ABSTRACT
Northern ireland has served as a nursery slope war for many journalists who went on to cover strife in Beirut, South Africa and Kosovo. It has been suited to this because it is safer and has always been safer than those other places at their worst. In Northern Ireland, the Republican paramilitaries learned the protocol before the Loyalists did. Northern ireland's complexities demand fair assessment, but sometimes the best journalistic response to the repetitive ideological intransigence of politicians who sustain division is the unanswerable question that penetrates hypocrisy. A lot of people in Northern Ireland are more accommodating in private and more considerate of the enemy's point of view than they publicly acknowledge. Northern ireland's complexities demand fair assessment, but sometimes the best journalistic response to the repetitive ideological intransigence of politicians who sustain division is the unanswerable question that penetrates hypocrisy.
