“I was questioning myself a great deal about my compulsion to go to war. Why was I going to battlefields? What was it about war that made it my subject?” Foreign Correspondent Fergal Keane found his answer in the stories his father told him whilst growing up; and in those he wasn’t told about his family’s involvement in the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War shortly after.
Keane returns to his family history and the story of Irishman Tobias O’Sullivan in Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love, exploring the past through hard facts and evidence, and questioning the singular narrative of history which he was taught as a schoolboy in the 1960s. “I thought I’d seen it all in war,” said Keane, until he researched this period of Ireland’s past for Wounds.
“The journalism of witness is a form of atonement,” said Keane: “If by bearing witness to these things we’ve got to confront unpalatable truths one can then … make a small start to look at the past.” The reportage of war and witness then sets an example “To look back, not with misty eyes, not with sentimentalism, but with cold hard facts”.
When asked about political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who Keane interviewed last year in her only interview with foreign media, he said she seemed a different person to the woman he knew many years before. He said she would not be pressed on the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His question is what would happen “if the military turn against her and she looks to the international community for support? Where are they going to be after all this?”.
If you liked this, you might like seeing David Milliband speak on Saturday at 11.30am.
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