Media

An Irish journalist's reports from the Crimea changed the newspaper industry and British politics. 150 years later, Conor Brady remembers William Howard Russell

Have you ever noticed how, if you mention anything to do with gender balance, the first reply you get is "but we have a woman on the committee/board/management etc"? I like to think of that response as the recognition that one, solitary, lone, token woman is the equivalent of the dozen men who have permanent residence on the committee/board/management etc. In allowing myself to believe that, it helps to suppress the overwhelming desire it provokes in me to deck the eejit who just said something that dumb.

At some point in every election campaign every candidate forms a view that they are going to win. This syndrome, which is known as candidatitis, is capable of moving even the most rational aspirant into a state of extreme self-belief. It strikes without warning, is no respecter of gender, and can infect the lowly, municipal hopeful as well as lofty presidential wannabe.

Recent events – or non-events – in the political scene have served once again to emphasise the poverty of politics in modern Ireland. Very rarely is any matter of genuine political principle or policy choice an occasion of conflict or controversy: that is reserved for personalised in-fighting and career manoeuvring.

The delegation going to meet the Minister for Health, whom one of them refers to as "the Mata Hari", gather on the train with all the anxiousness of a group of kids on an outing to Dublin. They count themselves on; four here, two joining them in Limerick and some driving. They check their statistics, adding the latest.

Journalists are often forced to use some artistic licence.

Imagine your child is at a school where neither the teacher nor anyone else in the school can communicate in his/her own first language. Imagine that all the children in the school share the same first language, but none of the adults who work there do. Imagine that your child will never be encouraged to communicate in its own language for the entire time it is at the school.

On 6 April I made an appeal to the IRA to commit itself to purely political and democratic activity. Before making these remarks I thought long and hard about this initiative. There has been adverse comment about the timing of my appeal. Some have dismissed it as an election stunt. Others have said it is a confidence trick.

While the memory of that plain wooden coffin on the beautiful oriental rug will long linger, the feel-good factor of the Pope's funeral went out the window as soon as President Khatami got back to Iran and denied that he had shaken the hand of Israel's President Khatsav. What may or may not have been an exchange of "peace be upon you" and a chat in Farsi about their shared home place of Yazd was replaced by mutterings about "baseless claims by the Zionist media".

The Údarás na Gaeltachta elections last weekend saw another important step forward by Sinn Féin. The party won their first seat on the Údarás when Gráinne Mhic Géidigh in Donegal took a seat formerly held by the the late Neil Blaney's Independent Fianna Fáil group.