Dateline: Dublin, Ireland — I FIND IT INVALUABLE, always, to be viewing world events via a global lens, instead of through purely American eyes. This week there’s been a powerful array of global forces at work, not least in the Middle East (left), and some good international reporting on those forces.
Journalism is often at its effective best when it takes fully into account the microcosmic human stories that play out against the background of those larger forces. Such microcosms can tellingly illuminate the macrocosm.
Here in Dublin there has been, unsurprisingly, much coverage of one particular microcosm – the uncertain fate that’s befallen a young Irish-Israeli girl called Emily Hand. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on October 7th, eight-year-old Emily (who’d been living on a kibbutz) was reported to be among the many killed on that terrible day. She was believed to be one of 130 or so dead bodies found at Kibbutz Be’eri. But now four weeks later, Israeli intelligence have told her family that detailed DNA checks reveal she was not among those killed, and must be presumed taken as a hostage to somewhere in Gaza.
A shocking turn of events, of course – especially since CNN had carried an emotional interview with her Irish father, Thomas Hand, soon after her apparent death, saying he felt her being killed was better than having her be captured. “If you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza,” he told CNN’s reporter, “that’s worse than death.”
More than one news outlet here in Dublin chose to bracket this terrible story with another international story. I should explain that British soccer makes for every bit as much Irish news as their own Gaelic Athletics do, and fervent headlines this week greeted a Colombian player for a Liverpool team in England, a high scorer named Luis Diaz — especially after he scored a vital goal in an important Premier League match.
But the headlines were not just for his sporting skill, but because his parents had been captured at gunpoint by members of a rebel guerrilla army in their home country (of Colombia). Diaz had rushed home in shock. His mother, though, was soon freed, but even as he returned to play in England … his father was still missing. And so after his triumphant goal, he displayed to the TV cameras a slogan on his shirt proclaiming Freedom for my Dad! (in Spanish of course).
Televised UK soccer, especially the Premier League, is naturally enough shown all over the world, every week, and this eye-catching move by Diaz appeared to have some effect – the rebel army was reported to be considering releasing the older Diaz.
The situation has remained much grimmer for young Emily Hand in Gaza, if that is indeed where she’s been held. Irish commentators were condemning both of these kidnappings as examples of wantonly cruel groups of armed men ruthlessly exploiting as well as murdering innocent people. The Irish, it has to be said, are all-too-familiar with the doings of cruel groups of armed men.
WHICH BRINGS ME – AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING OVERLY BLUNT in a somewhat delicate political situation – to the matter of armed men’s legacies here in Ireland. The Sinn Féin party, the political wing of the the IRA, the Irish Republican Army — this country’s home-grown group of guerilla rebels — has been prominent in the news. Not so much for anything they’ve done themselves, but actually for being an important subject for worried discussion at the annual convention of another party altogether – the longtime mainstream party of government, Fianna Fáil (meaning ‘Soldiers of Destiny” – Sinn Fein, by the way, means ‘Ourselves Alone’).
The situation facing traditional parties here in the Republic of Ireland is that in the years since Northern Ireland’s Peace Agreement in 1998, Sinn Féiners have appeared to consign the ‘armed struggle,’ as they called it, to the past, and have meanwhile grown in ordinary political strength. They now command a considerable lead in popular support across the Northern counties, which of course are still in British hands. And here in the South they look very well placed to be part of any ruling coalition that might emerge from a general election – which is expected sometime over the next year.
The anxious discussion at the Ard Fheis (party convention) centered on whether Fianna Fáil should agree to a coalition with Sinn Féin in order to hold onto power (Sinn Féin leads the opinion polls down here as well as in the North). Fianna Fail is currently in power through a coalition with that other more mainstream party, Fine Gael. The leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin was quoted in Irish media as not entirely ruling out a deal with the modern-day successors to the IRA, even while he was generally negative about it when pressed by some insistent journalists on the matter. I should really cite verbatim the conclusion drawn by a very arch-sounding political editor at the Irish Times.
“So that’s a No to Sinn Féin, then. Probably,” was the line. It sounds like a very carefully Irish way of putting it.
IRELAND COMBINES ITS STURDILY INDEPENDENT STATUS with a determined strategy of collaborating with other parts of the world – Europe most naturally, but the wider world as well. The national broadcaster RTÉ, has a morning radio show not unlike NPR’s Morning Edition, called Morning Ireland. Listening to it the other day, I heard three stories butting up against each other in quick succession. First: Dublin Zoo (which happens to have a Director, Christoph Schwitzer who is German) is launching a program to protect native Irish animal species – in collaboration with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In the radio piece there was a lively exchange about the Irish Pine Marten, the brown mammal about 20-inches long, that looks (to my untrained eye) a bit like a small fox. It’s recovering from near extinction “on its own,” said Director Schwitzer, but with considerable help, he pointed out, from humans – in protecting its habitat a lot more than we used to.
Barely a beat followed, before the radio team was onto a new item, interviewing a science educator from Cork, Dr Niamh Shaw, who is one of a hundred women in science who are embarking on an Australian-led maritime expedition to the Antarctic, to research among other things, the disastrous melting there of sea-ice as result of human-caused global warming. “We are just another animal” said Dr Shaw. “We’re a very intelligent species but we have a blind spot in thinking we are in charge”.
She is also involved in another Irish science project, known as EirSat One. It’s a satellite – and the Eir part of the name is the Irish word for Ireland itself, Eire. Yes, it’s an Irish satellite, the country’s first, to be launched on November 29th. It’s all part of Ireland’s participation in the continent-wide European Space Agency – and it’s been developed largely by University College Dublin. Once up in space, it will be performing two main research functions – testing a novel system for spacecraft orientation … and trying out different kinds of outer surface coatings for future satellites.
Dr Shaw (who, by the way, makes no secret of her compelling ambition to become the first Irishwoman in space) said she will be on the Antarctic peninsula when Eirsat One is launched, but she’ll be enthusiastically waving at it, along with with maybe a penguin or two.
In one morning’s listening, then, three examples of a reported microcosm and the overall macrocosm being persuasively connected.
