“Climate change is here now. I don’t think people have processed that fact yet”

Ronan McGreevy is a journalist with The Irish Times. In this interview, partly undertaken in direct conversation and partly by email correspondence, McGreevy talks about some of the key themes that have marked his work as a journalist and which figure in the books he has published. Various themes arising from the long decade of centenaries which commemorated key events in the period from The Third Home Rule Bill in 1912 to the end of the Civil War are dealt with: ranging from the Rising and the monuments and cemeteries of France and Flanders that mark the participation of Irish soldiers in the First World War to the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson which triggered the Irish Civil War. McGreevy also throws light on the 1983 kidnapping by the IRA of Don Tidey, the theme of commemoration relating to the period of the Troubles as well as revisiting the key historical role of former Taoiseach Séan Lemass and the interviews with him which form the basis of McGreevy’s forthcoming book Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir: The Autobiography of Ireland’s Most Admired Taoiseach. McGreevy also talks about the current state of journalism, the impact of populism and the challenges we face in relation to public and global health in the context of a decline in literacy and climate crisis

Biography · Context (archaeology) · Conversation · Face (sociological concept) · Irish · Period (music) · Spanish Civil War · Theme (computing) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Education, Technology, and Ethics · Irish and British Studies