Angela Graham reviews the book Reporting The Troubles: Journalists tell their stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict, compiled by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little.

The first account in this collection of the experiences of more than 60 journalists is by one of the youngest of them all. Martin Cowley of the Derry Journal was only 18 when he was not assigned to cover what would turn out to be one of the most significant of stages on the way to The Troubles, the Civil Rights march in Derry on 5th October 1968. He was too junior for the job, “But I wasn’t going to miss it either.”

At once we are in the thick of one of the recurring themes in the collection: the journalist as observer; the journalist as participant. Cowley might have been very new to the job but already “professional conflict kicked in.” Should he, being a reporter, though ‘off-duty’, walk with the marchers or not? He aimed for a position on the side-lines but, many years later, after reading a long-forgotten statement he had typed at the time, he acknowledged that “my decision to walk along the pavement within arm’s reach of it (the march), was my way of taking part.”

And Cowley featured that day in footage of an incident that had a profound effect on my own young life; footage I would eventually use in a documentary of my own. During the chaotic breaking up of the march by policemen, a news camera captures a man pleading with officers to be restrained. He is jabbed viciously in the stomach and crumples in pain. Watching that on the tv broadcast was as though a veil had been pulled aside and we were all invited to decide whether this was the policing we deserved.

The cameraman holds his ground and films a young man being felled by blows to the head from a police commander. The youngster is Martin Cowley. The book gives us the names of the cameraman: RTÉ’s Gay O’Brien, with sound recordist, Eamon Hayes, along with that of the injured demonstrator, Pat Douglas.

The book’s naming of journalists is very significant. Repeatedly in this collection, as the people behind the written or broadcast stories step into the spotlight, it is extraordinarily encouraging and impressive to read both of the sheer effort it takes to ‘get’ stories and the idealism that fuels that effort. There is certainly hard living, competitiveness and opportunism on display but the commitment to informing what Thomas Jefferson (quoted in Senator George Mitchell’s Foreword) called ‘the opinion of the people’ is unmistakable.

This book would make a great present for any trainee journalist at the commencement of the academic year. Being a journalist is a wonderful thing. At its best, it’s about bringing fresh air and light into the room. It demands a feet-on-the-ground imagination – a stance that requires a lot of stamina to maintain. It takes a heart, a head and a good stomach.

Although there is acknowledgement of ‘the machine’ of news gathering, the journalists in this book foreground the human element: news gathered by people, and what that harvest costs them; even to costing life itself, as in the murder of Martin O’Hagan of the Sunday World.

Martin Cowley survived his beating and went on to become a London editor of the Irish Times and Reuters Ireland correspondent.

For any novice this collection is inspiring. For any tired old hack it will provoke memories and some laughs and, who knows, it might stimulate a few more memoirs.

More information on the book, published by Blackstaff Press, can be found here.