city", apparently.

Well, of course Ireland is not Britain, and it's appropriate that our media doesn't obsess about British debates over troop deployment. In as much as Ireland is a partner in the Iraq war, the partnership is with the US, which treats us as a conveniently placed North Atlantic aircraft carrier.

In political terms, the war remains, however, the key global pivot of this period, its latest consequences felt along the Gulf of Mexico and in the German elections. And in historical terms, the unfolding of events in Basra bears intriguing relation to the story of British troops in Northern Ireland, where they're meant to have learned all about community-sensitive, soft-hat policing in a sectarian cauldron.

Only Daily Ireland made much of the connection between SAS dirty tricks here and there. Elsewhere, in Irish and British media, there is remarkably little curiosity about the actual conduct of this war – as in: what the heck were those two undercover guys doing there? For editors, the problem in Basra is "infiltration" of the Iraqi police by Iraqis, not the city's occupation by foreign soldiers.

If they're true to form, RTÉ and The Irish Times will give generous and dull coverage to the upcoming Iraqi constitutional referendum, and the occupation will get precious little mention.