When I ask how he’s doing, he references two Van Morrison albums: A Period of Transition and And the Healing has Begun. It’s a self-protective mechanism – if I’m really tough with myself, then nobody else can be as tough on me. As a journalist Keane has covered conflict and brutality across the world for more than thirty years, from Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and many more.

The Madness by Fergal Keane | Book review | The TLS The Madness by Fergal Keane | Book review | The TLS

Keane is interested in the question of intergenerational trauma, an emerging scientific field based in epigenetics—the study of the ways in which environmental factors, including traumatic experiences, can turn genes on and off. With an alcoholic father who could be charming, and an emotionally distant mother, he lived like a ghost, barely breathing for fear of bringing himself to the attention of the parents he loved dearly. Fergal had a nervous breakdown– a period of acute mental illness leaving him unable to cope with life. They were taken by two Ukrainian journalists who drove into a city under attack, and stayed as Russia set a horrific siege. His early years and background created the anvil and his life choices to become a war correspondent were the hammer.Fergal Keane’s torments might be as nothing compared to the sufferings he has observed, and his work can do nothing to alleviate those sufferings, but what chance is there of any restitution, no matter how inadequate it may be, without witnesses to the crimes of the truly guilty?

BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023 BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023

His grandmother received an injured veteran’s pension for her role in a conflict as brutal as those Keane went on to cover. When I came out of Rwanda, and I did what was the most important film of my life, which was the first documentary during the worst genocide since the Nazis . After reporting on the genocide in Rwanda, he “was shadowed by the memory of those who had witnessed the murder of their families, endured rape and mutilation, and unlike me had no access to medication or therapy”. Experiencing intense mental anguish, he phoned home crying and barely able to speak, and left his ticket and money belt at a kiosk.war photographers, war correspondents are a small fraternity, and they tend to leap from conflict to conflict to conflict . Now that you’re no longer going to the frontline, has that addictive side of your personality found other outlets? Driven by an irresistible compulsion to be where the night is darkest, he made a name for reporting with humanity and empathy from places where death and serious injury were not abstractions, and tragedy often just a moment’s bad luck away. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.