A year of brilliance
...how our writer scooped Ireland’s top journalism prize
ON Thursday this newspaper’s Chief Correspondent Catherine Fegan was awarded the country’s highest journalistic accolade when she was named Journalist of the Year at the Newsbrands Ireland National Journalism Awards.
The awards, presented in partnership with the National Lottery, also saw John Lee and Michael O’Farrell of our sister paper, the Irish Mail on Sunday, scoop the Political Journalist and Investigative Journalist categories respectively. Seven other Mail writers were also shortlisted for awards.
The independent judging panel which named Catherine as Ireland’s top journalist commended her as a reporter who is ‘equally at home in rural Ireland, with loyalists in Portadown, with those who care for people with severe mental health issues, in Trump’s America, or with a notebook in a courtroom. She knows that the gravest sin for a journalist is to make the important boring, and she brings to her writing rigour with the best of good storytelling’.
Catherine won the Journalist of the Year award after first taking the Feature Writer of the Year prize. Incredibly, however, she was also shortlisted for awards in four other categories: Crime Story, News Analysis, Foreign Journalist and Business Story of the Year.
As well as a stunning personal triumph for the winners, these awards are a vindication of the Irish Mail newspapers’ determination to invest in covering the stories that matter — wherever in Ireland or the world they may be happening.
Here we present the astonishing array of Irish Daily Mail articles which helped secure Catherine’s recognition as the 2017 Journalist of the Year...