Sir, - In a report (June 21st) of a meeting organised by the national committee coordinating European Year Against Racism and the National Union of Journalists, I was among those quoted as being "highly critical" of the Pat Kenny radio show.
Almost exactly two years ago, just before the show went off the air for the summer, I wrote to Pat Kenny to compliment him and the producer for an interview with Dr Azra Jaganjac, who at the time was the first Bosnian government official to have made it to Ireland from Sarajevo and who graphically described how she had to crawl through a tunnel of mud, one of the few means of escape from the besieged city and the first stage of a very hazardous journey out of the country.
The following day Pat again recounted Dr Jaganjac's description of the terror of the citizens of Sarajevo and made an impassioned plea to our own Government to support the Bosnian government and its people.
Prior to that, in December 1994, Pat Kenny did a very sensitive interview on his TV show with a Bosnian woman who had been in a concentration camp in northern Bosnia during the early months of the war and an Irish journalist, Melanie McDonagh, who frequently visited Bosnia throughout the war. Rather than just offering another "human interest" story, the programme presented a very comprehensive account of the background to the conflict in Bosnia and confronted the tough questions of how the horrific atrocities of the camps could have been tolerated by the West.
The programme's concern with the causes of the war has recently been reiterated by Ed Vulliamy in an Amnesty publication on refugees.
Sadly, much of the Bosnian war was covered from a strategic, military perspective rather than the challenging and carefully researched response to the enormous human tragedy involved which Pat Kenny's two programmes represented. Both he and the producers and research teams of such programmes are to be commended.
My criticism at the media conference of the current Pat Kenny radio show was in response to a comment made that those concerned about the recent coverage of the refugees issue by some sections of the media were not perhaps doing enough about it, that most journalists were receptive to complaints made and that a lot more phone calls and letters of protest were needed. I said I did not think that radio phone ins, such as that on Pat Kenny's radio show, were a suitable means of dealing with the highly sensitive issue of refugees. Yours, etc.,
Belgrave Mews,
Dublin 6.