Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Newspaper from a different patch offers fresh perspective

Cyclist and author Dervla Murphy pictured with actor and comedian Michael Smiley
Cyclist and author Dervla Murphy pictured with actor and comedian Michael Smiley Cyclist and author Dervla Murphy pictured with actor and comedian Michael Smiley

We’re in a war, as has been said, the fact that nobody can define how or when it will end being one of its most painful features.

This new Covid variant brings temptation to panic, no good to anyone. Finding a rhythm in daily life that encourages calm may be the best a citizen can do. Apart, obviously, from thinking how to protect the people around you and yourself at the same time, and refusing to become angry when someone without a mask flounces past you into a shop.

Note that angry ‘flounce’. Note to self; more of that. Be warm and civil to people on tills and driving buses, as of course you will.

Here’s a suggestion that may distract some. Look for a newspaper produced somewhere you don’t know, or at least where you don’t live, and buy it a few times. I’m taken by the Irish Examiner, price £1.60. Without daring to claim insight into editorial line or the general cut of its jib, the look of it alone - news on the back page - is entertaining out of comparative novelty. Hasn’t that always been one benefit people extract from ‘wartime’, that it shifts perspectives?

This is the paper formerly known as the Cork Examiner, owned now by the Irish Times, still with a strong Cork flavour. The papers that come out of Dublin may cover similar material but to this reader at least Dublin’s vanity overwhelmingly skews them. Dáil doings, for example, pre-occupy the Irish Times. The state’s legislature must be properly reflected for sure, but does it merit such labour-intensive coverage, should it dominate the online digest on so many mornings?

To these fresh eyes – see if it works for you - the Examiner reads like a clear-eyed cousin at a big family gathering. This might be a northern skew. I started admiringly last Saturday into their investigative specialist Michael Clifford differing with an Irish Times writer the previous Saturday, on how Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan and minister for justice Frances Fitzgerald came to resign four years back. Worth reading, but a headline glimpsed earlier hooked me away. It was a fond, respectful interview/cum profile in the weekend’s magazine on Dervla Murphy.

Aged 90 now and living alone as she has most of her life, she sounds well and happy. And very good value as an interviewee. Writer of many books on 50 years travel round the world, mostly by bicycle. She famously felt fear very rarely, she confirmed to interviewer Ethel Crowley, though in 70s Belfast she was ‘quite sensibly afraid of a nocturnal cycle through the Antrim Road area of the city.’

A Place Apart, her book on Northern Ireland ‘attempted to get under the skin of the place at the height of the war there.’ Full stop, end of that brief mention. I can’t remember the book. Perhaps I didn’t read it, like most of the other several thousand Troubles books. But I remember Dervla.

She came fondly recommended by Dublin female colleagues. She wanted to see an IRA hunger-striker’s funeral. Not on a bicycle and not on her own. So we trudged along a country road with other local journalists staying well clear of us. Dervla said ‘Yah’ for ‘Yes’ as loudly as any British officer, with what sounded to me like upper-class confidence. We attracted hard stares from republican press handlers. Whatever later discussion we had I have memory-wiped.

Her books, said the Examiner’s writer, are ‘underpinned by research on the society, geography, and culture of each chosen country.’ Maybe she had already done the research and only needed a native companion, on an excursion that must have seemed unnerving. Some culture gaps are wider than others.

On even a few days exploration the Examiner has features to intrigue a reader from another patch with a different perspective. Though it may not offer everyone a trip down a brambly, pitted memory lane.