Tag: Ireland

The American Press and a New Fourth Estate

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Anna Politkovskaya

On September 1, 2004, a middle-aged Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya boarded a plane in Moscow on her way to Ossetia to cover a hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. During the flight, she drank a cup of tea that almost killed her. After she drank the tea, she became disoriented, began to vomit, and ultimately lost consciousness. She was taken to a hospital in Rostov-on-Don, where doctors concluded she had been poisoned.

Politkovskaya had been reporting on the human rights abuses in Russia and Chechnya for some time and was a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin. In one of her books she had written, “If you live in Russia, you cannot help but notice that Putin’s Russia is a world of violence, lies, and injustice.”

Throughout her career, Politkovskaya received death threats and was heavily surveilled by the Russian government. But the intimidation didn’t stop her, and she wrote hundreds of articles for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and several books highly critical of Putin. In her 2004 book, Putin’s Russia, she bravely wrote about the corruption, human rights abuses, and oligarchy in Russia with an unflinching style.

In short, she was a daring, hardworking investigative journalist who risked her life to write about the cruel and criminal aspects of Russia. She was assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, 2006—Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Read more »



Monday, March 4, 2024

On War: A St. Patrick’s Day Offering

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My 1985 photo of the priest who helped me to sneak into Armagh Jail, Father Raymond Murray: Jail chaplain, with former inmate Catherine Moore.

I arrived in Ireland in the mid-1980s to cover the seemingly intractable bloody conflict colloquially known as “The Troubles.” I studied up on materiel: Armalite rifles, homemade fertilizer bombs, the plastic bullets protestors ducked. And on the glossary of local politics: Loyalists were mostly Protestants who wanted to remain British citizens; Republicans were mostly Catholics who yearned for a united Irish nation. I interviewed people on both sides of the conflict but more women than men. I wanted to make their voices heard in the United States.

I was taken by one issue that had already created international headlines—the strip searches of female political prisoners.

But the stories I read did not quote the women who were being strip searched. They quoted politicians and  sociologists instead of the women themselves. The stories said the policy was routine, part of the process of getting inmates out of civilian clothes and into prisoner uniforms. Not true. This was actually a well-conceived British military psychological operation to humiliate the women, a technique intended to “break” the women.

I decided that the only way to write about this was to getting inside the 100-year-old stone walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Armagh—and to talk to the women directly.

But to get in, even to speak to only one woman, I had to lie. I could not say I was a reporter. I had to say I was a cousin, visiting from the states. The Northern Ireland Office, run by dutiful Protestant colonists controlled by the British, kept the press out. Perpetrators of abuse do not like publicity. Now, as St. Patrick’s Day approaches, and two larger wars rage—wars that unlike the one in Ireland threaten us all—my mind keeps racing back to what is better known as “Armagh Jail.” Read more »

Monday, March 14, 2022

How Many Patricks Is That?

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

St Patrick
St Patrick with attributes – shamrock, crozier, Celtic cross, snake and blue cloak, not green.

“God the Father. God the Son. God the Holy Ghost. How many gods is that? You, Quinn!”

“Three, Sir.”

“No, you heathen pup. There’s only one God. Come up here!”

In those bygone days of paganly sadistic Irish teachers, “come up here” meant that Quinn had fallen for what we called “the strap trap.” The teacher would deliberately choose a pupil who would fall for a trick question and then take pleasure in delivering three stinging whacks each to the unfortunate’s outstretched palms. Me, I blamed St. Patrick and his cute trick of raising a shamrock on high and telling the bemused heathens, “See, three leaves on one stem; that is the holy trinity of three persons in one true God.” His folksy logic had failed to travel down the millennia to penetrate Quinn’s admittedly thick 20th-century skull.

Thursday is St. Patrick’s Day. This is a day that for long divided those who were born and raised on Patrick’s green island from those who weren’t. Those who weren’t wore green hats, drank green beer beside green-dyed rivers and said things like “begorrah and the top of the morning to yourself” in foul American-Irish accents. They all had Irish grandmothers – the apparent outer limit of Celtic heritage. Once, during a three-month slice of my life in Orlando, Florida, I noted in a diary that 122 people had told me they had Irish grandmothers – that was an average of ten a week. It was embarrassing to be Irish in certain parts of America on St. Patrick’s Day. Read more »