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.

“What was remarkable to me was no focus on the obvious context which was a balcony that should not have collapsed, collapsed. A balcony in a relatively new building that people were standing on innocently trusting it, that fell. That’s the story. And instead of that we get a story, a rehashed cut and paste story of a number of incidents, very highly exceptional incidents involving J1 students,” Ms McAleese said.

“As we speak at this moment there tens of thousands of Irish students studying abroad all over the world, not a word about them, why? Because they are a credit to us.”

Ms McAleese said that she was one of tens of thousands of Irish students who have travelled over the last few decades.

“In this moment of intense grief these journalists, and it was a team of journalists, it wasn’t just one journalist but a huge team of them involved in this, they cut and paste these most awful stories which represent the most minute minority imaginable and they put that in their newspaper as if that is in any way connected to what is a horrific story of a building failure, an engineering failure.”

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said he was “surprised” by the tone of the article.

“They know well the impact and value of J1 visas and the extraordinary opportunity it gives to so many thousands of young Irish people over the years to go to the US, to understand the bigger world out there and the excitement it creates.

“This is a tragic incident and I was very surprised and disappointed to see the tone of the article written by The New York Times; surprised at them.”