Gaza conflict ‘brings home importance of journalism’, says author

The conflict in Gaza and Israel brings home the importance of journalism, without which the world will never achieve peace, columnist and author Justine McCarthy has said.

Speaking at the launch of her new book, An Eye on Ireland, Ms McCarthy said it felt inappropriate to be celebrating given the conflict, which has already cost the lives of 11 journalists.

While paying tribute to colleagues covering the conflict, particularly Palestinian reporters and photographers whose families are “being massacred”, Ms McCarthy noted that the sense of powerlessness felt by people was “truly shocking”.

“When the rich make war, it’s the poor who die,” she said, quoting Jean Paul Sartre.

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The book brings together a selection of her writing from four decades. It is prefaced by an extended personal essay looking back over her life and career, from her childhood passion for writing to the loss of her father at an early age and on to her entry into the male-dominated world of journalism. In the 1980s, a woman getting too many bylines could, and did, lead to a National Union of Journalists bar.

Ms McCarthy said she owed a debt to all those who had trusted her sufficiently to “open up their hearts to a total stranger” in interviews conducted over a lifetime in journalism.

From Bandon, Co Cork, Ms McCarthy cut her journalistic teeth in the Southern Star before moving to Dublin, where she worked for the Irish Independent, Sunday Tribune and Sunday Times. She joined The Irish Times as a columnist in September 2022.

[ An Eye on Ireland: A Journey Through Social Change by Justine McCarthy - Women at the forefront of a revolution ]

Launching the book, former broadcaster and newspaper editor Vincent Browne described Ms McCarthy as “the best writer I have ever come across in Irish journalism, with the possible exception of Deirdre Purcell”.

Ms McCarthy’s interview with Annie Murphy, who had a child with Bishop Eamonn Casey, “tells us more about that love affair than anything I’ve read” about it.

Praising the “brilliance of descriptive writing” in her “remarkable collection” of columns, Mr Browne said the author did not just write about people and issues that matter, she also wrote about “people who felt they didn’t matter”.

“Often they were victims of rape, or the cruel strictures of the then all-powerful Catholic church and victims of sectarianism in Northern Ireland.”

Describing Ms McCarthy as “talented, empathetic and splendid”, he singled out for special praise columns on diverse topics such as Charlie Haughey’s tax bill, Kilkenny rape victim Lavinia Kerwick, sectarianism in Northern Ireland and cancer patients let down by the health system.

Affirming that IRA violence was “utterly without justification”, Mr Browne admitted of his own journalism that “I was caught in the venomous web of nationalism too long”.