Published in The Independent, 18 March 2005.
All of These People
A memoir by Fergal Keane
HarperCollins £18.99
395pp
Hooked on bullets and booze
This is a book about two Fergal Keanes. The first part tells in lyrical terms of his boyhood in an Ireland that has since disappeared. His father Eamonn was an actor whose talent was sabotaged by a lifelong love of drink that ruined his marriage and alienated him for many years from his son.
In fact, drink runs like a leitmotif through the book. In Keane’s early days in journalism, one gets the impression that there was hardly a reporter on the Irish papers who was sober long enough to write a story. Practical jokes were common, the victims usually junior journalists. One was sent to a council meeting to deliver to the city manager an important letter about the approaching St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The manager interrupted a speech, heaved with laughter and passed the letter back to the reporter. It read, “My name is John Breen and I want my arse painted green for St Patrick’s Day.”
Even at that early stage, Keane was dreaming of the day he would be a foreign correspondent, preferably in Africa, an area for which he had developed a passionate interest. He discovered his talent for reporting conflict in the 1984 marching season, when the police were trying to prevent Orangemen from marching through flashpoint areas in Co Armagh: “Surrounded by violence and chaos, I was focused and calm, observing and recording the battle”.
The second Fergal Keane now comes on stage. He made it to Africa, which he loved, and began covering for BBC radio the violence in South Africa between the ANC and Inkatha. Soon, he was as hooked on the addiction of conflict reporting as on the alcohol that addicted his father. Keane writes: “I felt afraid so much of the time and yet I felt at home in this craziness. I was more alive than at any time in my life.”
He was a member of what he and colleagues called the Bang Bang Club: a group of hardened war correspondents who did their best to pretend that what they watched, photographed and reported did not affect their psychological well-being. But some became emotionally crippled and at least one committed suicide.
Keane was himself by now fighting a battle against alcohol, but unable to break from the job: “I am on the front line, risking it all, our own correspondent calling out his news down a crackly line”. He reported the genocide in Rwanda and, with other correspondents, remains disturbed by it to this day. How were they able to leave threatened people behind to be slaughtered? He survived his alcohol problem but was still addicted to war. “We knew that when that war ended there would be a lull, then there would be another drama and the same media faces would turn up,” relieved by a new sense of purpose. “Alive again, yes, that’s the word, alive”.
But after Kosovo and Iraq, the death toll for war correspondents soared. It became safer to be a soldier than a reporter. Keane now had a son and “when the call came to return to Iraq, I told my editor I would not go”. When he now sees a colleague in a flak jacket, he feels “a momentary pang. It is a loss of a kind, I know that. But… I cherish the life I have.” This is a completely honest account of reporting conflict by a journalist who got out in time. He is one of the lucky ones.
Phillip Knightley’s updated history of war reporting, ‘The First Casualty‘, is published by Carlton.
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