Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese has written a stinging critique of a New York Times article portraying a “lazy, tabloid stereotype” of Irish students in the wake of the California balcony collapse that left six people dead.
Two Irish students remain in a critical condition following the incident in Berkeley on Tuesday, in which five of their compatriots and a woman with joint American and Irish citizenship died.
The paper has apologised for the feature, which detailed drunken Irish student antics in the San Francisco Bay Area and was published just hours after the collapse. But the diplomatic row it sparked has continued, with McAleese accusing the New York Times of “heaping deliberate injustice on top of the most awful grief”.
In a letter to the paper, McAleese writes: “Today the New York Times should be hanging its head in shame at how outrageously and without the remotest evidence it has rushed to judgment on those deaths.
“I was a J-1 visa student in California over 40 years ago. Tens of thousands of Irish J-1 students have spent happy summers there over the years since. By far the vast majority have been a credit to Ireland and only the very tiniest minority have not.
“Yet within hours of the most appalling tragedy in the history of the J-1 visa programme, when the one salient fact to speak for itself is the ludicrous collapse of a fourth floor balcony in a relatively new building, New York Times journalists reached for the lazy tabloid stereotype and heaped deliberate injustice on top of the most awful grief.”
Meanwhile the New York Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, said on Thursday she believed the paper’s management team were “couching their words very carefully” in their apology, but said she cannot “tell the Times what to do”.
Sullivan told Irish radio station Newstalk: “I think the New York Times made some pretty bad mistakes with this story and, yes, I think it was insensitive and not handled properly.
“I think the Times institutionally and the editors and reporters were couching their words very carefully [in the apology], I would like to go a step further myself and say that I agree it was insensitive and that the complaints are very valid.”
She continued: “I definitely know [the article] added to the great pain of this tragedy and that’s extremely unfortunate and I personally feel very sorry about that.”
Sullivan confirmed that the paper has received around 400 complaints in relation to the article. In the piece, three New York Times journalists wrote about the thousands of Irish students who travel to the US every summer with special J-1 visas allowing them to work temporarily.
The article said these students are “not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara”.
It also quotes a 2014 column by Cahir O’Doherty, the arts and culture editor of the Irish Voice, expressing distress at “the callous destruction unleashed by these loaded Irish students” at a rental house in San Francisco.
The Irish ambassador to the US, Anne Anderson, has also weighed in on the controversy, writing her own letter to the New York Times. She wrote: “The implication of your article – that the behaviour of the students was in some way a factor in the collapse – has caused deep offence.”
Anderson denied the J-1 visa scheme was a source of embarrassment for Ireland. She said: “We are fully supportive of this programme and we know that it brings enormous mutual benefit ... Yes there have been isolated incidents of the type to which your article refers. But they are wholly unrepresentative.”
