McAleese complains over ‘New York Times’ article on Berkeley tragedy

Former President Mary McAleese said that the “absence of empathy” in a New York Times article on the death of six Irish students in Berkeley prompted her to file a complaint with the newspaper.

Ms McAleese’s comments followed an apology from the newspaper after it wrote that the J1 programme that sees students travel to work in America was a “source of embarrassment” to Ireland.

“I find the article utterly offensive and so insensitive that I would say it was almost disassociated from any sense of human empathy or human feeling or any sense of human grief. No understanding whatsoever of the grief of these families and the pain and the suffering, the cruel suffering, that they are enduring,” she told RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke radio programme yesterday.