Air quality in Beijing is a hot topic for international news reportersI’m off to witness the Olympic spectacle in Beijing and only sorry that my trip did not take in the awesome opening ceremony which surpassed any before. It’s clear to the world that no stone has been left unturned in Beijing to enable China to set out its stall.

By tomorrow, I should be in the centre of the city and am particularly interested to see for myself what the television cameras have been reflecting. Television news sees China in two very different lights. On the one hand, no report could underestimate the incredible organisation of the Games and advancement of China itself. On the other, there are the ongoing protests and criticism of China’s human rights record without which no coverage of the Games seems complete.

I suspect you could live amongst this vast nation of 1.3 billion for months and still not comprehend where the truth lies. For my own part, I’m keeping an open mind not least because I know from long experience of Northern Ireland, how protesters can take undue advantage of reporters and cameras.

My impression to date is that some of the reports have been struggling to create a non-existent crisis.

I think back to the doom-laden reporting of the early stages of the Olympic torch protests. Trouble along the route was reported as only a taste of worse to come so much so that I feared neither myself never mind the torch might ever reach Beijing. But it has. If you were to get the scripts of the news bulletins which covered its journey, I think you would be surprised how over the top some of them were.

Then there’s the ongoing issue of whether we will even survive the air quality in Beijing. I’m certainly not packing a mask and I am intrigued by the debate over whether what occasionally blocks out the sun in Beijing is really serious pollution or good old-fashioned fog. Again, my lungs will tell me soon enough in the next few days.

Finally, I was intrigued by one of the BBC’s many human rights reports from China, while on holiday. There must be a host of foreign correspondents scouring the Chinese countryside for evidence of rights abuses.

This particular BBC report focussed on a preacher in Beijing who has been banned from the capital for the duration of the Games. The BBC’s veteran correspondent, John Simpson, in his inimitable style, complete with guide/interpretor, was filmed shouting his questions from the perimeter fence of a police station. The preacher was under some loose form of detention but was still able to gesticulate wildly at Simpson through an open window and shout his replies to his questions down a mobile phone.

The whole episode looked totally bizarre and made me wonder if the treatment of this preacher represented a sufficient violation of human rights to hit the BBC national news headlines. Indeed, the preacher, himself, looked a trifle unhinged and I wondered if the Chinese authorities might even be forgiven for trying to restrain him from spoiling the party in Beijing.

Talking of news, I appeared briefly on France’s national bulletin last week perhaps looking just as bizarre as the Chinese preacher. There I was touring the countryside of Languedoc in a taxi, wine-tasting, admiring a church and having an excellent lunch at a golf club. The France 2 TV channel had sent a camera team from Paris to southern France for a fortnight to find holiday stories for its lunchtime and evening bulletins and I was picked upon by pure coincidence as a likely tourist guinea-pig.

The news report focussed on a new taxi service, where drivers speak the language of their passengers, and groups of tourists can hire the cars at fairly reasonable prices to spend a morning or afternoon touring the region, much as visitors here like to see the Giant’s Causeway or the Mountains of Mourne.

Some evenings I’m left wondering does the British Broadcasting Corporation know where Britain is, so obsessed is it with reporting from the far corners of the world. Happily, this was not the case in France, nor is it with RTE’s national news, which strikes a much better balance between news from home and abroad.

At any rate, I look forward next year in the holiday month of July or August to the BBC featuring lots of stories from Northern Ireland and I think this is challenge for the excellent Mark Simpson, its new Ireland correspondent. Good luck, Mark. Imagine the city centre of Belfast or Londonderry. It’s Friday night late. At least 10,000 people, young and old, are on the streets. There is lots of alcohol everywhere.

Imagine indeed. Does anyone doubt that such a gathering in this country, or more so in cities across the water, would be a recipe for yob drunkenness and trouble? That thought went through my mind as I sat beside Madame, the Mayor of Montpellier, in south-west France, in the warm evening air of her city last week. We were surrounded by 12,000 locals and tourists in the Place de la Comedie.

It was an extraordinary sight. The setting was the equivalent of the grounds of Belfast City Hall and Donegal Place or around the Guildhall in Derry and Waterloo Place. But there the comparison ended because there was hardly a police officer in sight nor the slightest hint of an angry word or any disturbance.

I asked myself why should this be? What’s so different in our make-up? Is there something in our body politic, in our behaviour, that is inherently foul because it seems no night here is complete without drunken rows, screaming police sirens, and young people behaving badly.

Every Friday night this summer, Montpellier has run its massively successful street festival without any apparent problems. Wine, by the glass and the bottle, is everywhere because the city is surrounded by vineyards. Yet I didn’t see a single person falling over or looking unduly inebriated.

Of course to be seen drunk in public in France is regarded as a social stigma. In contrast, Northern Ireland’s double Smirnoff and Harp six-pack brigade aspire to a state of leglessness every weekend. Until someone, somewhere mounts a campaign — as has happened with drink driving and with smoking — to change that habit, the image of our towns and cities will continue to suffer.

Every now and then, we will also have the appalling headlines of unsuspecting visitors attacked in our streets, as has happened in the past year. I know that councils and mayors are criticised for embarking on junkets to foreign places but I would strongly recommend civic officials to visit Montpellier and not just for the Friday night experience.

Not for nothing is Montpellier one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe. It may be small but it has transformed itself in the past decade from a fairly mundane place into a vibrant, youthful and increasingly attractive location to live.

In so many ways, it has done what other places have not. There is a modern tram system. Car traffic is restricted but car parking is in abundance. It is a pleasure to walk the pedestrianised streets of the centre. A new state of the art sports stadium puts Northern Ireland’s appalling tardiness on this subject into perspective. Montpellier is also capital of a region, dependent for centuries on the land — just like Northern Ireland — but which has become the focus of a new drive in technology and attracted new industry.

I know we all see far off fields as greener but this is one small city from which I believe we could learn. So I say to the mayors of Belfast and Derry, if you go on a junket to Montpellier, I won’t complain.