BERKELEY, Calif. — They come by the thousands — Irish students on work visas, many flocking to the West Coast to work in summer jobs by day and to enjoy the often raucous life in a college town at night. It was, for many, a rite of passage, one last summer to enjoy travel abroad before beginning a career.It’s almost impossible for me to address this without throwing something. Or, better yet, getting rip-roaring drunk and then trashing a handy nearby apartment building in my stereotypically wild Hibernian way. Nothing this execrable newspaper writes surprises me any more. With a bunch of dead Irish kids whose parents are even now starting to bury them, Adam Nagourney and two other Times hacks see fit to report their deaths like this.
But the work-visa program that allowed for the exchanges has in recent years become 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.
Early Tuesday, 13 people, most of them young Irish students here on the visa program, were crowded onto a fourth-floor balcony off Unit 405 for what neighbors described as a loud party when the balcony collapsed, sending people tumbling onto the street below. Six people were killed; five were Irish and the sixth had dual Irish-American citizenship, according to the Irish Embassy. Three of the dead were men, three were women, and all were in their 20s. At least seven others suffered injuries, some serious.
UPDATED:
Today in Ireland we are hanging our heads in shock and sorrow at the needless deaths of six of our brightest and best young adults and the serious injuries to others. 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… Shame on you.
- The Times has issued an apology:
- Still unsatisfied, the Irish minister for equality, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, slammed the Times’s racist insensitivity in a tweet:
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