farmer or Congolese soldier? When I did have to wing it, the articles tended to be light on direct quotes. I took crash courses, with mixed results. Silvio Berlusconi gallantly lauded my Italian but we both knew he was lying. When Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez invited me to ask a question on his TV show, Aló Presidente , his face scrunched as he sought to follow my ponderous phrasing. When kidnapped in Iraq in 2005, my smattering of Arabic afforded no hope of talking myself out of it. So, yes, there were occasions I rued BESS, my undergrad from 1990-94. I had no complaints at the time. It was a sprawl of a thing, philosophy, macroeconomics, history, sociology, geography, political science, and I loved, or at least liked, most of them. Cherry picking topics that interested me without acquiring expertise in anything felt indulgent. Looking back three decades later, I can set aside the spasms of lament for unlearned languages and appreciate the legacy of what I did learn. In making a generalist, it made a journalist. I had to know a little about a lot and learn new stuff fast. I would parachute into stories – people-smuggling in the Adriatic, say, or a row over genetically modified food aid in Zambia – and have a few days or maybe just a few hours to try to make sense of it and file 900 words. Done right, a topic that initially seemed mysterious and forbidding would reveal itself in the reporting process. It wasn’t about becoming an expert, it was about finding the right people and listening to them. And then handing in the essay on time. If you’re curious about the world, it’s a hell of a way to make a living. Diving into a topic or country for the first time is daunting and exhilarating. You make mistakes – get the wrong visa, overlook nuance – but everything is new and fascinating. With experience comes confidence. Returning to a city you know where to stay and who to call. The catch is that over time familiarity can breed complacency and dull the news sense – you stop seeing things. The news cycle does not help – it has accelerated to a blur. There were times, especially in the US, where I’d Google myself to remember what I’d filed days earlier. Twice I’ve taken sabbaticals to slow things down, drill into subjects and write books, Comandante , about Chávez, and Killing Thatcher , about the IRA’s Brighton bombing. I can’t vouch for readers but doing them they were balm for the storytelling soul. It’s been a zig-zag career from posting to posting with no overarching plan but a few recurring themes, notably immigration. I didn’t know it at the time but slogans I heard at Lega Nord rallies in Milan in 2000 set a template for what was to come across much of Europe and the US. During Donald Trump’s march to the Republican nomination in 2015, I watched him electrify crowds by promising crackdowns on illicit border-crossers. ‘He says everything that’s in our hearts,’ Mary Przybylo, a 75-year- old grandmother, told me in Phoenix. ‘He’s got to keep it up, keep it going.’ In 2018 I moved back to Dublin as the Guardian ’s Ireland correspondent. It was an opportunity to rediscover a country I had left in 1995 and reconnect with family and friends. My tropical wife has (mostly) made peace with the climate, our daughter is thriving and every day I learn something new about Ireland. So it’s been great, even the day I fell into a Kildare bog. But there are days that memories of pitiful scenes I witnessed around the world come rushing back, because now I see them here too. ‘It’s my first time sleeping in a tent,’ Andile, a Zimbabwean asylum seeker, told me, peeking from a crumpled tent on Mount Street. ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’ The squalor was a cross between a refugee camp and LA’s skid row. Last October, a block from Trinity, I watched rioters loot shops and set fires. ‘We’re rammed to the gills with foreigners,’ said one man. On a reporting level covering the mayhem was easy – there were no language issues. And it was desperately sad. Most of my life I had been abroad, an immigrant. Now I was home, in my native city, and it was burning.
Download PDF file