Orla Guerin

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Tuesday, 3 December 2024 at 11.00 a.m.

TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR DIANE NEGRA, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 3 December 2024, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa on ORLA GUERIN

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Orla Guerin was born in Dublin in 1966 and took her first degree in Journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology before coming to UCD and earning an MA in Film Studies in 1999.

Ms. Guerin is a distinguished broadcast journalist who has covered foreign affairs, wars, and disasters over many years. Over her long tenure with the BBC, she has reported from all around the world including Kosovo, Moscow, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Islamabad and Caracas rising to the rank of Senior International Correspondent which sees her currently based in Beirut.  Her composed style and her commitment to truthful and thorough reporting from conflict zones often in the most arduous circumstances have become her calling card as a journalist.

In the 1990s Ms. Guerin became RTÉ’s youngest foreign correspondent, covering the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, reporting from the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.  Upon completion of her UCD MA her first foreign posting for the BBC based her as the broadcaster’s International Correspondent in the Middle East from 2000 to 2005.  In subsequent years her work as Africa Correspondent took her to Darfur, the Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe, which she entered undercover.

Since that time, she has taken up a staggering roster of key posts, moving from strength to strength and forging an acclaimed career in frontline foreign coverage.  In 2019 she worked for the BBC in Caracas during the presidential crisis and protests there. As many will know, she has provided standout reporting of the war in Ukraine and the recent events in Lebanon. While making her name in frontline reporting from global hot spots, she has also interviewed world leaders and filed important investigative reports. Orla Guerin’s intrepid and tenacious journalism, her dogged work in delivering crucial information in complex evolving geopolitical circumstances and her fierce determination to expanding what we see and know of those circumstances have made her a trail-blazing figure for women in television. For many aspiring journalists, she is a role model.  At a time when news resources are typically being scaled back, sometimes drastically so, limiting coverage of critical and thorny world events, Orla Guerin’s career and accomplishments remind us of the vital importance of expert knowledge in on-the-ground broadcasting.

Ms. Guerin’s illustrious media career has led to numerous honours including an MBE for Services to Broadcasting in 2005 and repeated Emmy and BAFTA nominations. The esteem in which she is held by her industry has been conveyed in awards from the London Press Club and the Royal Television Society which named her Television Journalist of the Year in 2018.  She has been awarded honorary degrees at a number of universities and we are proud to add to that list today. In light of Orla Guerin’s illustrious career and the breadth and depth of her global experience and expertise it is highly fitting for her to be honoured at her alma mater, “Ireland’s global university”.

Orla Guerin works in a profession with a powerful mythology around it.  Films about foreign correspondents have been staples of Hollywood and other national cinemas ranging from Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) to Reds (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997).  If we are looking to popular cinema to define the realities of any profession we are probably going to go significantly astray. And yet the image of the foreign correspondent and the work they do has often been particularly glamorised. As John Maxwell Hamilton writes in his history of foreign reporting the correspondent “swoops into our imagination with flash and gravitas.”  Orla Guerin’s style is somewhat different; marked by gravitas but not flash, it is defined by a strong sense of competence and care. We might go so far as to say that Ms. Guerin’s work reflects an Irish way of relating to the world.  She is, of course, always neutral in the ways her profession requires yet her reporting is also suffused with empathy.

As an internationally renowned and award-winning broadcast journalist of great courage and distinction, Orla Guerin is an illustrious alumna of UCD who reflects immense credit on her alma mater.  It is a pleasure to welcome her back to Belfield and to honour her many achievements.

Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,

Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Artibus; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.