Politicians in Northern Ireland have condemned the incident.
A live report on BBC Newsline was cut short due to children in the background chanting ‘Up The Ra’.
The report was being broadcast from Dublin during the homecoming celebrations for Ireland’s Olympic team.
Medal winners like Kellie Harrington, Fintan McCarthy and Daniel Wiffen were all present as thousands of fans welcomed them home on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
During the BBC’s report, presenter Aoife Moore was forced to stop broadcasting during Harrington’s celebrations on her home street of Portland Row after kids in the background started up the controversial chant.
Moore covered her ear and said she couldn’t hear anything over the chants as the broadcast was diverted back to the studio in Belfast.
BBC cut short live broadcast of Team Ireland homecoming after kids shout ‘Up The Ra’
TUV Carrick Councillor David Clarke said he has written to the Olympic Federation of Ireland and the director of BBC Northern Ireland raising concerns.
Mr Clarke said he was ‘shocked and appalled’ at what he saw during the broadcast and has invited the Federation to ‘publicly distance’ themselves from the chants and to “make clear that there is no place for the glorification of terrorism in sport.”
The chanting of ‘Up The Ra’ has become a hot topic for public discourse around the Ireland within the past year.
The conversation was reignited during The Wolfe Tones’ performance during Electric Picnic last year, where a record crowd chanted the controversial phrase as part of the lyrics of ‘Celtic Symphony’.
Lead singer of the band Brian Warfield announced he was suing RTÉ presenter Joe Duffy after the Irish band was accused of “glorifying slaughter” on the host’s popular radio talk show.
Warfield hit back after Duffy called his music “awful, brutal old rubbish”, by telling the Mirror: “The young people of Ireland have spoken in numbers that Joe Duffy could never get.”
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