FOR Mayo man Declan Walsh, his professional destiny revealed itself more by chance than by a grand design.

It was 1998. The Ballina native was a young reporter for the Sunday Business Post back then, just starting off in his career. Originally on a private trip to Kenya, Walsh ended up in neighbouring Sudan, doing a story on the war there.

“I was on the trail of an ex-Irish priest who had left the priesthood, had children with a Sudanese woman and was working for an aid organisation in southern Sudan,” Walsh recalls, speaking to The Mayo News: “So I went to chase that guy who was called Danny and ended up spending a couple of weeks in Sudan in an area that was affected by the civil war, which was in the south of the country at that point.”

The story had a profound impact on him. Walsh realised, that he wanted to work as a foreign correspondent in Africa. Back home in Dublin, he confided his editor into his plans.

His first reaction towards Declan: “You’re crazy!” He then tried to talk him out of it: “He called this a terrible idea,” Walsh remembers: “He said ‘if you are going to go to Africa, you’re going to become a gin alcoholic, you’re going to get malaria, and you’re going to end up falling in love with the local woman and getting married to her and never coming home’.”

It was a time when the Celtic Tiger was just taking off and the Business Post was doing very well, Ireland was just starting to really develop economically. And there was more money going around.

But Walsh had made up his mind. And as it turned out, “my editor was right on two of those three counts. My wife is Sudanese and in fact, we got married right near Westport. And I have had malaria a couple of times.”

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‘Shockingly neglected’

WALSH set off for an eventful career. He reported from several countries in Africa, but also from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, to name but a few. And since 2019, he has been Chief Africa Correspondent for the New York Times.

Recently, he has written about politics in Kenya, went to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, for example. But for the past two years, most of his work has been focused on the conflict in Sudan.

For extensive work on that issue, Walsh and his team were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the category ‘International Reporting’ in May this year. In October, Walsh received an honorary doctorate from Dublin City University, and afterwards, Georgetown University awarded Walsh with the ‘Prize for Distinguished Reporting on Foreign Policy and Diplomacy.’

In his address at Georgetown University, Walsh had an opportunity to raise the profile of the current conflict in Sudan: “I think it’s shockingly neglected, given the size of this war, the scale of it and the intensity of the suffering of ordinary Sudanese people.”

Walsh feel it is amazing how people are willing to talk to him, this foreigner who turns up into their lives, on the worst day of their lives, sometimes, and tell him what’s going on.

“It’s really thrilling to feel that you are on the leading edge of history being made, even if it’s history of a very distant country.”

Sudan may be far away, but the relationships Walsh develops with people on the ground, are extremely moving: “About a month ago, I was reporting on the siege of the city called El Fasher in Western Sudan. And at the time, the city was surrounded by these paramilitary fighters.

They’d built this huge earthen wall that eventually stretched to about 40 miles long and surrounded the city, cutting off supplies of food and medicine. I was not able to get there, it was too hard, but I did manage to reach a doctor in the city’s last functioning hospital, called Dr Omar Selik.”

Walsh reached Dr Selik on the phone. They turned on the cameras to see each other. And the doctor told him, that they were eating animal food, malnourished children and medical staff alike.

It was a very emotional interview and Dr Selik thanked Walsh: “He said, it is so wonderful to see the face of someone on the outside, and to know that it’s someone who’s interested, and that who’s going to take our story to the outside world about what’s happening with them.”

They both stayed in touch, exchanging text messages. Days later, on a Friday, Dr Selik went to say his morning prayers at a mosque that was close to his house.

And a drone came overhead and fired a missile into the mosque and killed about 75 people who were inside. And one of them was Dr Selik. “It was hard for me. We reported on the drone strike and on his death.”

Into the sniper’s nest

NOT that Declan Walsh’s work is without its own dangers at times. The most difficult thing very often is getting to a certain area of interest in a war zone or a country in turbulence.

“Most of the time, you’re just dealing with the practical challenges of getting there, getting around, finding the right people, gathering the materials that you need for the stories,” Walsh explains.

He doesn’t want to downplay it either. When they went to the Sudanese capital Khartoum last March, they just happened to get there, when the battle was turning, and the city had been controlled largely by this paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces for two years before that.

And as Walsh and his team were approaching, the Sudanese military was launching an enormous push to get the RSF out of the city.

“And we witnessed that. We saw some quite heavy fighting. We were climbing into these sniper’s nests, overlooking the Nile River and the battle areas. And there was a constant danger from drones that were flying overhead. That’s really a big change we see on battlefields these days in Africa, is the arrival of drone technology from countries like Turkey, and China and Iran.”

Walsh explains, how these drones are a real gamechanger and make it a lot harder to work in some of these areas. In the past, when journalists were going to a war zone, or to a battle zone, you could identify where the frontline was, and go close, but not too close.

Whereas when drones are flying in the sky, they deny a huge area because a drone can strike anywhere, and sometimes you don’t even see it coming.

Walsh and his team do take extra care and for some of the trips they did to Sudan, they had a security officer, a person experienced in combat zones.

A smaller world

WALSH witnesses himself how the world is getting smaller around us. On the one hand, technological advancements allow us to communicate seamlessly with people on the far side of the globe. But also, a higher degree of mobility brings us all closer together.

Walsh tells a story, from when he was in Dublin a few weeks ago: “Every time I come home, I’m struck more and more by the diversity of the people I see around me, the immigrant faces that I see.

You see people from many parts of the world, often parts of the world that I’ve been reporting on, who have come to Ireland, and some of them are coming because of the conflicts that I’m reporting on.”

He mentions there are a lot of Sudanese who work as medical staff in Ireland,. They’ve been coming for many years before the war. But just the other day, Walsh was interviewing a man, a doctor in Longford.

And he was connected to another person who was caught in the middle of the war zone. “So the world’s getting smaller, these stories from Sudan that can seem very distant, they do now increasingly have a connection with our own communities in Ireland as well.”

Walsh certainly hasn’t distanced himself from his home county Mayo. His parents live outside Westport and him and his family are regular visitors here. Who knows, maybe one day he will come back to where his journey began.

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