The Cost of War: Dr Terry McCarthy at TEDxUCD

Terry McCarthy is an Emmy Award winning war correspondent and is currently President and CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, whose TEDxUCD 2014 talk is entitled 'The Cost of War'.

In his TEDxUCD talk, Terry who has covered wars from Central America to South East Asia to Central Asia and the Middle East, talks about the human costs of war, and outlines why it is so important that we never forget those human costs when we debate the use of military force anywhere in the world.

His TEDxUCD talk revolves around the story of one young Marine, Sergeant Johnny Jones, who lost both his legs in an improvised explosive device (IED) blast in Afghanistan.

Terry McCarthy is President and CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council which invites authoritative and influential figures to Los Angeles and provides them with an open forum to promote greater understanding of current global issues and their impact on the people of Southern California.

He is a University College Dublin (UCD) philosophy graduate and in 2012 was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University.

After completing his undergraduate studies at UCD, Terry moved to Paris to further pursue his studies before returning to Ireland to begin his reporting career working for the Irish Press in Dublin in 1984. He left Ireland to cover the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985.

Since then he has travelled the world for television and print media covering politics, business, military, social and environmental issues across the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

He has managed bureaus in the US and overseas, and established two bureaus in war zones. He speaks six languages, has won four Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow award.
Post 9/11, he covered the war in Afghanistan, where he opened TIME's Kabul office, and later went to Kuwait to follow the troops into Iraq in 2003. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, he set up TIME's bureau in Baghdad.

His first forays into television came in Iraq, where he was part of the ABC News/TIME team that reported the special series 'Iraq, Where Things Stand', which won two Emmy Awards in 2003 and 2004.

He covered the execution of Saddam Hussein, the battle for Baghdad and the US troop surge under General Petraeus. He travelled throughout Iraq covering the war from the U.S. military and the Iraqi civilian perspectives, for which he won an Emmy Award in 2007.

He has also reported on Islamic radicals in Jordan, life along the Yangtze River in China, the North Korean nuclear threat, swine flu in Mexico and hurricanes in the Caribbean.

In July 2012 he took up his current role as President and CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

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