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Living between Ireland and the United States has made one thing plain: what counts as “news” depends very much on where you are standing.
Back when things were funny, I used to joke about a Saturday Night Live skit in which Irishmen are stopped by US customs, only for one of them to wave it away with a cheerful: “It’s us, lads.” Everything becomes instantly kosher. The humour rested on a familiar assumption — that Irish and Americans occupy a shared cultural space, that there is easy recognition across the Atlantic, a sense of we are them. For a long time, that felt broadly true. Lately, it feels less like a joke and more like a relic.
In Ireland, coverage of Gaza has been sustained and often graphic, with images and testimony that make civilian suffering difficult to ignore. In the United States, the same events are more sparingly reported and frequently sanitised, framed through official statements and strategic analysis rather than human consequence. This difference is not simply a matter of emphasis; it shapes how audiences understand violence, responsibility and urgency.
I was reminded of this again in recent weeks while watching American coverage of Washington’s manoeuvring over Greenland and Venezuela. These stories dominate headlines, panels and podcasts. Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Goode — both white, both US-born citizens — during encounters linked to intensified immigration enforcement have triggered protests and a serious rupture of trust between communities and federal authorities.
For the Irish, this is not abstract. In 2025, Irish citizens were among those caught up in a renewed wave of deportations from the United States. Families were separated, lives abruptly uprooted, and people who had built communities over decades were forced to start again. At home, these stories resonated deeply. In the US, they were largely absorbed into the background noise of immigration statistics and policy briefings.
This imbalance matters. Foreign policy disputes lend themselves to familiar narratives: territory, minerals, influence. Domestic state power exercised at close range is harder to package. It resists abstraction, forcing attention onto individual lives, grieving families and uncomfortable questions about authority.
What stands out in Minnesota is not only the deaths themselves, but the scale and character of the response: thousands of federal agents deployed into a single state; residential neighbourhoods treated as security zones; residents who observe or attempt to de-escalate encounters re-framed as agitators. When presence alone becomes provocation, the logic quickly turns circular.
It is in this context that historical comparisons emerge — not so much with European secret police as with earlier American practices. Long before today’s immigration agencies, slave patrols operated across the southern states, empowered to stop, search and punish with minimal oversight. The resonance lies less in rhetoric than in lived experience: what it feels like when authority arrives armed, uninvited and largely unaccountable.
None of this fits comfortably into the geopolitical frame favoured by much international coverage. Greenland is discussed in terms of shipping routes and rare earths; Venezuela through the familiar lens of intervention and ideology. Minnesota poses a more unsettling question: what happens when a democracy normalises militarised policing in its own communities?
Watching the news on both sides of the Atlantic has taught me that human rights crises do not always announce themselves with tanks crossing borders. They also appear in traffic stops, neighbourhood raids, deportation notices and official statements that flatten complex lives into administrative categories.
What makes Ireland — and Irish-American relations — distinctive is not just history, but empathy. During their own suffering on the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation sent $170 — more than $5,000 in today’s terms — to help the Irish during the Great Hunger. It’s us, lads.
That story feels especially urgent amid today’s mixed reactions to Donald Trump and headlines of his crippling and distracting lawsuits against media outlets like the BBC. Some argue that the United States is not the way it is because he is president, but that he is president because of the way the United States is. Yes, he is responsible for much rhetoric, but ICE agents have free will. Watch the multitude of angles in video footage. Is that us? What are we doing?
Living within both borders, I see how vital it is that domestic news travels. In Leenane, the village across Killary Fjord from where I live, people are famously reserved: one does not speak of one’s affairs if one would not want them covered in the Times. It encourages a kind of collective attentiveness. There's little need, and great consequence, for print.
Americans, by contrast, are not known for discretion. I will always belong to that latter tradition; no matter how much I learn to whisper in pubs, my boyfriend was right — I will never be one of them. But justice is rarely born in distraction, and in a pluralistic society, where many insist that ICE raids do not represent the America they fought for, there is also a responsibility to listen to African Americans who say: we recognise this. This feels familiar. Not an distant Gestapo analogy, but something rooted in American history itself. We must maintain our fortitude, our humor, and the real border: where we end, and they begin. We are not waging wars. We feel under attack.
In the poem, Robert Frost doubted himself. Good fences don't always make good neighbors. We need these stories to travel. We need to submit the matter to the pub for jurisprudence — before Pretti and Goode fade into the margins of tomorrow’s headlines.
