The Irish nationalism of 'Star Trek'

Irish nationalists are spreading a meme featuring a scene from

Star Trek: The Next Generation

.

In it, the android Data lists political achievements achieved through violence, and one of them is the Irish unification of 2024. The episode, titled A

Noble Cause

, aired in the United States in 1990, and a BBC investigation has found that It was never broadcast in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

Sky programmed a version in 1992 with the discord scene censored.

The BBC is only aware of having broadcast that episode - uncut - once, in prime time at 2.39 in the morning on September 29, 2007.

The scene contains a classic

Star Trek

resource , where it is common for historical facts and figures to be listed, mixing truth and fiction.

For example: the three great singers in history were Viardot, Callas and the Klingon soprano K'Ammar.

It seemed to the screenwriter that 2024 was a date futuristic enough to place any anodyne fantasy on it.

She did not have the longevity of

Star Trek

, ubiquitous on many platforms, but she also did not take into account the BBC censors, subject in those years to anti-terrorist legislation that did not even ignore science fiction.

The new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, from Sinn Féin, has promised a unification referendum, and the Data scene has come in handy for her campaign.

There are already those who study this meme as an unexpected and subtle way of influencing public opinion through the cutting and pasting of pop culture, and others have pointed out how ridiculous censorship could be.

I took the opportunity to rewatch the episode, in which some terrorists kidnap the doctor from the Enterprise, whose crew finds itself in the middle of a dispute between a separatist group and the government of a turbulent planet.

As so many other times in the series, moral dilemmas are raised that no one resolves, leaving the judgment to the viewer.

This trademark subtlety must have greatly bothered the British censor, who felt that Captain Picard was too ambiguous about political violence.

The curious thing is that almost no one remembers today that the topic of the chapter was terrorism, nor does any of the Sinn Féin sympathizers who spread the meme seem to remember it.

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