I recently read Hanne Ørstavik’s novel ‘ti amo’ (And Other Stories books) and it has been haunting me ever since. Not a negative possession at all, but haunted in the sense of revealed truths that are sad and essential and reveal a beauty that catches the heart and sends it soaring. It is a novel/memoir - autofiction is the current term - about the loss of Ørstavik’s husband to cancer. At times I had to put it down, so intensely did the writing communicate the loss from which there is no rescue.

She tells the story with heart stopping honesty. There is not a scintilla of romanticising much less self pity. Because true love has no place for such things. I am on my way to the countryside for a few days so this is a brief post. But do read the book. It will sit with you in all the best ways.

London, June 4

There will be no more dramatic summonses. The news desk will not call me in the dead of night. No heart thumping, wondering what hell-hole I might be heading to, no frantic packing of a bag and trudging away from home before dawn for the taxi to the airport, and no boarding a near empty plane, the only other passengers my colleagues and competitors from other organisations, all of us flying to a place everyone else is leaving. I have returned my BBC ID pass, the mobile phone, the laptop. Sometime in the last few days the company email stopped working. If I ever return to New Broadcasting House, it will be as a guest waiting in reception to be shepherded to a studio. I walked out of the building without saying goodbye to a soul. That is my way. I cannot abide prolonged departures. The real friends I made at the BBC will be friends for life. We will still meet and gossip and be there for each other when the storms blow.

Passing by All Souls Church – John Nash’s Regency masterpiece beside NBH – I remembered the morning of my BBC interview in 1989 and how nervous I was. So much so that I popped inside and sat in silence and mumbled a sinner’s prayer to see me through the ordeal ahead.

Had I known what lay in the future – wars, famines, genocide, PTSD – would I have still walked across the road and entered the interview room? Yes. I no longer bargain with the past or torment myself with ‘What ifs?’ Besides, as I have expressed in a film just made by Alice Doyard, the long journey enriched my experience of humanity. It left me a hopeful person and one full of gratitude. See here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002x905/the-road-to-hope-with-fergal-keane

Listowel, County Kerry.

The River Feale is in full flow. A Heron stalks the banks below the bridge. I arrive in late afternoon, coming in the Tralee road with the Stacks Mountains to my right, the river on my left and beyond that the plain of north Kerry rolling to the shores of the Atlantic.

This is the heartland of the Keanes and Purtills, my father’s people, my people. This is a country of cattle farmers and writers. I am on my way to attend Ireland’s oldest literary festival, Listowel Writers Week, founded 55 years ago by, among others, my uncle, John B. Keane and his fellow writers Bryan McMahon and Brendan Kennelly.

There is a lovely lack of pretension at Listowel. No hierarchy of the famous, the nearly famous, the wanting to be famous, and the obscure. In my experience writers are an insecure bunch. Not the best people for small talk, the good ones at least. Listowel doesn’t have a green room or roped off area for the performers. It spares us the potential awkwardness of each other’s company. That means the literati and the people mingle. They drink, tell stories and sing in the pubs. Among these my cousin Billy’s bar on William Street is much visited.

I share a stage with the former trade union leader, Mick Lynch, who rouses the crowd with an appeal for solidarity in the face of right-wing advances in politics and media. I ask him if he will stand for election and he doesn’t say yes, and he doesn’t say no. Watch this space.

Church Street, sometime after 10am the following day.

There are a lot of Keanes around this place. As a child who came here in the summer holidays, I was constantly being introduced to people who were cousins. The poet Roger McGough remarked to me some years ago that everything in Listowel seemed to be ‘Keane’d’ in some way. Well, it might look like that. But many of the Keanes you meet are not actual relatives, or they might have been a few hundred years ago, but the family lines diverged. Still, the sense of tribal solidarity is powerful, a bit Sicilian I would say. An offence against one, an offence against all. I am staying with my cousin Conor and his uber kind wife Marie. It is a quiet house, the perfect place to be the day after I have left the BBC.

My late aunt, Mary, wife of John B., who ran the bar for decades, was the lynchpin of the tribe and my cousins are fond of recalling her words of advice about meeting adversity. “We’ll put our shop face on and we’ll hoor it out.” Damn any troubles behind the scenes, customers would see an unperturbed face. To ‘hoor’ it out is to face troubles defiantly.

The new day begins with rain. We are following my cousin John who is leading a guided tour of the town, with stops at various historic points or places noted for the eccentricities or quirks of their former habitants. He summons me and gives me a piece of paper to read. It is the election manifesto of a long-forgotten character in the town’s political history, one Thomas Doodle, a joke candidate invented by my uncle and his pals during the 1951 general election. At the time the town was still riven by bitter rivalries from the Civil War just under thirty years before. My uncle thought humour the best antidote to enmity.

Doodle - whose real identity is still disputed - drew 3000 knowing locals to his big rally. He was preceded by two brass bands and overshadowed the far smaller hustings of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who visited the same day. Newly freed from the constraints of BBC impartiality, no longer the big cheese reporter, I read out his manifesto in my best lying politician voice. Doodle promised to abolish taxes on gold found at the end of a rainbow, to outlaw buffoonery, to establish a factory for shaving the hair off gooseberries and - my favourite - a declaration that under his rule “every man would have more than the next.” I finished off with his immortal slogan: “Vote the Noodle and Give the Whole Caboodle to Doodle.” The crowd cheered. The rain fell down on last year’s man. (Merci Leonard.)

Carrigafoyle Castle, the day after that.

As was their custom, the English massacred the garrison. Easter 1580 and the Italian and Irish troops, sent by the Pope, were cut down trying to flee across the estuary, or hanged in front of the castle. We were at Carrigafoyle Castle for the beautiful sea and country air and the view over the mouth of the River Shannon. A fine place on a morning when the rain has stopped.

We were three ageing hacks, a brilliant poet, the poet’s talented son and a harpsichordist with several hearts of gold. The hacks: I have known Julian Borger and Chris McGreal since my early days in Johannesburg as a foreign correspondent. They are the kind of buddies a man needs at this stage of life. They too have aching bones and are bewildered by the speed of the world around them. They are good human beings and argumentative customers, McGreal particularly, no matter the elevated rank of the one he tangles with. He sailed the oceans as a teenage deckhand in the Merchant Navy before becoming a newspaperman.

Some years back (2006) he wrote two major articles for the Guardian comparing the realities of apartheid South Africa and life for the Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. It was brave, necessary and credible reporting because McGreal had lived and reported in both places. He needed his thick skin to endure the tide of rage and misinformation that came his way in the aftermath.

The poet was Zaffar Kunial, one of the great rising talents of English literature, although ‘English’ is too narrow a definition for a man with roots in these islands but also in the Indian sub-continent, and whose inspirations are universal. His mother was English, his father from Kashmir. He is pictured above at the most unusual cricket grounds in the North Atlantic, at a place called The Spa near Tralee (Zaffar is an aficionado of a game I do not understand.)

I am sure he will not mind if I share with you this work. It’s a poem called ‘The Word’ aabout an exchange with his father, and speaks to the distances between father and son, the alienation between different worlds, and a deep tenderness.

I couldn’t tell you now what possessed me
to shut summer out and stay in my room.
Or at least attempt to. In bed mostly.
It’s my dad, standing in the door frame
not entering – but pausing to shape advice
that keeps coming back. “Whatever is matter,

must enjoy the life.” He pronounced this twice.
And me, I heard wrongness in putting a the

before life. In two minds. Ashamed. Aware.
That I knew better, though was stuck inside
while the sun was out. That I’m native here.
In a halfway house. Like that sticking word.
That definite article, half right, half
wrong, still present between enjoy and life.

Zaffar was at Writers Week with his son, Zaffar Óg, as the locals here christened him. He is 17 and Óg is the Gaelic for young. The young man is a talented musician and stunned us all with his intelligence and the breadth of his knowledge of music and writing.

Our harpsichordist, Karen Glen, doesn’t know it but she is heading for a breakthrough on the popular music scene. Karen is a full-time classical musician, but I have persuaded her to pause and join my rock and roll band. Riches have been promised. Fame. Impossible glamour. Read on…

South-west London, sometime recently.

The sun is pounding on my cranium. Even the dog Deilo, always game for a walk, is swaying in the afternoon heat. I am reminded of the mad king Sweeney’s words in Flann O’Brien’s comic masterpiece, At Swim Two Birds: “Piteous Christ it is cheerless.”

Alice and I enter the pub, the final stop on a Via Dolorosa of searching for a venue where ‘The Last Chancers’ might be able to play for their families and friends. We are five individuals of greater and lesser musical talent. I am at the far end of the latter but recently took possession, after a lifetime of longing, of a Fender Telecaster guitar. It has greatly improved my musical self-esteem. We will be loud, proud and there will be dancing and laughter. Our repertoire is blues and rock and roll and it will my first time playing a proper gig since South Africa in 1994. Then I played at the Foreign Correspondents Club dinner that marked the elections to end apartheid. Before that I’d played in rock and roll bands at school, dreaming of making it big until U2 – contemporaries – got there first. I hear on the grapevine they are terrified of the revival I am planning.

On matters of venues, and much else, I defer to the judgement of Alice. As a Parisian she has a solid belief in the rightness of her judgements, and more often than not on aesthetic matters she is right. So, it proves today. The place is small but full of what a TripAdvisor review might call “genuine atmosphere.” I muse dreamily on the Beatles and the Cavern, the Stones and Bowie at Eel Pie Island, The Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City. “Yes. I like it” says Alice. Four words. The deal is sealed.

All that remains is for ‘The Last Chancers’ to practice. And by God we need to.

But one of the nice things about leaving a full-time job as a foreign correspondent is that I can make plans and know that I will keep them. No danger of the civil war or natural disaster calling me away. And I am finding my way back to things I love, like playing music and making time for friendship. See you in a fortnight for another Wonder Diary. Keep on rocking in the free world.

Welcome to my official Substack launch. I am bringing to this space four decades of reporting the world and experiencing the vagaries of human nature. By instinct and training I live by reasoned argument. I will call things as I see them. At the outset I should warn you that I am, despite my travels, a hopeful man. To steal part of a phrase from Evelyn Waugh, I place the human capacity for love “high in the pantheon” of virtues.

In addition to my weekly letter, I am starting a diary which is a more personal space that might give you an occasional laugh or an insight into the worlds I am travelling, and have travelled through (like the nerve shredding moment with the Kurds who were fighting IS at the time.) The diary will start tomorrow (Thursday).

It is a strange feeling to write a piece that doesn’t have to be first seen and approved by a BBC editor. Liberating to be sure. I can write what I like within the bounds of libel and defamation laws. Nor do I have to worry that something I write will bring the hounds of outrage baying at the Corporation’s doors.

I never worried about them coming for me personally. I was schooled in a robust newspaper tradition in Ireland (see more in my first letter below), and decades of dealing with bullies in the war zones of the world prepared me well for the venom of social media.

But I was always acutely conscious of not drawing fire on the BBC because of anything I said or wrote outside.

I am encouraged by the new Director General, Matt Brittin. This is a view based on personal soundings, people I’ve spoken with, things I’ve heard. He has the intellectual sharpness and strategic brain for the hour we are in. I am told he has a strong moral compass. That is the essential attribute for an editor-in-chief when the storm is raging, because in an organisation as hierarchical as the BBC the line the DG draws will be the one everyone else defends. Whoever he recruits as his deputy, and his head of news, will need to have steel at their core. They are the ones who must ensure that the journalists get it right and are fair-minded – the essential obligations - but also that they feel supported when the heat comes on from pressure groups, vested interests or, as in the case of Robbie Gibb, from within the structures of the BBC itself.

I was lucky to have a succession of Foreign Editors who had my back. The understanding was that I wouldn’t hang them out to dry with biased or inaccurate reporting. The young who consume news get this. This is a generation with a desire for moral clarity in a world where words and images are routinely deployed in the service of lies.

You cannot attract younger audiences if they perceive you to shy away from the truth because of pressure. Journalistic courage is good for business. Enough of Keane the sage. For my first letter, I am reflecting on the changes I’ve seen since I started out as a reporter in the autumn of 1979. I am starting without paid subscriptions, to give you a sense of whether you feel my writing is worth forking out for. I will review in a fortnight. There will still be free content but I am planning a larger package with audio, video and long dispatches for paid subscribers.

From Stone Age to (I) Phone Age.

I was eighteen years old and wearing the first suit I ever owned. A light grey tweed that almost, but not quite, gave the impression I was an adult. I left home with this family gift and a few words of caution familiar to all Irish teenagers: “Don’t make a show (spectacle) of yourself.”

A few months earlier I had been a schoolboy in Cork dreaming of travelling the world. Now I was sitting on a train bound for Limerick city. A journey of 90 minutes through the sodden fields of that long ago Autumn. I remember changing trains at a rural junction where carriages loaded with beet were being lined up, muddy and grey, blocking the far horizon of my imagination. But it was a beginning. The job I had craved. How proud I was then when someone asked me what I did and I could reply: “I’m a reporter.” Had anyone then suggested to me that almost fifty years later I would be writing a valedictory piece for about my career as a BBC foreign correspondent, and the changes I’ve seen in journalism, I would have laughed at them. For most people the internet would not exist for another 12 years.

I arrived at the little newsroom of the Limerick Leader and Chronicle at 54 O’Connell Street to be greeted by a fug of cigar and pipe smoke, the clattering of typewriters, a constant ringing of landline telephones - mobile phones were still six years away in Ireland and Britain - and regular bursts of laughter and intermittent swearing.

This was a world of clearly defined roles. The reporters went out on stories - what we called ‘markings’ - and wrote them up, taking care to always make a carbon copy. The sub editor received the top copy to correct and mark up the headlines. As the junior I would then be sent back to hand the marked story to the printers.

I learned how to type and take shorthand notes. I spent my days reporting the local courts, agricultural shows, council meetings, local politics, rugby matches, greyhound racing, and I ran a circulation boosting ‘Bonny Baby’ competition.

The only hitch with the latter was that I lost a box of children’s photographs and had to spend some months avoiding irate mothers on the streets of Limerick.

It was an extraordinarily broad grounding in journalism of a kind that has vanished along with so many local newspapers in Britain and Ireland. According to the UK Press Gazette the UK has lost 293 titles in the last 20 years, while the number of journalists employed by the country’s three leading local newspaper groups has fallen from 9000 to 3000. It is a tragedy for journalism, cutting off an entry route for aspiring reporters and removing a key vehicle for holding local power accountable.

Drinking culture

On the Limerick Leader you could never forget your audience. You met them in the streets. You defended your reporting to the faces of those who might be displeased by it. A thick skin was required.

If you were inclined to put your opinions ahead of the facts, or entertained notions about the grandeur of your position, there was always a battle-hardened colleague to bring you down to earth.

The climate of 70s and 80s journalism - across newspapers and broadcasting - tolerated a ‘robust’ drinking culture. Liquid lunches. A short hop to the pub in mid-morning to quell a violent hangover. The one pint that stretched to two, three, four and more.

Free drink was widely available as businesses, state bodies, civic groups, politicians sought the favour of the press. Our collective attitude is best summed up in the words of a colleague who, when asked what possible news could be extracted from the launch of some minor product (it might have been detergent), replied, “We will eat and drink our fill and astonish them with our ingratitude.” In other words, nothing would be written about the event.

Questionable behaviour was endemic in many newsrooms. On one memorable occasion working in Dublin, I saw a typewriter fly across the room, propelled by an inebriated colleague. He vanished the following day, apparently on a ferry to Britain, never to be seen in the building again.

The drinking in newspapers and broadcasting seemed like fun at the time, but it did not make for good journalism, and it sent too many fine reporters to early graves, wreaking devastation on families.

That era is long gone. We operate now in a world of water coolers, herbal tea and oat milk cappuccino and - for the most part - careful avoidance of any words that might offend a colleague. Although I suspect the bullying has become more passive aggressive or mutated into back biting.

To one who was regularly addressed as “Keane you gobshite” or “Keane you clown” and many other colourful phrases, today’s environment is markedly less abrasive. I learned to give as good as I got. The men who taught me expected nothing less.

It was a male dominated environment. I have spoken with enough female colleagues of my vintage in Ireland and the UK to know how deeply they experienced a misogynistic ‘lads’ culture in journalism. It wasn’t until I reached the BBC in 1989 that I worked for a woman editor - a decade after I’d started out. According to the Reuters Institute women now occupy 46% of senior editorial roles in the UK, while 53% of journalism students are women. It is a different story in much of the rest of the world where the Institute criticizes “the prominence of gendered routines and ‘boys’ clubs’ within newsrooms.”

In other areas change has been intense and rapid. Like no period I have known. At times I wonder if this is what it felt like for the stars of silent movies when their world was overtaken by the talkies. How many of my generation feel overwhelmed by the landscape of Tik Tok and AI? I certainly do. Recording myself pontificating into the mobile phone, then posting it with hashtags and captions, feels like a ‘Dad at the Disco’ moment. I can do it, but the young are so much faster and better.

No Golden age.

There was never a ‘golden age’ of journalism. When I started out, just like now, there was great reporting, a vast tundra of competent work, and then the lower depths occupied by sensation mongers, ideological axe grinders and outright fabulists. What has changed is the power given by social media to cranks, bores, conspiracy theorists, lobby groups, liars and chancers, con artists of every shade.

All the worse because it is promoted by big corporations with a vested interest in manufactured outrage. Nothing makes money for the social media titans like anger.

I don’t make an argument against change. In four decades, I have gone from working on typewriters to main frame computers to laptops; from recording voice tracks down crackling phone lines to satellites that deliver the reporter in quality - sound and vision - instantly from almost anywhere in the world. How exciting has it been to go from the dominating western narrative of foreign affairs to a world where the peoples of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American nations increasingly tell their own stories and challenge stereotypes.

What is different is the speed of transformation. This makes demands which are cognitive, physical and moral. This last is what concerns me most. Fighting disinformation and hate demands courage. So does standing up to well organised lobbies who target journalists with coordinated, prolonged campaigns designed to shape our coverage. Like any journalist with a shred of sense I welcome feedback. Positive or critical, it doesn’t matter, as long as the purpose is to expand knowledge, address an imbalance or correct an error.

But too much of what I have seen in the past few years has to do with bullying journalists so that they toe the line or simply avoid certain subjects altogether. It continues because it works.

The physical targeting of journalists by governments and armed groups is rising at a frightening pace. The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 124 journalists and media workers killed in 2024 - the highest number since the CPJ began compiling statistics thirty years ago. The group Reporters Without Borders described Gaza as the most dangerous region in the world for journalists with over 200 journalists killed by the Israeli army, “including at least 35 whose deaths were linked to their journalism” since October 2023.

New life.

I decided to leave the BBC to do other things. Write more books, including my first novel. And it is nearly written! In saying this I am reminded of the apocryphal conversation in a Dublin pub between two well oiled hacks. One says to the other, “I am writing a novel”, to which the response was, “Neither am I.”

There will be documentaries. I will write here and in newspapers and magazines.

I have had friends and colleagues who gave their lives pursuing the ideal of public service broadcasting. John Harrison, killed in South Africa in 1994 months before the dawn of democracy; Kate Peyton, murdered in Mogadishu in 2005; Simon Cumbers shot dead in Riyadh in 2004.

There were those who came home changed for life by what they survived. My producer friend Stuart Hughes, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion in Iraq in 2003. Another blast killed the cameraman, Kaveh Golestan. I think too of Frank Gardner who was left partially paralysed in the legs and uses a wheelchair, after the attack that killed Simon Cumbers.

Ask me about the true spirit of the BBC? It is those people. It is the Palestinian cameramen in Gaza who bravely and accurately recorded the agonies of Gaza over nearly three years of war. The fixers in Ukraine who have taken me to the frontline, the security advisors who share our dangers and keep us safe, the stringers in cities and towns across the world filing the stories of their people, and it is the young journalists whose commitment to public service journalism I find so inspiring. I have learned so much from younger colleagues, about how to meet the challenges of new media , but also about the necessity of maintaining idealism.

What advice can I offer them? Put accuracy first. Follow the facts, wherever they take you. As my first editor in Limerick, Brendan Halligan, told me: “Go after the bad guys but make sure you get it right…” Intellectual rigour and scepticism are more than ever essential. But above all these days, have a moral compass. You will be bombarded with propaganda and straight out lying. Finding out what is true and having the courage to say it will demand all your moral strength. Just keep remembering who you work for.

Your ultimate boss is not the Director of News. It is not the Director General. It is not the Chairman of the BBC Board. Nor is it the pressure group that shouts the loudest. It is the man or woman in Hull, Manchester, Salisbury, Glasgow, Swansea, and so many other places across this nation. They pay you to get it right. To say sorry and fix it if you get it wrong. They pay you to stand up in the face of pressure from wherever it comes. Keep them in mind always and you will not go wrong.