Eyewitness To War And Peace

Anthony McIntyre 🔖Journalists' memoirs have long functioned as a fast track to key events.

They are more than the first draft of history which is how journalists' reports have often been characterised. In the memoir the journalist has more time to reflect on the events that made for their first drafts.

Some of my favourite memoirs are by journalists like Jacobo Timerman who reported on Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s and 80s or Fergal Keane who was stopped at Interahamwe roadblocks during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. They inform and frighten at the same time, such was the darkness that descended upon both countries under the respective military dictatorships of Jorge Videla and Théoneste Bagosora, both of whom lived out the remainder of their putrefacient lives in prison for their crimes against humanity.

Memoirs, like any non-fiction book, are appraised by what we feel we learned from them, when our intellectual curiosity has first been excited and then satisfied. I came away from reading Eyewitness To War And Peace feeling I had experienced neither intellectual excitement or satisfaction. This is less the fault of the author, a gifted writer, and simply down to the subject matter, which by this stage of life I am pretty familiar with. Not a lot new under the sun there, it might be said.

Throughout the conflict from the mid-1970s first the voice of Eamonn Mallie, then the face, became omnipresent in the news bulletins, either on the radio or the television. I am old enough to remember the launch of Downtown Radio around St Patrick's Day in 1976. As a young republican prisoner, just two weeks back into prison where I would stay for the next seventeen years, Downtown Radio was a god send even for those who did not believe in god. At the time I did. Constant news and music, in cells where there were radios but no televisions, this was sensory oxygen.

The author became an anchor in the station and he describes his not always smooth odyssey through its stations and channels. These are the things that never crossed our teenage minds while listening to Candy Devine or Derek Marsden.

A childhood immersed in poverty, on occasion sans money to pay the school fees, led Eamonn Mallie to become intellectually left leaning. Although it was not his ideological stance but his journalistic skill that caused right wing figures like Margaret Thatcher to wish for someone to rid her of this troublesome South Armagh priest.

Throughout his forty eight years in the world of journalism and broadcasting Eamon Mallie met the great and the good, the bad and the beastly, one often posing as the other. He was fascinated with Ian Paisley and Charles Haughey although there are hints that the book collections of both men might have been the real aphrodisiac. Of particular interest to me was his meeting with Bobby Sands with whom he spent an hour talking in Irish, a prisoner ravished by the conditions he was forced to endure: 'emaciated and gaunt . . . he was the antithesis of the smiling healthy looking young man in the murals in republican areas.' His endurance and the perseverance of his comrades won them the grudging accolade from Thatcher: 'you have to hand it to some of these IRA boys.'

Some inattention to electoral detail has him wrongly claiming that Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew were elected to the Dail in June 1983. Both were elected two years earlier with Kieran Doherty dying on hunger strike while a TD in August 1981. Nor did Ian Paisley unseat Terence O'Neill from his Bannside seat but won the seat after O'Neill had resigned it and was elevated to the House of Lords. Paisley later went on to claim the Westminster seat for North Antrim but not at the expense of O'Neill who never held it.

Despite his centrality to the world of news Eamonn Mallie is a man I only met once. I was in Stormont in the company of Ed Moloney for a reason I no longer remember. On another occasion he rang me asking if I could confirm that Dolours Price had died. It was news to me but unfortunately true. So getting to know him through the book was a worthwhile journey even if the personal human story rather than the political angle was what really interested me.

Beautifully written and wonderfully communicated, it is a memoir to be read less for its political insights and more for its narratorial clarity. Even if the subject matter is old hat, like the old joke, it is in the telling that this work achieves lift off.

Eamonn Mallie, 2024, Eyewitness To War And Peace. Merrion Press. ISBN: 9781785375064.