Paddy Woodworth
Irish journalist and author

"Using Terror Against Terrorists:
The Consequences of a Dirty War for Spanish Democracy"

Tuesday, March 25
4:00 p.m.
Pyle Center

Sponsored by The Center for European Studies Link to CES website
More information: 265-6295 or email

Paddy Woodworth is author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (rev. ed. Yale University Press, 2003). He will discuss the strategies of the Madrid government in combating the Basque terrorist group ETA over the last 40 years. In particular, he will talk about what happens when a democratic administration begins to use terrorist methods - kidnappings, torture and death squads - against a terrorist group, as occurred under the Spanish Socialist Party governments in the 1980s. He will argue that such a strategy undermines democracy’s best arguments against terrorism in principle, and has a deeply negative effect in practice.

Mr. Woodworth, who has covered Spain for the Irish Times, RTE, the BBC and other media since the 1970s, was born in Ireland in 1951 and lives in Dublin. He worked with Field Day Theatre Company and the Project Arts Centre before moving into full-time journalism in the early 1980s. Arts Editor at the Irish Times from 1991 to 1997, he then worked on the foreign desk, and is now pursuing freelance writing projects.