Hit The North: Faux News Is Good News

History may well repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce; on its sixth time round the block, though, you suspect it’s just taking the piss.

By July 2001 the annual Drumcree confrontation had become a pale shadow of its former state-worrying, teeth-rattling self. The apocalyptic bent of the first few years had by large subsided, leaving a cheesed-off global media facing the prospect of three days in Armagh looking for fresh angles amongst the mid-summer mud and old men in caravans.
Four months earlier, nursing a redundancy package and unlimited access to the web, Newton Emerson, a Portadown-born test technician for Nortel, decided to have some fun poking sticks at the recreational sectarianism and dunderhead politics both of his hometown and in Northern Ireland in general.
Taking his cue from the peerless U.S satirical site The Onion, and drawi über raw-nerve-rubber Chris Morris, he mocked up the front page of an imaginary newspaper, ran some stories glorying in the ridiculousness of provincial Ulster life and emailed the link to a selected few friends. He called it The Portadown News because his mum once worked on the long defunct paper.
Every week he would update the site – broadening his list of legitimate targets – and watch in astonishment as the hits count rose from forty to four hundred to over ten thousand within a matter of months. Type Portadown into Google and guess what came up first? Come July and in anticipation of the annual news-scrum on his doorstep, Emerson ran up a special issue that took fewer prisoners than usual. The hacks gathered in town took note and, perhaps picking up on the gravity in the midst of the absurdity, decided to spread word of the site. By the end of that summer The Portadown News had been established not only as a top location for a weekly chuckle, but also as an appropriately skewed chronicle of a resurfacing society contorting into weird, demented shapes.
“It was absurd to take the situation over Drumcree seriously,” Emerson explains, “You always remember that people died – Constable O’Reilly, Michael McGoldrick Elizabeth O’Neill – and you have to be conscious of the fact that that is not funny and never will be. But I just felt that taking the whole thing seriously, in fact taking the situation in general seriously, almost made it worse. There’s an official Sinn Fein line on The Portadown News and it goes something like this: we don’t read the nonsense because it’s childish, juvenile drivel. And I can’t argue with them. They’re absolutely right. It’s all those things, but so is the situation and so are they. Think about it – any paramilitary symbolism, Orange marches, Gerry Adam’s beret – it’s all as gay as Christmas and they’re absolutely oblivious to the fact. Daphne Trimble running against Jeffrey Donaldson, every word written or spoken by Danny Morrison, the fact that Sinn Fein’s gift shop sells pens shaped like baseball bats – I mean, how can I top that for ridiculousness?”
Our multitude local ne’er-do-wells may well make a habit of leaving the ball on the penalty spot with the goal unguarded – and Emerson is merciless when it comes to slotting away sitters – but The Portadown News also has a happy knack for firing in long-range spectaculars. This satire does not emanate from the cosy Billy and Tim world of The Hole In The Wall Gang; it is corrosive, nasty and challenging. However, far from being the barbed domain of a detached observer, judging by its obvious (near pathological) fascination with the minutiae of Northern Irish political life, it is very clear that the TPN is the work of an obsessed, engaged, insider.
“The politics is silly, the tribalism is deadly serious. Right from the very start I had worked out the tribal line for the site. I went straight onto the message board and announced that I was a Protestant from Portadown who, when it comes up, votes Ulster Unionist – deal with it. Northern Ireland is full of people who will point the finger and make accusations of bias, so, to short-cut that I decided to hold my hands up at the very beginning and admit it: yeah, of course I’m biased. And I discovered that taking that rattle off those kinds of people, it totally diffused them.”
Three years on from its launch, a new book that gathers together highlights from every edition to date has been published. It is a mean-spirited, intermittently unpleasant and frequently hilarious tone. It is also, in its own peculiar way, an historical document that rings horribly true. The Drumcree franchise may have become devalued in recent years, but this series looks set to run and run.

The Portadown News; The Best Bits is published by Gills & MacMillan www.theportadownnews.com