An Eye on Ireland: Writings from a Changing Nation

by Justine McCarthy

The book opens with an extended piece of new writing in which Justine describes her formative years and entering the male-dominated Irish newspaper culture in the 1980s, a time when a woman getting too many bylines could, and did, lead to a National Union of Journalists bar.

From Mary Robinson making history as Ireland's first female president to a present-day RTÉ in crisis, over thirty years of stories are collected here. In her long career, Justine broke child sexual abuse scandals and reported from the frontline of the Northern Ireland Troubles; she covered the major reforming referenda, documented political turmoil and charted the role of Ireland on the world stage. She followed the times the country let down its people, through its ailing health system, its legal system, the domination of the church, and its treatment of women.

An Eye on Ireland maps a transformative era in Irish life towards a more progressive and just society, and one woman's extraordinary career at the forefront of change.

448 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2024

Reviews

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle of Justine McCarthy's book is 'A Journey Through Social Change: New and Selected Journalism', but the author gives no satisfactory explanation of the guiding principle of the selection. Although the earlier articles are new to me, reproduced from newspapers that I don't read, the subject matter will be familiar to all of us who have lived through the events of the four decades she recalls. Her approach is more anecdotal than analytical, tending to focus on personalities rather than policies, most notably in 'The Day Haughey gave old Ben Dunne the boot', a tendentious account of the allegedly 'famous rift between two men who have touched the lives of all of us'. This seems a hyperbolic claim to make about the fall-out from the falling out of the indebted Taoiseach and the head of the retail empire. An article from 2023, 'British Media was right -- Joe Biden's Ireland belongs to the Dark Ages', has belatedly acquired some topical relevance. Romantic Ireland may have died and gone long before Biden's well-documented visit to his ancestral home, but the romance has been revivified in this collection as Gothic horror stories of ignorance, incompetence, corruption and callousness in the benighted past. In a revealing introduction, McCarthy records her mother's informal intervention that gained her a place in journalism school. While the beneficiary applauds this act of feisty feminism, the sceptical reader may well regard it as an admission of the author's own induction into the 'brown envelope' and 'not what you know but who you know' convention she decries. It's an engaging and provocative read, provoking the pedant in me to make liberal use of a red pen to underscore the various instances of reductive commentary and lamentable proofreading.

[A. Oosthoek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoewel deze bundeling van columns niet direct een pageturner is geeft het wel een treffend inzicht in de (veranderde) cultuur van Ierland sinds eind vorige eeuw. Van The Troubles, tot misbruikschandalen tot corruptie. Ophef regeert.

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📖Tot me genomen via papier.

[Aoife Bagnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good! Made me angry a lot!