FROM THE ARCHIVES:Actress Siobhán McKenna upset unionists and got the BBC into trouble again in the North with comments she made on a US television show during the IRA's Border Campaign during the late 1950s, as the anonymous writer of this Letter from Belfast explained.
– JOE JOYCE
NOW A woman, in the person of Miss Siobhán McKenna, the Belfast-born actress, has outdone the Hardings and the Whickers in drawing the B.B.C. into yet another row in Belfast, and evoking protests from the people there. Some of her remarks in a television programme on Saturday night were completely wrong-headed, and warranted a rebuttal.
The programme was one of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s “Small World” series, first seen in America a month ago. Miss McKenna, James Thurber and Noel Coward were taking part in a discussion presided over by Mr. Ed Murrow, of the C.B.S., on the subject of wit and humour.
Near the end Mr. Murrow remarked to Miss McKenna: “I hear from the underground that there is something you want to say about Mr. Macmillan .” The actress then criticised Mr. Macmillan for his protest to Mr. de Valera about the release of the Curragh internees, and described it as “impertinent.” She pointed out that she was surprised that Mr. de Valera, for whom she normally had great respect, should put in prison “young idealists” who were fighting for the same cause he had fought for in 1916. Fair-enough comment.
Mr. Coward, who up to that seemed to be taking Miss McKenna’s remarks as a joke, then remarked that the English were really rather tired of the I.R.A. putting bombs through letter-boxes. The actress retorted that he was out of date on the subject. The present campaign, she said, was being fought on the frontier, and there was no threat to human life. Bridges and some “hated Customs posts” had been blown up.
Miss McKenna’s “no threat to human life” pronouncement, whether deliberate evasion or ignorance of the facts, will make enlightened people in the South, not alone in the North, hot under the collar. More than 12 lives have been lost in the Border campaign – four of them policemen – and Miss McKenna’s unfortunate turn of phrase will only anger people whose reaction to these killings in the period since 1956 has been restraint. And the fact that she was speaking from Dublin will not mitigate in her favour (“Small World” is a world link-up programme).
To-night Mr. Brian Faulkner, the Government Chief Whip, has resigned from the B.B.C.’s Northern Ireland Advisory Council in protest against the programme being screened. He said in a letter to Sir Ian Jacob, Director-General of the B.B.C. that the programme was aimed at the constitutional position of Northern Ireland and said the Gilbert Harding and Alan Whicker contributions had been less harmful.
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