Latest news with #FintanDrury
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
‘It horrifies me, but I had actually developed a corporate strut': Fintan Drury on Anglo, Paddy Power and Gaza
Fintan Drury was marching in support of Palestine with one of his daughters last year, feeling the same distrust he felt during his 1980s stint as a presenter of RTÉ's Morning Ireland. 'I just sort of thought, well, I don't believe what we're being fed. I just don't believe it.' As Israel's onslaught on Gaza intensified, his participation in marches became more regular, and so did the sense that he could do something else to counter the official line coming from Israel. He rejects as 'patent nonsense' any perception that the conflict began with the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023. 'I thought there was more I could do if I got up off my ass and used my curious mind and my journalistic training.' READ MORE This was the catalyst for writing Catastrophe: Nakba II, his sober yet devastating account of Israel's treatment of Palestinians over decades. He says the subject is too important not to actively promote the book and that means being 'quizzed' by journalists, though he seems keen throughout our conversation to avoid coming across as egotistic – something that will not surprise readers of his 2021 memoir See-Saw, which dwells on the perils of ego. 'Sorry, it sounds sort of pompous,' he apologises soon after explaining how he was counselled to exhume his reporting skills in 2016. That year Drury wrote a series of articles for The Irish Times from his time as a volunteer at a Syrian refugee camp in Athens. It came after a long spell in the higher echelons of Irish corporate life during which he was, on occasion, the story. Indeed, so much of his career was spent in business that when he identifies journalism as the thing he was 'best at', the self-criticism is implied. Fintan Drury: 'I wasn't trying to be a hero; that wasn't my mission.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Catastrophe opens with a note acknowledging that most books on Palestine and Israel are by authors with more extensive experience of the Middle East. Many are by 'absolutely brilliant minds', he says, but can be academic and dense. His aim, when he began working on it 'in a serious way' in April 2024, was to provide an accessible narrative 'so even the people who are out marching and protesting and wearing their keffiyehs – the people who are instinctively pro-Palestine – can better understand why they're protesting'. His research, which saw him travel to the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon last July, helped confirm his own 'gut' feeling, though he didn't know then how extreme the situation would become. 'I didn't honestly believe at that time that it could be as bad as it is now. And it was bad then. Really, really bad.' Israel's aggression escalated while he was in the region, obliging him to call off one trip to southern Lebanon after a phone call with a contact in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil). He was advised that an elevated security threat meant it would no longer be able to dedicate a minder. 'It's a bit like swimming when you're told not to, and the coastguard getting called out. You're putting other people at risk. I'm a grandfather. I wasn't trying to be a hero; that wasn't my mission, so I didn't go.' He has been heartened by the 'very positive' public reaction. At the Listowel Literary Festival, interest in Catastrophe was such that his talk was moved to a bigger room, though when someone asked him about solutions, he said he wasn't the right person to offer them. 'It is multifaceted, and it will ebb and flow and change,' he says. 'But the fundamental of the story is pretty clear to me and to a great many others who are there and studying it and observing it for decades. This is a genocide. All bets are off now. This is not right.' [ Britain and allies sanction two Israeli ministers as Gazan authorities say gunfire kills dozens at food aid site Opens in new window ] Authors often have more than one reason for writing a particular book and in his case there were several. Apart from the conflict itself, and the time being right for him to embark upon the project, he sees parallels with Ireland's colonisation that intersect with his own family story. Drury's maternal grandfather Joseph Connolly was a leader of the Irish Volunteers in Belfast who was imprisoned by the British in 1916 and resumed his republican activities in the city after his release. When it became too dangerous to stay, he fled with his wife and young family to Dublin. Connolly, who went on to serve twice as a minister under Éamon de Valera, died when Drury was two, but he knew his grandmother well, he says. 'My grandparents were displaced people. They were refugees from Belfast. Is that relevant? Absolutely, it's relevant. Because it's in your history. You understand that Catholics and nationalists who weren't able to get out continued to suffer.' Catastrophe – the Nakba of the subtitle refers, in the first instance, to the mass displacement of Palestinians in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – is dedicated to the memory of his Belfast-born mother Róisín Drury, née Connolly. Their discussions about how the plight of Jewish people was shamefully ignored in the 1930s and 1940s would sometimes end with her relief that modern communications meant nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again. There will be no credible basis for anyone to claim they did not understand what Israel was doing in Gaza or that they 'somehow missed it', he writes. The book documents an 'institutionalised bias' in the West towards Israel as the 'upholder of Western values' in the Middle East, with Drury despairing at both 'staggering' international inertia and 'chilling' sponsorship of Israel's campaign. He witnessed what he calls the 'warped' US policy first hand when he reported for RTÉ on Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election and believes Democrats as well as Republicans have abandoned Palestinians. While Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu found it easy to 'play' the US in a presidential election year, he says the young mothers he met in Lebanon were livid that such a 'warmonger', as one described him, was permitted to address Congress. Ireland should be doing more, too, he concludes. 'I think Ireland has done many things really well, I really do, but has Ireland done enough? Time will tell, but right now I don't think so.' Drury (67) was born in Dublin and raised in Clonskeagh, then a 'sleepy part of south Dublin'. He attended Blackrock College and later UCD – its relocation to Belfield was an early taste of the city's encroachment on the fields of his youth. From 1981 to 1988 he was a newsman, joining RTÉ despite being told in a screen test that his head was 'shaped like a shovel'. He reported from Belfast and overseas before becoming the co-presenter of Radio 1's then fledgling Morning Ireland in 1985. But after just two-and-half years he grew restless and left broadcasting at age 29. It wasn't his plan to go into business, yet that's what he did, founding the public relations firm Drury Communications before selling it to its management a decade later to concentrate on his eponymous sports consultancy, which in 2004 rebranded as Platinum One. He became chairman of RTÉ in mid-2005 but resigned after six months when a perceived conflict of interest arose – over golf. The then government was flirting with adding the 2006 Ryder Cup, which was being held in Co Kildare, to its list of free-to-air television events, but Drury was an adviser to its organisers. Relinquishing the role was 'the right thing', he says. Does this all seem like a long time ago? 'It was a long time ago,' he says, laughing. It was that exact Celtic Tiger era, I say. 'Yeah.' These were hubristic times, as Drury outlines in See-Saw, which is laced with mea culpas about a 'sense of impregnability' borne of live news presenting and his PR and sports management success. It underpinned decisions that led, he writes, 'to a decade of stress that was degenerative of body and soul'. I had actually developed a corporate strut. When that becomes part of your way, you don't lose the capacity or the facility to make good judgments, but that capacity is dimmed or diminished — Fintan Drury After Anglo Irish Bank supremo Seán FitzPatrick persuaded him to join the Anglo board, he served as non-executive director for six years until May 2008, leaving six months before the bank failed. FitzPatrick's post-collapse recollection that Drury brought him and then taoiseach Brian Cowen together for a July 2008 meeting and round of golf did no one any favours, with Drury and Cowen, his friend, still being asked about it at an Oireachtas inquiry seven years later. (No banking was discussed that day, they said.) FitzPatrick's distraction-creating move convinced Drury of FitzPatrick's 'utter selfishness', he notes in the memoir. Cowen, meanwhile, remains a friend and was one of the early readers of Catastrophe. [ Fintan Drury: Brian Cowen put country first, party second Opens in new window ] I ask him about his realisation that when FitzPatrick said he wanted board members who would 'never be afraid' of expressing their opinion, he was flattering his ego. 'Yeah, and men, in particular, we're more susceptible to that,' he says. He mentions his use of the phrase 'corporate strut', which he suspects he acquired in those Anglo days. Fintan Drury: 'I was a good chairman in the sense that I helped [Paddy Power] grow. But I was horrified when I looked back.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 'It horrifies me, and it would have horrified me before – it wasn't a conscious thing – but when I looked back on it, I had actually developed a corporate strut. When that becomes part of your way, you don't lose the capacity or the facility to make good judgments, but that capacity is dimmed or diminished.' He also regrets that 'the blinkers were on' during his tenure as Paddy Power chairman, when he says his old curiosity was subsumed by passive subscription to corporate Ireland, blinding him to the societal consequences of gambling. Efforts to regulate the industry are 'nowhere near tough enough' , he says. 'I was a good chairman in the sense that I helped the company grow. But I was horrified when I looked back, and I wished I'd never been chairman.' [ From the archive: Banking inquiry: Drury's evidence was worth the wait Opens in new window ] The memoir, as well as his articles for The Irish Times and business publication The Currency, gave him a 'certain level of confidence' that he could write, though he has been reluctant to call himself a journalist again. 'There was a discussion with [Catastrophe publishers] Merrion Press about how to describe me on blurbs, and initially I was kind of resistant to that, because I think I have an old-fashioned sense of what a journalist does,' he says. (The blurb says he 'returned to journalism' in 2016 but introduces him as 'an author and opinion writer'.) The principles of his news years are deeply rooted, nonetheless. When he says he watches 'really good interviewers' flail amid the 'stonewalling, stonewalling, stonewalling' of Israel's spokespeople, I ask if he thinks it is correct to invite them on air when this outcome can be anticipated. 'I would have suffered the constraints of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, and I don't believe in censorship. I am strongly of the view that censorship of any description is not of value. So I think it is better to attempt to interview them, and every so often you might make a little breakthrough,' he says. 'I think their own Sphinx-like intransigence, and same old weary lines, reinforces to most of the audience – which is more intelligent than we ever give them credit for – that that's what it is.' Sport being the other through line of his life – he played soccer for UCD – Drury is now chairman of not-for-profit Sport Against Racism Ireland. 'The work of any NGO, trying to get funds, is hard,' he says, adding that he would like to see the Government 'crack the whip' so the private sector does more. 'A lot of private-sector companies benefiting from migration aren't investing any money at all in supporting initiatives that make migrants feel part of our community, feel cared for, feel respected, and that's a real shame. I would much rather you include that than any bolloxology about Fintan Drury.' Catastrophe: Nakba II by Fintan Drury is published by Merrion Press
Irish Examiner
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
The Mick Clifford Podcast: Fintan Drury on the forgotten people of Gaza
As the destruction of Gaza by Israeli defence forces continues, bigger questions about how the world got to this point have gone unanswered. The plight of the Palestinian people has long been the issue that much of the west simply doesn't want to know about. Businessman, author and migration activist Fintan Drury has written a book that melds history with polemic into a compelling narrative. Catastrophe – Nakba II is a timely examination of an issue that is turning into a major indictment of the west. Fintan Drury is this week's guest on the podcast. Read More The Mick Clifford Podcast: Clodagh Hawe's sister on why investigation into murder suicide should be published
Irish Examiner
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Sarah Harte: The Government cannot continue to pay lip service to atrocities in Gaza
There are many other conflicts in the world, such as the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan. Yet, we find commonalities in our shared history with the Palestinians. This can be linked to what Fintan Drury, in his new book, Catastrophe Nakba II, terms us being 'indelibly marked by the experience of being colonised by Britain'. The folk memory of the famine that transformed Ireland lives on, when entire communities were wiped out, which perhaps heightens our reaction to the current famine in Gaza, including the nightly images of emaciated children and starving babies. As TCD academic Brendan Ciarán Browne has written, blockaded humanitarian aid trucks waiting to get into Gaza should remind us of British colonial ships laden with crops and livestock departing our shores while our ancestors at home starved. So, we, the Irish people, empathise with the Palestinians. Still, as international agencies operating in Gaza have run out of superlatives to describe the hell there, hard questions are being asked of many European governments, including our own. The Germans are struggling with reconciling the genocidal ideology that paved the way for the mass genocide of European Jews, and their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many German Jewish writers have objected to the conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel (as have scores of intellectual Jewish thinkers), and they have suffered as a result, including being defunded and not awarded literary prizes. Small potatoes, you say, but not if it's your livelihood. In that situation, the moral luxury of commenting becomes costly. Spare a thought for the many Jewish people, who abhor the genocide in Palestine. To ever escape a cycle of violence necessitates acknowledging suffering on 'the other side'. What must that be like, go to bed, turn off the light, and be left trying to square the outsized tragedy of your past, the visceral fear the Hamas attack on October 7 provoked, with knowledge of the massacre and famine in Gaza supposedly carried out in your name? Tide may be turning in Germany The tide may finally be turning in Germany. Last week, its foreign minister Johann Wadephul warned that the fight 'against antisemitism…and full support for….the state of Israel must not be instrumentalised for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip'. He said they are thinking carefully about what 'further steps to take'. They need to hurry up. Of course, many Western countries persist in seeing only what they want to see about the current phase of the Zionist mission. A question that must be posed to the Irish Government is what concrete steps they are going to take to object to the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people? Omar Shaban is the founder of Palthink for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst and development expert with extensive experience in Palestine. Mr Shaban has led humanitarian and emergency programmes for Catholic Relief Services in Gaza for 10 years and worked with UNRWA for another 10. He was born and lives in Gaza. Mr Shaban suggests that the Irish Government request that EU states stop supplying arms to the Israeli military. The Social Democrats in Germany have just called for the German arms exports to Israel to be halted to avoid German complicity in war crimes. Germany is the second-largest weapons supplier to Israel after the US. He asks that the Irish Government work to pressure Israel to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt to allow patients, injured children and their families to be evacuated. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask. He advocates that Ireland works closely with other EU states that share the same position to declare a clear joint statement asking Israel to stop the war immediately and to allow the flow of aid through international organisations such as UNRWA and WFP. This statement should include an ultimatum that if Israel doesn't do this, then the EU will impose trade sanctions. The EU can suspend sections of the EU-Israel Trade Agreement under Article 2. According to European Commission statistics, the EU is Israel's biggest trading partner. Some 34.2% of Israel's imports came from the EU, while 28.8% of the country's exports went to the EU. Of course, practically, that leaves our government with a problem. As reported in The Irish Examiner last week, Ireland is Israel's second-largest trading partner. Israel's exports to Ireland have exploded since 2021. As Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie exposed, for all our performative statements, meaningful sanctions on the Israeli economy would jeopardise our economic position. As reported, the vast majority of what we are buying are 'electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies,' mainly used in tech and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ambassador Adel Atieh, who lives in Ramallah, is the director of the European Affairs Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Palestine. He suggests that if the EU Council fails to take responsibility for reviewing the EU-Israel association agreement, and if the European Commission continues to neglect its legal obligations regarding agreements with Israel, Ireland should consider asking the European Court of Justice to investigate and provide a legal opinion. Furthermore, Ireland should issue a public warning to settlers holding Irish citizenship, urging them to withdraw immediately from settlements due to their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mr Atieh says that this stance could encourage other EU member states to adopt similar positions, potentially leading to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank. This month, the UN General Assembly will vote on granting Palestine full membership status. Even if a US veto blocks Palestinian statehood at the Security Council, the General Assembly retains a critical pathway through the 'Uniting for Peace' resolution. This mechanism allows the Assembly to convene an emergency session when the Council fails to act due to a veto, and to recommend collective measures. Our Government must exert public pressure on other countries to accede to this. Silence of Irish professional bodies Back home on Irish soil, the questions for our government extend to professional medical bodies, including the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) and the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA). The management of their relationships with Israeli counterparts and their deafening silence in calling out the genocide, as I've written before, raises serious questions about them. Dr Angela Skuse, a GP working in Inclusion Health in Dublin with homeless people, says none of the Irish medical organisations have issued a statement that includes the words 'genocide' or 'Israel'. Any statements issued have been careful not to 'take sides', and as Dr Skuse said, could equally refer to a natural disaster. 'Why is the medical profession so silent? Doctors are one of the most trusted professions. If we won't speak out and say that it's wrong, that it's a genocide and Israel is committing it — who will?' She adds that hundreds of healthcare workers have been murdered. Trinity College has just ended academic co-operation with Israeli institutions. The medical organisations should follow its lead and expel Israel from the World Health Organization and the World Medical Association. Ultimately, it will never be enough for the Irish Government (or professional bodies) to mouth support for international law from the sidelines. If we do nothing concrete, we engage in a problematic form of empathy or virtue signalling. Just as many Jewish people have the hardest of choices about whether to speak up, we and other Europeans are presented with choices too. The question is, what choices will our Government make in our name?
Irish Examiner
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Unravelling every wrongdoing
'The prevailing narrative is one thing. The truth is quite different.' When the evidence of nefarious wrongdoing is so ubiquitous and overwhelming — as it is in Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza — perhaps the greatest achievement for any writer is simply to be discerning. Journalist, media entrepreneur, and migration activist Fintan Drury has handled the almost impossible task of framing the unframeable in his latest book, Catastrophe: Nakba II. In the book, he eschews hyperbole and emotional outrage and speaks directly to the symptoms of Zionism and its catastrophic effects on the Palestinian people — from the original Nakba in 1948 until today. Written and impeccably researched in real time, the book provides a compelling and concise account of the contemporary history of the Middle East, the birth of an ethno-terror state, and Western complicity in its manifestation from violent philosophy to brutal protagonist. An Israeli citizen, who relocated his family from Tel Aviv to Paris, said: 'Israel is a very different now to a decade or two ago; the IDF is different to when I did my three years mandatory service 20 years ago. Truth is a casualty.' File picture: AP 'Israel is a coloniser; aided by the West,' he writes. 'It has been allowed not just to establish itself as a sovereign state with internationally accepted boundaries, but one that has methodically extended its territory in contravention of multiple UN resolutions and international law.' Such straightforward opinions might otherwise seem subjective had Drury not backed them up with unimpeachable detail. Unable to travel to Gaza, he might well have stayed at home and still produced a book of considerable merit given the evidence remotely available. Instead, he travelled to Lebanon, Jordan, the occupied West Bank, and Paris to include incredibly worthwhile testimony that — among other things — provides nuance to the oft-misunderstood complex relationship between Lebanon and Palestine. Buried within another testimony from an Israeli citizen, who relocated his family from Tel Aviv to Paris, was a nugget of truth too jarring to ignore: 'Israel is a very different now to a decade or two ago; the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is different to when I did my three years mandatory service 20 years ago. Truth is a casualty.' Perhaps, but the 'truth' Drury lays bare repeatedly confirms that the IDF — and the state it purports to defend — was no different 20 years ago than it is today. The only difference — as Drury explains — is that the restrictions and boundaries the international community once imposed upon it no longer exist. The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, gave them the excuse to test that theory, and the results are now visible on the faces of emaciated Palestinian children. What is perhaps most revealing is the carefully teased out confessionals from inside Israel, by Israelis. Not because they elicit sympathy, but because their indifference is so flagrant. There is also insight into an inherently racist educational system that has contributed so much to the maturation of an apartheid state, especially as it seeks to punish any voice from within who questions government policy. Parallels between the Troubles and the Palestinian cause have often proven lazy and reductive. Not so here. Few are better placed than Drury to carefully examine the strategy and consequences of internment. One Israeli non-governmental organisation quoted references the weaponisation of a scabies outbreak among Palestinian prisoners to impose even more hardship on detainees. It's a horrific image, and one that is depressingly consistent with the tone and tenor of this book. With excellent pacing and an admirable ability to make the complex comprehensible, Drury prosecutes the roles of the Israeli Knesset, international media, and UNRWA, as well as the ambivalence of modern society as they pertain to Palestine. Crucially, he neatly presents irrefutable facts regarding what Gaza and the occupied territories looked like on October 6 — the day before — as a method of framing every horror since. Some will absurdly argue this book is antisemitic. Others may say Drury does not go far enough, that the reality unfolding on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere renders the objectivity he covets obsolete. To his immense credit, he lets the facts scream from the page. This is an essential book. One that should be read and understood today, before the horror becomes history, and that history is repeated. Read More Israel has used detention and starvation to bring Palestine to heel
Irish Independent
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Independent
Author hoping to convert Kerry readers not convinced of Palestinian cause at talk in Listowel
Fintan Drury's book argues that the brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 was the result of almost eight decades of Israeli oppression Kerryman Those who attend the Listowel Literary Festival talk with author Fintan Drury will be told that they have a part to play in bringing an end to the assault on Gaza. 'Without being grandiose about it, we have a responsibility to do whatever it is we can to express our horror and to seek to pressure those who have some influence to get this to stop,' Mr Drury told The Kerryman. Mr Drury (67), a former RTÉ journalist from Dublin, is the author of Catastrophe. The book argues that the brutal Hamas attack of October 2023 was the result of almost eight decades of Israeli oppression, and that Israel's reaction to it has been egregiously disproportionate. 'If you look even in a kind of cursory way at the conduct of Israel to Palestinians since 1948, there is no conclusion other than the Palestinians are among the most oppressed people in the world ever,' Mr Drury said. 'Ireland has done more than most but we still have issues that we need to consider around doing more.' Mr Drury said he had been going to marches advocating for Palestine for years but realised he had to use his skillset, as a trained journalist and writer, to try and make a difference. It was that realisation which led him to writing his book with the aim of detailing what has occurred in Palestine in an accessible manner. Mr Drury said those he would like to see most at his talk in Listowel are those who have not been convinced to support the Palestinian people. 'I'd love them to leave after an hour and go: 'Now I understand, I've got it',' Mr Drury said. Mr Drury will be in conversation with Mike Lynch at 11am in Listowel Arms Hotel on Sunday, June 1. Tickets for the event cost €15.
