Ireland’s
Ambassador to the US said she would have preferred if the New York Times had removed from its website an article on the Berkeley tragedy, which she called "insensitive".
However, she accepted the newspaper’s public statements on the controversy and said she felt management had “gone quite far to distance themselves from the article”.
Anne Anderson complained to the newspaper about the article, which linked the balcony collapse that killed six Irish J-1 students to past episodes of drunken parties and the wrecking of apartments in California.
The newspaper apologised for language in the article, which was published on its website late on Tuesday, about the collapse that “could be interpreted as insensitive” and said it was never the paper’s intention to blame the victims for the accident.
Insensitivity
Speaking a day after arriving in Berkeley, Ms Anderson told
The Irish Times
the newspaper did not reply to her letter to the editor complaining about the insensitivity and inaccuracy of the article but felt the paper took account of her concerns with its public statements.
"The article was inaccurate, insensitive, ill-timed, ill-judged. Of course we would prefer if it wasn't still on the website but that is an editorial policy which applies in all situations so obviously we weren't going to be able to change their minds on that," she said. Ms Anderson said she had been overwhelmed with messages of support and sympathy from across the United States, from the US state department and from members of Congress on Capitol Hill.
“There has been an absolute flood of sympathy, support, solidarity, everybody saying, is there anything, anything, anything we can do,” she said.
“There has been huge empathy and an outpouring of sympathy, solidarity.”
The Ambassador said that while there was always grief and sadness at the untimely deaths of beautiful young people, many people at senior levels of the Obama administration and people working in Congress spoke in particular about time they spent in Ireland as young people.
“They have been to Ireland, they have a sense of Ireland and many of them said to me, ‘I was in Ireland when I was 20 or 21 at the same age of these young people. I know these people’,” said Ms Anderson.
“They feel that they know them even if they don’t know them individually, but they know the kind of young people they are and that kind of joy and energy and appetite for life.
“To an extraordinary degree, there has been a sense of empathy, and an outpouring of grief and sympathy and solidarity.”
