International coverage of our little old economy
A blog post by respected US journalist Timothy Egan on his New York Times hosted Outposts blog has whipped up a bit of a storm – 268 comments since it was published on April Fools Day. Titled The Orphans of Ireland the post comes from a recent holiday that Egan took in Dingle where he was shocked by the number of empty houses in the Irish countryside. Commentators seem to take particular umbrage that he seems to rely on Irish-American cliches for much of his view of Ireland:
“Every village that had seen nary a rock wall or a cottage window unchanged suddenly had a cul de sac of insta-homes and a half-dozen O’Mansions. Anyone with a mortgage could get rich in little more time than it took for a head of Guinness to settle.”
Egan is not the first to paint quite a patronising image of our sudden economic implosion and it’s not just Fianna Fail ministers that are starting to sound the warning bell about innacurate coverage damaging our reputation in international markets. The editors at US magazine Foreign Policy have called on journalists to take back innacurate comments about Ireland and Iceland. They say that much coverage has included ”lots of bloated and condescending scrim on how Ireland and Iceland are the magically quaint fairy-lands of leprechauns, vikings, alcohol, and the in-bred!”
So do you think we deserve the beating we are taking in the international press?
