In his book, The Madness, a memoir of war, fear and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Fergal Keane opens doors into closed places. He lets us look inside those complex compartments where fear, anxiety, anger and panic lurk, and he tells a story of being afraid all of his life.
Keane steps out from behind a news shield that has been so obviously dented and damaged by years of thinking, witnessing and seeing what can’t be unseen. Hearing what can’t be unheard.
A big part of his story is what he describes as those decades “roving the world’s front lines”.
This is how most of us know him. Seeing him on television. Listening to him on the radio. Reports from Belfast, South Africa, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq, Ukraine and from the numerous other hells on earth.
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But the battles in his head, inside what I call the mind’s wardrobe where things don’t get thrown out, began long before then.
He tells a story of “childhood stress”. His father’s alcoholism “was rapid and self-obliterating”. And, in all its detail, he also writes of his own battles with the bottle. He has been sober for more than 20 years.
As we turn the pages, we learn that the wars of Keane are not just those that he has reported on and from in those years of roving, but his fighting from the deep trenches within himself. Those never-ending battles of the mind that can break the body.
For a number of years, we worked in the same BBC newsroom in Belfast, when the story from the North was still its fighting and, at a time when peace felt like a pipe dream. I stayed in that newsroom — stayed too long.
Keane began his international journeys, into places most people would run a mile from — and, all the time, part of his story was this unseen war raging within himself. We think we know people. We don’t know their struggles.
His book is beautifully written. A painful read. At times, harrowing. It will make us look inside ourselves — self-examination that takes us to places that are not on the map, but yet we find them. This part of Keane’s war, his suffering behind his shield — that broken and battered armour — is the learning from the pages of this book.
I can visualise him writing it. Hear him reading it. Agonising. Trying to let it go. But, go to where?
Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone
He drills into the detail of PTSD — what it has done to him. What it does to him. We find him reading into family history, following long lines back to times of hunger and war. And, in different generations, finding what today might be described as PTSD.
In his research, he is gathering the information for his next questions, about how trauma is shared, or how it spreads and travels. Where did it begin for him? He is excavating deep roots.
Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone.
Keane writes in detail that demands attention. That, at times, makes us shudder; makes us walk in his shoes and in those steps that he took into many places of danger:
“Nobody forced me to be there on the day in Kabuga, Rwanda, when I lifted the broken door and saw the rotting soldier beneath it, blackened and shrunken, the photo album of his wedding lying open on the ground beside him.”
Elsewhere in the book, he describes “a vast graveyard. The rancid, offal reek of the dead rose from pits, ditches, houses, the banks of streams and rivers; a smell that settled in the mind as much as it lingered on our clothes and turned our stomachs.”
There are lines and pages on the dead he knew. People he worked with and alongside. Their names. Their stories. How it ended. How close he was on occasion.
“They could have acted as my warning,” he writes. “Any one of their deaths might have persuaded me to stop there and then. Except none did.”
Keane forced himself to be there. That is what news is about. Being in those places of the biggest headlines. Places of great danger. Being with the fighting and the dead. It is a type of addiction.
Keane is a reader. A thinker. He remembers too much. Knows the damage. Yet, he kept going back.
As I read his book, I ask myself how would anyone ever erase this stuff from the memory bank.
He dreads writing about Rwanda. Of course, he does. What happened there. What it did to him. What it does to him. Remembering the fear and the anxiety of being there.
The journey with a small team of colleagues to Butare, not knowing that already almost 300,000 people had been murdered. Witnessing. The hell of seeing. He is hard on himself. He shouldn’t be. Someone who was with him in Rwanda in that summer of 1994, told him: “Stop beating yourself up.” It is good advice.
All of us, as we rewind back to different news days, think about what we should have done. What we could have done better. That is life’s learning. The purpose of reflection.
I think about all of that in the context of the conflict in the North and, then, on its roads to an imperfect peace.
Keane has much more to think about; what happened on the many — the too many — front lines from which he reported. These stories develop. They never end.
In the prologue of his book, he writes of a conversation in which he says: “I should have stopped after Belfast.” He knows, of course, that he was not going to stop then. Those of us who knew him then knew he was not going to stop.
Belfast, and Northern Ireland in its wider frame, has not stopped — that imperfect peace I described still makes too many headlines; the stories we read in the book Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom, edited by journalists Leona O’Neill and Chris Lindsay.
This is an important book. A reminder that peace is a process; that danger does not end with ceasefires and the making of political agreements and, that a scratch beneath our surface, you can still find bitterness and brokenness.
Lindsay, a BBC journalist, writes the opening chapter — Hard Cover; his story from Ardoyne in north Belfast on 12 July 2005 — one of those days in the city when parade and protest meet.
Ask Leona O’Neill to put peace into words after seeing what she saw on the cold ground of Creggan in Derry in April 2019
His words are a personal description of the physical and psychological wounds that come with Belfast’s reporting beat.
Seeing a blast bomb rolling towards him. Hearing its sound — “a savage, concussive boom”. Feeling searing pain in his back — “a flesh wound from a small red-hot shard”. Sharing an ambulance with a man who had been more seriously injured.
Peace has a different meaning in Northern Ireland.
Ask Leona O’Neill to put peace into words after seeing what she saw on the cold ground of Creggan in Derry in April 2019.
“I heard the shots and I ran for cover. She was just laying there on the ground, we didn’t know what had hit her. My friend put his coat under her head and I phoned an ambulance. The police put her in the back of their vehicle and crashed through the burning barricades. They took her to hospital where she tragically died.”
Leona writes about repeating those words numerous times on news outlets; words describing the shooting of journalist Lyra McKee during rioting in Derry, hit by a bullet fired towards police vehicles by a dissident IRA gunman. O’Neill was there when that happened, and was now trying to stay in “professional, stoic mode”. Trying not to crumble.
That news shield, that we have all hidden behind, offers only limited protection. It can be pierced. Is it any wonder that there is trauma in the newsrooms?
David McIlveen, described as “simply one of the outstanding camera journalists of his generation”, takes us inside the Royal London Hospital during the Covid pandemic; different from international assignments:
“Not devastation in a foreign field but on our own doorstep, with people dying and suffering all around us.”
We don’t often, or not often enough, think about those behind the camera. McIlveen’s writing, his words in Breaking, will make the reader think some more.
This is a book that can be read without following its chapter chronology. One of the writers is Barbara McCann, a broadcast journalist with a career that stretches beyond 40 years. She knows the story of this place and other places, and she shares something I have not read before.
“Throughout my career, every time I arrived at the scene of an atrocity or fatal crash, I have first always said a private prayer for the dead or dying. It has never mattered to me what religious or political views they held. They all had someone who loved them.”
This is not a book I could read in one sitting or in one go. I had to put it down.
There is still no agreement on a legacy process to answer the questions of Northern Ireland’s past
Having read through the Keane memoir and into Breaking, I found the experience too much — too soon for me after my own writing of Living with Ghosts.
I will return to it because this is important work; the experiences of correspondents, reporters, camera operators and photographers that take the reader outside the often strict boundaries of news.
There is still no agreement on a legacy process to answer the questions of Northern Ireland’s past. But, eventually, when some story-telling archive is established, these contributions will add to understanding. That is the worth of this book. Its value. Why it is important.
- Brian Rowan is the author of Living with Ghosts: The Inside Story from a Troubles Mind (Merrion Press)
FURTHER READING
The Reporting the Troubles books are essential reading. Compiled by veteran journalists Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, they bring together decades of reporting experience across the conflict period and into the Northern Ireland peace process. The scores of essays, or chapters, are written not just by home reporters but include contributions from numerous correspondents who visited when Belfast was a place that made world headlines. Senator George Mitchell, international chairman of the talks that produced the historic political agreement at Easter 1998, writes the foreword to Reporting the Troubles (Blackstaff Press, 2018). Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair contribute the foreword to the follow-up Reporting the Troubles 2 (Blackstaff Press, 2022).
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