In this final IT Sunday subscriber newsletter of 2023, I wanted to reflect on some of the themes of the past 12 months and look forward to what will be a critical year.
Media outlets like ours have always drawn a distinction between domestic and international news – “Ireland” and “World” occupy separate if adjacent sections on irishtimes.com and in print. But recent years have taught us that this neat division is at odds with how we experience modern life.
In this age of mobility, with societies and economies more closely connected than ever, global events are also local stories. We were reminded of that in 2023, when two era-defining conflicts overseas dominated what we call the “home news” agenda. The reverberations from the Russian war in Ukraine continued to be felt in every household and community in Ireland, where families struggled with a persistent cost-of-living crisis and tens of thousands more refugees found sanctuary here. The horrific killing by Israel of more than 20,000 people in Gaza, following the appalling Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7th, provoked outrage in Ireland and led our homepage more often than any story in the closing months of the year.
The pattern repeats itself every day. The over-heating of the planet is a crisis without borders. Political convulsions in continental Europe are an Irish concern. The influence of globalised culture wars can be seen in Ireland’s far-right movement, a mob of conspiracy theorists whose imported slogans evince their online radicalisation. The torching of a building intended for use as asylum seeker accommodation in Co Galway this year showed that Ireland is not immune from the dark forces that most western states are grappling with.
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These basic assumptions about Ireland’s place in the world inform our heavy investment in foreign coverage at The Irish Times. Our global network of correspondents, more extensive than that of any other Irish outlet, puts world affairs at the heart of our service, offering a view of the world in the English language that is not refracted through the lens of Britain or the United States. That will be essential in 2024, when elections take place in the US and the UK and across the European Union.
In Ireland in 2023, the political parties were unmistakably in preparation mode – finding candidates, revising policy, honing tactics – for a coming year that will feature at least two, and possibly three, elections as well as a referendum. The home-grown drama of the year was produced by RTÉ, whose financial affairs dominated public debate for much of the summer. Celebrity names drew the public to the story, but its most important long-term consequence may be a serious reckoning with long-deferred questions around the future of public service broadcasting in the digital age.
As so often, it was the arts and sport that gave national life its colour, its comforts, its joy, its sorrow. The deaths of two great singer-songwriters, Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, were genuine occasions of public mourning, their passing within months of each other seeming to close an era they did so much to shape. The only comparable moments of shared national experience came from the world of sport – the Irish women’s football team at their first World Cup, the men’s rugby team crashing out of the World Cup in France, Dublin reclaiming the football championship, Ciara Mageean and Rhasidat Adeleke breaking records on the track. A remarkable year for Irish artists – a year in which An Irish Goodbye took home an Oscar and Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize – gave further evidence that the turmoil of recent years has been accompanied by a flowering of creative expression.
Here at The Irish Times, much of our preparation for the coming year involves planning for the things we know will happen – elections, referendums, the Paris Olympics – while ensuring we can react quickly to unexpected events. In the US, where the Iowa caucuses are just weeks away, our incoming Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan is about to join the campaign trail. Plans for coverage of the coming phase of conflicts in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine are taking shape. Several investigative projects are in the pipeline, and we’re working to be ready for a general election if one is called this year.
As a subscriber to The Irish Times, your support is vital in allowing us to invest in our journalism. In what looks set to be a defining year, we will work hard to explain, provoke, entertain and, above all, to provide you with the information you need to make sense of the world around us.
Happy new year.
