Kevin Myers is an English-born Irish journalist. He attended Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester and Ratcliffe College in Leicestershire, he studied history at University College Dublin. He became a journalist upon leaving UCD, for want of anything else to do. Over forty years later, he remains a journalist for largely the same reason.
He has been a newspaper columnist since 1980. He writes four columns a week, totalling some 160,000 words a year: nearly five million words to date. He has also reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia, and also from Japan, Africa and Czechoslovakia.
Since the late 1970s, he has worked to restore to public consciousness a memory of the Irish sacrifice in two world wars. He has been reasonably successful in that endeavour. His efforts to restore the Islandbridge War Memorial to the Irish dead of the Great War, and which had been turned into a Dublin Corporation dump, were also successful. He was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II by President McAleese at Islandbridge in May 2011. He has throughout his professional life as columnist been a vigorous opponent of the IRA, and all paramilitary violence.
He still cannot type properly, and the combination of his clumsy fingers and the complex alternatives offered by a computer keyboard means that many phenomena that appear on his screen are wholly unintended, whereas much of what promises to be his best material can be accidentally and irrevocably deleted. He is – by this time in his career – clearly incapable of curing himself of these habits.
He has written one published novel, Banks of Green Willow, two anthologies of his columns, and a widely-acclaimed memoir, Watching the Door
He lives with his wife Rachel and many dogs in the middle of the Kildare countryside.