Richard Crowley left the safe haven of Montrose to cover the Middle East, and experienced more than he could ever fit into his new book, he tells Róisín Ingle
The Old Strawberry Tree restaurant in Dublin 4 is a haven for RTÉ stars. There's Bryan Dobson queuing for a coffee; TV presenter Lucy Kennedy chatting to colleagues; Richard Crowley, fresh from his six-year stint in the Middle East, pouring sugar on a cappuccino, and talking about his new book, No Man's Land: Dispatches from the Middle East.
Actually, the Old Strawberry Tree restaurant is what they are calling the RTÉ canteen these days. "They had a competition to come up with the name," Crowley says, shaking his head and laughing.
Working on and off for RTÉ over the last 20 years, defecting briefly to the doomed Century Radio in the late 1980s, the 48-year-old has been RTÉ's man in the Middle East for six years now. In the past he'd been frustrated by being sent away only for short periods, which he says meant "spoofing" his way through a report, never having the chance to get under the skin of the story.
"The way it worked was, you'd go over for a couple of weeks, stay in the Crown Plaza hotel and report what the taxi drivers had told you . . . that was all you could do in that time," he says. Frustrated by this, he suggested to RTÉ that he go for longer periods, stay in a hostel and send more considered coverage back home. They agreed, and so, over the past six years, Crowley has become intimately acquainted with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"I could have written twice the amount," he says of the book, in which he interviews people from all sides: the promoters of violence, the peace-keepers, the civilians.
It's not a hopeful book - Crowley doesn't anticipate a resolution in the near future - but it's as wide-ranging a portrait of this troubled land as you are likely to find. His lengthy interviews with those affected include one with a leader of terrorist group Hamas, a Palestinian mother struggling with the day-to-day grind of existence in an occupied territory and an Irish Jew living in an Israeli settlement.
Why did he want to cover the Middle East? "I suppose I had come to a point after six years of co-presenting Morning Ireland when I was thinking, do I want to stay here talking to some councillor about a road-widening scheme in Kiltebbert or do I want to get out there and do something? It might have to do with wanting to experience life on the edge, dealing with life or death issues. When you go there you realise why people get addicted to the place. As a journalist it's an all-consuming, incredibly exciting story, and it was exhilarating, there is a buzz in a weird way."
He arrived for his first long stint a month before September 11th, 2001, after which there was a spate of suicide bombings. "At that point I did sometimes wonder what I had done. But I could hardly ring up RTÉ and say, 'I'm scared, I want to come home'." There were times, he says, when he left his room and figured there was no point tidying up because he might not be back.
He describes the intensity of the place: "You don't talk about the weather or who won the Booker for very long there; the conflict is always the topic of conversation".
Over the years he's becoming used to engaging with people on the subject of whether RTÉ's coverage in the region is pro-Palestinian and is honest on the subject. "We are all biased in some way," he says. "I have enormous sympathy for the Israelis - many Jews in Israel speak of not having a safe place in the world, of always feeling under threat. So it would be the best thing if the Israeli authorities would just define where they want to live and stay within those borders and let the Palestinians get on with it . . . there is only one occupied territory, the Palestinians are not building settlements, they are the only ones without a country . . . it's hard not to be biased towards the underdog."
Looking at the new generation coming up doesn't make him particularly optimistic for the future. He remembers being in Galilee when Hizbullah were shelling Northern Israel. "I went into this bunker and there were all these children sheltering there. I asked one of them, 'what's going on?' And this girl said, 'the Hizbullah are trying to kill us.' I asked 'why?' She said, 'because we are Jews.' So I asked what should the Israeli army do and this girl in her little Britney T-shirt said, 'they should go to Lebanon and kill them all'. She got cheers and applause from this group of eight-year-olds," he recalls. "So that's what you're dealing with - they hear nothing else except the situation, growing up, on both sides."
He can see the possibility of resolution. "But not right now, and it's frustrating knowing that they are not that far away from a solution. Of course there are extremists on both sides but the vast majority would be happy with a two-state solution . . . Palestine could be the first secular Arab democracy, a beacon for other countries." He is "at a loss" as to why the Americans don't push this agenda when, he says, it's in their best interests. He can only fall back on the "distraction of Iraq and the sheer incompetence and stupidity" of George Bush.
It might seem like asking a turkey to vote for Christmas, but is the criticism that there is excessive coverage of the Middle East on RTÉ a fair one? "It's probably true there is disproportionate coverage of the day-to-day stuff; it's the old cliche of news is where journalists are, and they've been there since the place was a theatre of war during the Cold War and they've never disengaged . . . so I agree, except that it has the potential to spread and develop into a wider conflict; other countries could get involved, so you need to keep an eye there. But that's an argument for analysis rather than day-to-day coverage."
Crowley is returning to the Middle East in a couple of weeks to work on a package in advance of a peace conference that's happening in the US in November. He feels that, in terms of his Middle East career, it might be time to make room "for a younger person". In one stint last year he worked 45 out of 47 16-hour days during the crisis in Lebanon. "I remember thinking this is going to kill me - I slept for three weeks afterwards . . . you'd go nuts if you did it for too long," he says.
He and his partner, RTÉ reporter Aoife Kavanagh, are moving to Barcelona for a year. He has always gone his own way in terms of his career, even when those on high might have wanted to groom him as an even more high-profile star, a Pat Kenny, say.
"I do what I'm told," he says in mock defence. Do you? "No," he laughs. "Well, sometimes. Look, there's only one thing worse than being a celebrity, and that's being a former celebrity, and there are a lot of them around here. I was always interested in sticking with the journalism."
While he has conducted several of the One To Oneinterviews on RTÉ TV with the likes of PJ Mara and, soon, Alan Johnson, television is not his medium of choice. The news that webcams might be installed in the radio studios he finds both amusing and appalling. "The whole point is that you can just shuffle in there and do the job without worrying about how you look," he says.
His plans for Spain are deliberately vague.
"I'm going to just do nothing. I might learn Spanish, or become a train driver . . . I am looking forward to reading books just for the pleasure of reading as opposed to researching. Really, this is my third mid-life crisis," he laughs, pleased at the notion.
"When I told the boss that I was taking a year's leave of absence he kind of snarled a bit. The next day I said, 'so I'm Hamas now, am I?' And he said that he'd been thinking about it and he wasn't worried. He said he knows I'll be back."
And will he? "Well, where else would I go?" he says. "This is mother's milk, the bosom of RTÉ, sitting in the Old Strawberry Tree Restaurant . . . hey, it's home."
• No Man's Land: Dispatches from the Middle Eastby Richard Crowley is published by Liberties Press
