Fergal Keane | |
|---|---|
 Keane in May 2016 | |
| Born | 6 January 1961 London, England |
| Education | Presentation Brothers College, Cork St Mary's College, Dublin Terenure College |
| Title | On Air Editor at BBC News (?–2020) |
| Relatives | John B. Keane |
Fergal Patrick Keane OBE (born 6 January 1961) is an Irish foreign correspondent with BBC News, and an author. [1] For some time, Keane was the BBC's correspondent in South Africa. He is a nephew of the Irish playwright, novelist and essayist John B. Keane.
Born in London, Keane grew up in Dublin and later in Cork. His father was the Listowel-born actor, Éamonn Keane. [2] He attended three primary schools in Dublin: Scoil Bhride, a gaelscoil (Irish-language school), St. Mary's College and Terenure College, and, later, one primary school in Cork, St. Joseph's. [3]
In a 1999 interview with the Independent , Keane said that his gaelscoil education proved useful in later life: "The grounding in the Irish language I had at Scoil Bhride has never left me. In a foreign country when I'm on the phone and don't wish people to understand what I'm saying, I speak Irish and no Serb listening in is going to crack the code." [3]
His secondary education was at Presentation Brothers College in Cork, where Keane says he was encouraged to join the school debating society, and where he won the Provincial Gold Medal for Public Speaking (on the subject of police brutality in Ireland). [3] Today, Keane continues to draw on this experience acting as a public speaker, event chair and after dinner speaker. [4]
On finishing school in 1979, Keane started his career as a journalist with the Limerick Leader . [1] Subsequently, he worked for The Irish Press . Later, he moved into broadcast journalism with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).[ citation needed ]
Keane joined the BBC in 1989 as Northern Ireland Correspondent, but in August 1990 he was appointed their Southern African Correspondent, having covered the region during the early 1980s. From 1990 to 1994 Keane's reports covered the township unrest in South Africa, the first multi-racial elections following the end of apartheid, and the genocide in Rwanda. In 1995 he was appointed Asia Correspondent based in Hong Kong and two years later, after the handover, he returned to be based in the BBC's World Affairs Unit in London.
Keane was named as overall winner of the Amnesty International Press Awards in 1993 and won an Amnesty television prize in 1994 for his investigation of the Rwandan genocide, Journey into Darkness. He is the only journalist to have won both the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year award and the Sony Radio Reporter of the Year in the same year – 1994. [5] He won The Voice of The Viewer award and a Listener Award for his 1996 BBC Radio 4 From Our Own Correspondent despatch Letter to Daniel, [6] addressed to his newborn son, and a One World Television Award in 1999. He won a BAFTA award for his documentary on Rwanda, Valentina's Story. He has won the James Cameron Prize for war reporting, the Edward R. Murrow Award for foreign reporting, the Index on Censorship prize for journalistic integrity, and the 1995 Orwell Prize for his book Season of Blood. [7] [8] In May 2009 he won a Sony Gold Award for his Radio 4 series Taking A Stand. He also won a Peabody Award and an Emmy for his reporting as part of the BBC team covering the 2015 refugee crisis.[ citation needed ]
In the three-part documentary Forgotten Britain, serialised on the BBC in May 2000, Keane travelled across the country meeting people living on the edge in affluent societies. [9] Keane was a patron of the UK-based development agency Msaada, which assisted survivors of the Rwandan genocide.[ citation needed ]
In 2010, he published his first history work Road of Bones: the Siege of Kohima 1944, an account of the epic battle which halted the Japanese invasion of India in 1944.
One of his projects is the five-part series The Story of Ireland , a 2011 documentary co-produced by BBC Northern Ireland and Raidió Teilifís Éireann.
Keane has been awarded honorary degrees in literature from the University of Strathclyde, Bournemouth University and Staffordshire University. On 15 December 2011, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Liverpool. Keane was appointed an OBE for services to journalism in the 1997 New Year's Honours list.
In April 2018 he was awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for Wounds. [10]
In November 2018, Keane provided the commentary for the Westminster Abbey service marking the centenary of the Armistice. [11]
The BBC revealed in January 2020 that Keane had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for several years, and consequently moved out of his role as Africa editor in order to aid his recovery. [12] In May 2022 he presented a documentary Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD on BBC Two, in which he discussed the impact of PTSD and considered the most recent medical thinking on the condition and its treatment, explaining that his disorder had led him to consider withdrawing from conflict reporting. [13]
In July 2023, he revisited the people and locations from the series Forgotten Britain for a second time in the BBC One programme Brave Britain with Fergal Keane. [14] [15] This new documentary was a one-off programme by filmmaker Alice Doyard and featured new footage of Keane in Cornwall, Glasgow and on the Lincoln Green estate in Leeds with archive footage taken from programmes made in 2000 and 2012.
The Nyarubuye massacre is the name which is given to the killing of an estimated 20,000 civilians on April 15, 1994 at the Nyarubuye Roman Catholic Church in Kibungo Province, 140 km (87 mi) east of the Rwandan capital Kigali. The victims were Tutsis. Men, women, and children were reported to have been indiscriminately killed, with the attackers allegedly using spears, machetes, clubs, hand grenades and automatic weapons. Local Interahamwe, acting in concert with the authorities, used bulldozers to knock down the church building. The militia used machetes and rifles to kill every person who tried to escape.
Ranelagh is an affluent residential area and urban village on the Southside of Dublin, Ireland in the postal district of Dublin 6.
John Brendan Keane was an Irish playwright, novelist and essayist from Listowel, County Kerry.
Hotel Rwanda is a 2004 docudrama film co-written and directed by Terry George. It was adapted from a screenplay by George and Keir Pearson, and stars Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo as hotelier Paul Rusesabagina and his wife Tatiana. Based on the Rwandan genocide, which occurred during the spring of 1994, the film documents Rusesabagina's efforts to save the lives of his family and more than 1,000 other refugees by providing them with shelter in the besieged Hôtel des Mille Collines. Hotel Rwanda explores genocide, political corruption, and the repercussions of violence.
This is a bibliography for primary sources, books and articles on the personal and general accounts, and the accountabilities, of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Mahon is an area to the south-eastern side of Cork, Ireland. Mahon gets its name from Lough Mahon, a wide stretch of the upper section of Cork Harbour. It was once a semi-rural peninsula, but from the late 20th century was subject to residential development, and has a number of housing estates and developments. The area was generally known as the Ring of Mahon, and is the site of Ringmahon House. Mahon is within the Cork South-Central Dáil constituency.
Chris McGreal is a reporter for The Guardian.
Greg Barker is an American filmmaker and producer. In 2011, The New York Times described Barker as “a filmmaker of artistic and political consequence.”
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Mark Doyle is a British journalist and former world affairs correspondent for BBC News. He is known in particular for his articles on topics related to Africa.
Dele Olojede is a Nigerian journalist and former foreign editor for Newsday. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. He serves on the board of EARTH University, in Costa Rica, and of The Markup, the New York-based investigative journalism organization focused on the impact of large tech platforms and their potential for human manipulation. He is the founder and host of Africa In the World, a hearts and minds festival held annually in Stellenbosch, in the Cape winelands of South Africa. He was a patron of the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Lincoln Green is a mainly residential area of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England around Lincoln Green Road, and is adjacent to and southwest of St James's University Hospital. It falls within the Burmantofts and Richmond Hill ward of the City of Leeds Council. The area was given this name in 1954, at the start of major redevelopment by the City Council.
Shane Kenny is an Irish journalist and broadcaster who worked mainly at RTÉ Radio 1. After gaining a BA from Trinity College Dublin he studied journalism in Newcastle upon Tyne and worked there for the Journal and Chronicle from 1970 to 1973. He was a weekend newscaster on BBC North East radio (1972–3) and later in 1973 he was recruited as a reporter and presenter of 7 Days on RTÉ television (1973–5) before joining RTÉ Radio, where he became a news editor in 1980, in which role he launched and was the first editor of Morning Ireland. He was a longtime news anchor on News at One and This Week, presented RTÉ radio's general election coverage, and also travelled extensively in the Middle East, Europe and the United States to report on international news stories and elections. From 1986 he was the US ABC network's Ireland correspondent. In 1989 he won the top prize "for supreme contribution to Irish journalism" at the National Media Awards. He was press secretary to the 1994–97 Rainbow Coalition government, and to its 1996 Presidency of the Council of the European Union. He returned to RTÉ when the government lost the 1997 election and he chose the less political post of business news editor. In 2003 he left RTÉ to research the role of the Russian Marshal Georgi Zhukov in WWII, and establish his own media business, Leader Productions, and a consultancy, Shane Kenny Media CRO. His radio documentary, Hitler's Nemesis – Georgi Zhukov was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 in April 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII.RTE radio documentaries. He still appeared on RTÉ as an independent broadcaster, including his Celtic Tiger series Moneymakers interviewing business leaders, and fronting the "Entrepreneur of the Year" series which he brought to RTE television until he stopped in 2007.RTE Guide He became director of public affairs at Dublin City University, and a member of the executive board, 2005–2011 with provision that he could continue his broadcasting and consulting work. He retired early in 2011 because of illness.
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Colm Keane was an Irish author, broadcaster and journalist. Originally from County Cork, he studied economics at Trinity College in Dublin and Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He joined Raidió Teilifís Éireann as a broadcaster in the late 1970s, and produced and contributed to several shows with a current affairs and documentary focus. After his retirement from broadcasting in 2003, Keane became a full-time writer, authoring 29 books, including eight Irish best-sellers.
Donald Friswell Easten MC was a British Army officer of the Royal West Kents who was awarded the Military Cross for his actions during the defence of Kohima from Japanese attack during the Second World War. In retirement he bred Hampshire Down sheep and was Master of Hounds to both the Colchester Garrison Beagles and the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds.
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