As Irish Times foreign correspondent Conor O'Clery retires, he reflects on 33 years of being in the right place at the right time, witnessing world events unfolding across the globe.
Early on September 11th, 2001, I was sitting in my 42nd-storey New York office putting together a column about recession-hit New York restaurants. I heard the bang of the first plane hitting the north tower, two blocks away. Turning to the window I saw a huge hole gouged out of the tower and thought it was caused by a bomb. I called RTÉ to offer an interview and only when waiting to go on air did I learn from a newsflash that it had been a plane.
Incredulously I watched the second plane hit the south tower and send an orange fireball out the far side. I took the lift down and ran across to the World Trade Center where bodies were smashing into the roadway, and then rushed back as my apartment block was being evacuated. It was fortunate that I did, as the south tower collapsed minutes later near where I had been standing.
I stayed in the empty building all day, reporting on what was happening outside where fires and dust made downtown Manhattan look like the day after a nuclear explosion. New York phones were down but international circuits and electricity stayed on until the third tower collapsed late in the afternoon. (Who remembers now that third tower, 50 storeys high, sliding down into itself after burning all day?) I then had to struggle down concrete backstairs in the dark, carrying my computer and other belongings.
To this day I still see people falling in my nightmares, and I cannot bear to look at footage of the burning skyscrapers.
These are the most vivid memories of the most dramatic day in a career as correspondent that took me from Dublin to Belfast, London, Moscow, Washington, Beijing and New York, and which is now coming to an end. There is an old Chinese saying: "May you live in interesting times." It is of course a curse, and on 9/11 it certainly was that. But journalists thrive on interesting times.
My good fortune, and something of which I am very proud, is that I worked for The Irish Times when it was in the process of shedding a provincial mentality inherited from colonial days. Ireland has produced many famous foreign correspondents, such as Lionel Fleming, who left The Irish Times in the 1940s to become a noted BBC correspondent. But they had to join overseas media organisations. For most of our history the only overseas Irish Times bureau was in London, where the London editor was treated as the representative of a provincial newspaper and allowed to join the Westminster media lobby from which foreign newspapers are banned.
Irish journalists ventured further afield only on rare temporary assignments - it helped if there was an Irish angle. RM (Bertie) Smyllie, Irish Times editor from 1934 to 1954, was, for example, dispatched early in his career to cover the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of the first World War. The Irish Times had a Paris bureau for a while in the 1960s, manned by Fergus Pyle, and when Ireland joined the EEC in 1972, all the main Irish newspapers and RTÉ appointed Brussels correspondents. But that was it.
When I joined the staff that year, regular foreign coverage still came from news agencies and overseas syndication arrangements. Douglas Gageby, who edited the paper for two spells up to 1986, took foreign coverage to a new level, however, making overseas assignments almost routine; he sent me to cover stories such as the start of the Iran-Iraq war and the emergency in South Africa.
The day the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Mr Gageby said to me off-handedly as he left the office, "Why don't you go to Afghanistan?" A few days later I was one of the first western reporters to get to Kabul, and thought this was a mighty achievement until I encountered Garret FitzGerald's brother, Pierce, there on World Bank business, and his daughter Pamela, relaxing in the hotel bar.
The subsequent war between American-backed rebels and the Russians was depicted in the west as a battle between good and evil. But on later visits I found it wasn't as simple as that. In the besieged city of Khost I met secular Afghan women terrified of the rebels imposing a strict Islamic state. And another time, after I entered Afghanistan across Pakistan's Baluchistan desert dressed as a Mujahideen fighter, the commander of the Hesbi-i-Islami rebel group told me he was fighting for an Islamic republic from which all non-believers would be expelled. These were the people who were getting Stinger missiles from the US as part of Cold War geo-politics, and who later fostered al-Qaeda. On that visit I was escorted across a mountain in pitch dark, with my rebel guides singing Islamic verses to indicate their location. I sang Tantum Ergo in response. It seemed a good idea at the time.
ON DIFFERENT ASSIGNMENTS around the world I would come across the staff correspondents of the foreign bureaus of newspapers from countries similar in size to Ireland. It was obvious that with Ireland's new role in Europe and the world we too should have our own foreign bureaus to provide news and analysis for an Irish readership, rather than presenting copy written primarily for British or American readers. In 1987, the then editor Conor Brady started the process, continued under current editor Geraldine Kennedy, of setting up and maintaining a network of foreign bureaus. And that is how I found myself en route to Moscow in January 1987.
I had always been fascinated by Russia and its secretive society, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as Churchill described it. As a teenager I tuned in to Radio Moscow and paid half a crown a week to a Belfast bookstore for Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago. Now the country was beginning to open up and the world was seized with curiosity.
In Moscow I presented myself, and a bottle of Bushmills, to Gennady Gerasimov, spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev. "Aha! A small corruption," he said, "I'll take it." Irish whiskey was then a rarity in Moscow, as were many basic foodstuffs. When asked in an interview broadcast in Ireland what I missed most, I replied flippantly, "marmalade", and soon received more than a dozen jars from listeners.
Communications were abysmal. Telephone calls took a day to get through. I hammered out news copy on a big, noisy telex machine that left my knuckles out of shape. How I loved it! On my first visit home Pat Kenny asked me on RTÉ if I was ever followed in Moscow by the KGB. I told him I didn't think so. But I mentioned somewhat indignantly that the Tass news agency correspondent in Ireland, Mikhail Smirnov, was followed everywhere by the Irish special branch - I had seen them do it quite openly when I met Smirnov one day for lunch in Dublin. Some time later, after Smirnov had returned to Moscow, a KGB defector exposed him in a book as Ireland's KGB station chief, and next time I was on RTÉ I made a point of praising the special branch for doing their work.
I did in fact subsequently have serious trouble with the KGB, which tried to infiltrate the Irish Times bureau through my wife Zhanna, then a Soviet citizen. A year before we married, KGB agents began summoning her to meetings at which they threatened and cajoled her to plant a KGB agent on me as a "friend", and to spy on other correspondents and diplomats we would meet. Every time it happened I quietly informed Judith Devlin of the Irish Embassy so someone would know what was going on if things got ugly. The harassment ended when we married.
The first real cracks in the Soviet Union appeared in the Baltic republics, and I commuted there regularly with friends such as Rupert Cornwell of the London Independent and Steve Handelman of the Toronto Star, equipped with chocolate and cognac for the overnight train. I was struck by a remark an Estonian radio commentator, Maarika Saarna, made to me. Twenty years of independence between the world wars had "spoiled" the Baltic peoples forever, she said, and they yearned to get their independence back. During those 20 years the Irish essayist Hubert Butler, Ireland's great travel writer, visited Latvia and wrote an essay called Riga Strand in 1930, evoking northern Europe between the wars. He described how Latvian merchants inhabited the big seaside villas while White Russian emigrés, once lords of the beach, acted as servants.
I went to report on Riga Strand in 1990 and found that Soviet officials had taken over the beach villas and Latvians were the maids and cleaners. Today of course the Latvians are masters of the strand again. Such was the ebb and flow of European history.
That year in neighbouring Lithuania, Yousas Urbshis, the 94-year-old former Lithuanian foreign minister, told me in his cramped Kaunas apartment how his country was forced into the Soviet camp. Stalin summoned him to the Kremlin in 1939 and showed him a map of Europe with a line down the middle, and Lithuania on the Soviet side, a casualty of the secret Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact. Urbshis cried softly as he related how he was imprisoned for 17 years and emerged to find his family all dead.
Talking to him was like touching history. I had other encounters with Russian history, including taking a role as a film extra in a Moscow crowd scene for poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's film, Stalin's Funeral, along with David Remnick, now editor of the New Yorker. That sort of thing happened in those intoxicating days of growing freedom. During this political springtime we could wander at will across the country, visiting places closed for decades to outsiders. In the Republics we were welcomed as harbingers of freedom.
Back home the fast-unfolding events in the USSR were followed closely. On a holiday in Co Leitrim, I encountered a taciturn old farmer, trousers tied with cord, who, when he found out what I did, asked me: "Is it true that collectivisation is fucked?" I assured him it was.
There was huge interest when Gorbachev made a stopover at Shannon on his way to Washington. At a press conference with Charlie Haughey I asked him a question, addressing him in the formal Russian manner as "Mikhail Sergeevich". Afterwards an Irish colleague complimented me on knowing the Soviet leader by his first name.
Gorbachev is rightly regarded as a great figure, who presided over the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. It could have been bloody. But the times produced Andrei Sakharov, the conscience of the nation, who preached non-violent dissent, and Boris Yeltsin, often dismissed as a bumbling alcoholic, who at a critical point channelled the growing discontent with communism into democratic activism and gave the restive republics their independence without civil war. Alas, when Yeltsin became president and it was his turn to stop over at Shannon, he was too drunk to get off the plane and Albert Reynolds and the Army band were left waiting at the foot of the steps.
I OFTEN HAPPENED to be in the right place at the right time, but not always. I missed the August 1991 coup in the Kremlin by a couple of months, having transferred to Washington to open The Irish Times staff bureau there. But my disappointment lasted as long as the coup, which fizzled out within a week.
The end of the Cold War meant that when elected president in 1992 Bill Clinton could take a new approach to Northern Ireland, and he started a process of bringing the political "untouchables" in from the cold. We entertained loyalists and republicans in The Irish Times residence in Bethesda, just outside Washington. When Gusty Spence and his pals came to dinner they surprised the guests, including Irish ambassador Dermot Gallagher, by singing the nationalist song The Fields of Athenry - and then telling everyone they noted who joined in and now knew who the republicans were.
When Gerry Adams came to dinner I sat him between the Washington Post's revered liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, who decided she didn't like him, and Nancy Soderberg of the White House, who decided she did, which counted more.
The importance of the Irish-American role in the peace process is often underestimated. Irish Americans provided important moral support for the end of physical-force republicanism, and 9/11 made it impossible for the diehards to continue promoting the use of the bomb and bullet. The deeply committed Irish Americans created a unique social and political infrastructure for all the parties in Ireland. Bill Flynn and Tom Moran of Mutual of America made their New York offices a regular venue for visiting unionists, loyalists, nationalists, republicans, Irish and British government ministers, NGOs, academics and writers, sometimes all together at one time. I am convinced that the combination of Clinton's personal interest and the efforts of such people as Niall O'Dowd and Chuck Feeney to bring Sinn Féin in from the cold brought forward the IRA ceasefire by a year or so and saved many lives.
During this time I found myself one winter evening in Annie Murphy's Connecticut apartment. She ordered her son to drop his trousers and show a birthmark on his thigh, which she claimed matched a birthmark on the leg of Bishop Eamonn Casey of Galway and proved he was his son.
When The Irish Times was about to break the news of how the bishop took church funds to educate the boy secretly, I contacted Bishop Casey and arranged to travel to Ireland to interview him in the Skylon Hotel in Dublin. The bishop stood me up. The Vatican had told him to resign and go into hiding.
Months later the exiled bishop rang newspaper editors in Dublin from his hideaway in South America to warn them that he had not given an interview to a certain Sunday newspaper, as it was claiming. Conor Brady reminded the bishop he still owed me an interview. Casey laughed and said he had been sitting near me in a Washington railway station and I hadn't recognised him. "Mind you," added the bishop, "I was wearing a false beard."
SOMETIMES WHEN IRISH politicians venture abroad tensions can arise with the accompanying reporters over news stories they don't like. This happened when I travelled from Washington to South America to cover a state visit by president Mary Robinson. As a woman and an articulate lawyer, the president had done wonders for the image of Ireland abroad. However, this trip was an unhappy one. Some critics at home accused her of using it to lobby for a future job at the UN. They pounced on her missteps, such as the infamous handshake with Gen Pinochet.
The president had been used to uncritical press coverage but, as Olivia O'Leary and Helen Burke noted in their authorised biography of Mary Robinson, the reporting by me and RTÉ's Eileen Whelan "brought about the lowest point in Mary's relationship with the media".
There was a sequel. Some years later, when I was based in Beijing, I got rare permission from the Chinese government to accompany Robinson, then UN Human Rights Commissioner, to Tibet, but the permission was abruptly withdrawn at her request, causing me and the Chinese some embarrassment and provoking a public row between Robinson and The Irish Times. Months later, when Robinson gave a press conference in Jakarta about human rights in East Timor, she made a point of coming up to me and shaking my hand.
"I'm glad to see you here," she said. "I'm glad to see you here, too," I replied.
East Timor was an example of a foreign story where news agency copy would definitely not have served Irish readership well. There was a special Irish interest in the fate of the former Portuguese colony and its people. Dick Spring once publicly blasted Indonesia's policy in East Timor, causing Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas to warn me in an interview that this was "tantamount to an act of war". As minister for foreign affairs, David Andrews became the first EU minister to visit East Timor, and, having experienced first hand the terror going on, helped stir outrage throughout the world that forced the Indonesians to leave in 1999.
On the day when Australian-led forces were "liberating" the tiny country, foreign affairs official Declan Kelly, now Ambassador to Australia, went to great lengths to ensure I got on the first plane going in. I found Irish diplomats such as Kelly invariably helpful and professional, as did many non-Irish colleagues.
These were "interesting times" in Asia. In the late 1990s China was emerging as a fast-growing world power. New buildings were making Beijing look like Manhattan. The speed of change in Shanghai was dizzying. Spurred on by The Irish Times coverage, the government developed an "Asia Strategy" to bring Ireland's trade and diplomatic representation up towards the level of competitor economies.
The Chinese were getting rich too. I met Beijing's Ferrari dealer at an Irish Embassy dinner hosted by ambassador Joe Hayes and when I asked what his connection with Ireland was, he replied: "I have a horse running in the Curragh next week."
China is still, however, a totalitarian state and reporting was sometimes frustrated by plainclothes police who watched us constantly. I was arrested twice and detained for hours for trying to interview people who were not even dissidents. Also, reporting what Chinese people said could get them into trouble. A Chinese student who gave an interview in Hong Kong to me and the New York Times about the repression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement was placed under house arrest when he later visited his parents in Dalian. He had insisted on us using his name but I felt bad about that.
There is another Chinese saying, "The hills are high and the emperor is far away", which I exploited to the full, travelling freely across Asia to report on fast-moving developments such as the fall of Suharto, which transformed Indonesia into the world's biggest Muslim democracy. The climax came one terrible day in Jakarta when thousands died as anarchy enveloped the Indonesian capital. I remember one surreal moment, as I dodged past soldiers firing at the mob, only to hear as I reached my hotel grounds the sound of "poc-poc" from the tennis court where a fellow correspondent was playing with the hotel tennis coach.
During that hectic time I was introduced to a late-arriving American TV reporter who said (I'm sure he thought in a friendly way): "Irish Times? You're a long way from home." That remark rankles with me to this day - and the fact that I didn't retort: "So are you!"
It is now the rule, not the exception, that an Irish Times reporter will be there, covering the main world stories. I got revenge of a sort in Kuala Lumpur when I was singled out from a crowd of foreign reporters (including the American), clamouring for an interview with Wan Azizah Ismail, whose husband, the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, had just been imprisoned. I alone was called into the house by Wan Azizah, who, it turned out, had trained as an eye doctor for six years in Dublin. She sat me on the couch and said: "Now tell me all the latest scandals about Charles Haughey!"
I HAVE HAD a good run for my money as a correspondent. I am convinced that the need for first-hand reporting and analysis from abroad is more important than ever, especially these days when arguments rage at home about what is going on in the world. The effects of supine and shrill reporting and commentary on world affairs can be seen most starkly in the US, where many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, because that is what they were told. I know from the many letters and e-mails that I got during the years how much attention Irish readers pay to what we report, and I am grateful for the comments and encouragement I have got, and the criticisms too, some of which have led to invigorating long-distance debate.
Finally, on a personal note. I worked for several years as a civil servant in Northern Ireland, and then resigned to do a computer science degree course at Queen's University in Belfast. The day I registered at Queen's the course was cancelled and, somewhat arbitrarily, I took English instead, and this led me into student journalism and then The Irish Times. I had not considered journalism before, nor had anyone in my family, as far as I knew.
But in my last years in New York I wrote a column from Wall Street for the business pages, pretty certain that I was the first Irish journalist to do so. Then, out of the blue, I was sent some columns from the 1880s, written by a Thomas McConville of Guilford, Co Down, for the Ulster Observer, when he was travelling in the US. One of these was a column from Wall Street.
Thomas McConville was my great-grandfather. So it was in the genes after all.