David Blevins: Making Hope and History Rhyme
A Talk on Ireland, the US, and Hope Amidst Conflict
Senior Ireland Correspondent for Sky News David Blevins visited Indiana Wesleyan University on January 14 to give a presentation on Ireland, the Troubles, faith, and journalism. Although Blevins has worked for Sky since 1996, this event came just days after Blevins’ viral interview with LA Mayor Karen Bass. The event was well attended and the atmosphere lively ahead of the event’s start.
The night was split into three sections: the first about the history of conflict in Ireland, the second about Blevins’ own life, and the third a discussion time with questions from the audience. Blevins began his presentation by going over 800 years of Irish history very quickly, before focusing on the twentieth century Troubles he grew up during and reported on as an adult. The Troubles were born from the discontent over continued British presence within Ireland and Northern Ireland and largely centered on Northern Ireland’s continued nature as part of the United Kingdom. Although difficult to accurately condense, the conflict largely occurred between British Protestant Loyalists who viewed Northern Ireland’s nature as part of the UK as a good thing and Irish Catholic Republicans who viewed the UK’s control of Northern Ireland as a continued invasion into Ireland. Groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were so opposed to the argued British threat that they enacted acts of violence meant to express their dissatisfaction and fight against British control, with the opposition often reacting in similarly violent ways.
Speaking about the eventual IRA ceasefire which marked the beginning of the end to the Troubles, Blevins noted that he still has the type-written script from the day he reported the ceasefire announcement. Even so, peace came slowly as the peace talks themselves didn’t begin for another four years. Blevins’ oldest child was born in February 1998, two months before the Good Friday Agreement which saw an official end to the Troubles. Today, she’s 27 and Blevins’ son is 20. “Our minds were filled with videos of bombs and bullets and barricades every night on the Six O’clock news. They grew up with their minds filled with memes and videos on Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik-Tok,” Blevins said. “We thought the ceasefires were the pinnacle until we got the agreement. We thought the agreement was the pinnacle until we got both sides to agree to share power in government.”
Blevins noted that things haven’t been perfect, but that peace continues even so. “There have been setbacks. Dissident Republicans who believe the IRA should not have surrendered without achieving a united Ireland continue to pose a terrorist threat and do occasionally carry out an attack and our own power-sharing government gets a bit wobbly sometimes as most governments do, but there remain two huge developments that caused change. The first is Brexit, the UK’s exit from the European Union. When the UK exited the EU the invisible border became an international frontier, complicating trade agreements. The other big development in the last several months is the election of the first nationalist First Minister in Ireland… It’s kind of the next rung down from the Prime Minister, and she wants a united Ireland. She’s the first Catholic First Minister of Ireland.”
Blevins pointed towards the shift away from partisan politics as the solution to ending a conflict that had seemed impossible to conclude. “Playground politics had been killing us, literally, so we found another way–a better way. The greater good for all of us does not require there to be a winner and a loser. Compromise is not a dirty word.”
“Successive Prime Ministers, from Churchill to Thatcher believed there couldn’t be an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland,” Blevins continued. “They basically saw it as a lost cause. I want you to remember that when people tell you there can be no end to a particular conflict or to the polarizing politics in the United States right now.”
Blevins then shifted to talk about the role journalists played in the Peace Process ensuring every voice was heard, reading between the lines, and finding space for good news. This then led into his discussion of his own history, faith, and the relationship between the two. Blevins told the story of his 36 years in journalism reporting on events such as the Shankill Road bombing, the Omagh bombing, the Holy Cross dispute, and the Good Friday Agreement. He also spoke about interviewing four American presidents, five Canadian Prime Ministers, and six Irish Prime Ministers. Even so, Blevins said it was ordinary people who made the greatest impression.
He also discussed his faith journey and eventual move into ministry. “I took a career break from Sky for three years and studied theology at the Irish Bible Institute in Dublin. You can imagine the reaction of the Irish media to that decision. You see in the Irish context, a journalist can talk about most things—ethnicity, sexuality, even politics. You just don’t mention religion.”
After Sky News asked him to return, Blevins worked in ministry and the media simultaneously, something no one else in Ireland had done before. “I felt God was calling me not to traditional ordained ministry, but to live my faith in the place he’d put me—to gather the news ethically and report it with integrity… Journalism was my history, theology was my hope, and I suppose journalism that understands religion could be described as my rhyme. I’m finally getting to recite that rhyme by reporting normal stories, at home and abroad in a way that I hope shines a bit of light in the darkness.”
Blevins then shifted his focus toward the United States—first in terms of his own experiences working there and how they related to his experiences during the Troubles.
“The experiences I had working in polarized politics during the Troubles may be the reason I’m deployed quite often to the United States. They’ve deployed me since 9/11 and I’ve had the craziest year reporting here covering the United States,” Blevins said, citing the attempted assassination of the president elect, the election, former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and the California wildfires. Blevins then shifted to discuss the wider context of political unrest in the United States.
“One in six jobs in Ireland is dependent on American investment. So, you can appreciate that the Irish finance minister is quite interested in suggestions about tariffs from the incoming president. What happens in the White House has an impact on the rest of the world not just economically but in terms of defense and international security, so there’s enormous focus on the United States. In terms of US politics there’s also a sense of bewilderment in the world that America is so polarized and narrowed it down to such interesting candidates for the election.”
Even so, Blevins wanted to emphasize once more that hope for peace and reconciliation should always remain, quoting from renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s poem The Cure at Troy as he said, “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave… / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” These words formed the basis of the entire presentation and are just as relevant to today’s United States as they were to the Ireland of past decades.
The end of the presentation proper brought with it a shift into the discussion portion, which included questions from several students in the audience. One of the central topics of discussion became Blevins’ coverage of the recent California fires as well as his viral interview with Mayor Karen Bass.
Regarding the video with the LA mayor, Blevins shared, “It was the providence of God. Everyone wanted to hear from the mayor, she was absent without leave even though the warning had been issued that the fires were approaching, and she was off on an international trip. No one could find her. We got a call at 5:30 in the morning saying we needed to deploy to LA. When I awoke the assignments desk in London had already booked our flight to LA, so I had to quickly get to the bureau to get fire equipment, get back to my hotel, pack up, get an uber, meet with my team, and get on the flight. Because we had booked our flight so late the producer and I were in the back of the plane and my cameraman was in the front. Halfway through the flight he walked down the aisle, sat down in the spare seat beside me, and said, ‘I think the mayor of LA is sitting beside me.’ I said, ‘You’re not serious.’ He said, ‘Yeah’ and then went back, took a photograph, sent it to me, walked back down the plane, said, ‘Is that the mayor of LA?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the mayor of LA.’ At which point the team hatched a plan, which was to move me to the front of the plane close to him just before we landed. We thought, ‘We’ll let her get off the plane into the terminal, and then we’ll ask her to take some questions.’ As the door opened, we realized that her security detail was at a side door out of the airbridge, so we had to move immediately and start asking her questions. By the grace of God, the security detail couldn’t get the door opened so she had to stand for 90 seconds. I’ll be honest with you, I think most UK and US politicians, would have said something like ‘I’ve just landed back, I’m exhausted, my heart goes out to the people effected, I’ll make a statement later today.’ It was the silence that was deafening and has been an inditement and to say it’s gone viral has been an understatement—it was the front page of the LA Times today, it led Piers Morgan Uncensored last night. That was six days ago and it’s still a hot topic. I think she is in some trouble about her approach seeming so cold in the midst of such tragedy.”
Regarding his coverage of the fires themselves, Blevins said, “It’s challenging mentally just getting your head around it, it’s challenging physically because you have to stay safe and keep your team safe, and it’s challenging emotionally because people are talking to you about how they’ve lost loved ones, lost everything—the occupants of thousands of homes have lost everything. It’s grueling, but in the midst of all those dark stories, at home and abroad, there’s light. There’s always light. I find people have hope everywhere I look. I don’t know if God is just good to me and puts them all in my path, but they inspire me… I think I’ve always been looking for stories of hope and I got a lot of feedback last week on the reports being empathetic, both from news management and from the general audience, and that makes me happy. That’s what I think we set out to do—not to be sensational, not to be dramatic, but to just let people tell their stories. That allows the audience to step into the shoes of that person for a moment. Empathy is a critical aspect of news gathering.”
