Hi From Neptune

Irish Essay

The urge to altruism is one of the most celebrated aspects of the human character. Through a desire to help others, through compassion, through sympathy or even understanding, each of us has felt its touch. As a tool with which to improve the world, it has perhaps no equal: for which of us cannot remember a time when the kindness of another has lifted our own spirits? Perhaps a welcome, warmly given; a heartfelt compliment, a gift, a remembrance or thought, a joke which blunts the edge of pain. Smiles, in all their forms. Acceptance. Love.

Suffering is a condition common to all humanity. Throughout history, in all corners of the world, we have known it. Its Irish birth can be found in the very beginning of lore; for Cessair, the mythic chieftess who was the first to invade those shores, is said to have died from a broken heart. Closer to us, it has been given tragic salute in the rebellions that have cast long shadows over Irish history: the armed uprisings of 1641, 1798, and 1916, wrought by a fervent passion to right perceived wrongs.

The greater task, not only of bringing attention to human rights injustices but to remedy them, is one so large in scope as to seem the domain of only a very few people in the world. They are the powerful, the rich, the famous: the idols of our increasingly secular society, signal fires which focus our eyes on areas so lightly called ‘trouble spots’.

When Mary Robinson visited Somalia in 1992, she went as the most popular president in Ireland’s history. She was an outspoken and morally driven liberal who aimed to draw her people in from the fringes of society, offer them respect; to listen to their concerns, and in so doing increase the chance of them listening to hers. What she saw, in the wake of the famine which had begun years ago, shocked her. A distant, composed woman who resented the outpouring of emotion in court, she had trained herself to hold her personal feelings in check. She did so as long as she could.

On the day Mary Robinson first set foot on Somalian soil, 140 bodies had been laid out for burial - but a tiny fraction of the 300,000 deceased. Fresh from the well-stocked opulence and pleasures of family at the presidential residence of Áras an Uachtaráin, the Harvard-trained lawyer was faced with desolation. She talked with those scarred, deformed by the absurdity of war. She saw and walked among women cradling starving children in their arms; she touched infants whose life would last no longer than the lighting of a candle. Death surrounded her. She was immersed, in a way few of our privileged society ever are, in the lives of those who have no hope.

And, days later, while addressing the United Nations, her compassion overcame her. “I cannot be entirely calm speaking to you because I have such a sense of what the world must take responsibility for.”

“I felt shamed by what I saw, shamed, shamed - on behalf of the European world and the American world and the developed world generally. What are we doing that we have not a greater conscience for it?”

As I write this, the United States has borne its worst ever civilian massacre. Suffering surrounds us: we must take action. So many times this has been expressed: in the aftermath of World War One, the “war to end all wars”; in the years after the Holocaust, following the defeat of one of the most hated names in world history; after Korea, Vietnam, Chechnya, the first assault by a Bush on Iraq. It was ever spoken with passion, as it is now. It has stirred the creation of the United Nations, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Darfur – does that word strike down into your soul? It marks continuing suffering, continuing neglect. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe does the same; so too the decades-long repression of Tibet. The population of Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, has lost 100,000 people to emigration since February of this year as it endures a brutal clash between insurgents and Ethiopian forces.

Persecution may be a part of human nature, but so too should be the desire to see it stopped.

Both Ireland and New Zealand, green lands surrounded by sea, infused with a colonial attitude and a queer sense of isolation, have developed a distinctive community spirit. The Irish are known for their generosity, for their humour, their warmth: though torn by religious and political dissension, the Emerald Isle projects a warm and welcoming image to the modern world.

The diaspora, whether first generation or seventh, proudly proclaim their Irish ancestry. And, in Britain especially, this celebration of their ancestry is greatly encouraged by the fact that in Mary Robinson, they found a President who gave them respect. For the first time since the 1840’s, those Irish who had been forced to emigrate were recognized, remembered, honoured. They were Irish “beyond our shores”, rightly given tribute by a light kept burning in the President’s own window.

In her many journeys overseas, Mrs. Robinson visited the poor and disabused. Her first meeting as President was with Threshold, an organisation for the homeless: her last, seven years later, with a charity for the homeless called Focus Point. She was a truly humane head of state, not only the first Catholic, the first woman and the first to win without support from Fianna Fáil, but a deeply moral individual who breathed life and compassion into an office confined by tradition and constitution. She has been mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Mandela and democratic Czech hero Václav Havel: both men of outstanding personal integrity who have contributed greatly to the global advance of human rights. In her first year as High Commissioner for Human Rights with the UN, she was to resoundingly validate that judgment.

The Irish people today fulfill and expand on the moral vision of her time. The Irish Centre for Human Rights was founded in January 2000 at the National University of Ireland, Galway, offering scholarships, PhD and masters programmes in international human rights law; a joint initiative has been made by Irish Aid, Amnesty International and several Irish non-governmental organizations on violence against women in the Sudan; Ireland is currently 6^th on the OECD list of aid donors; and, most tellingly, Gerry Adams and Rev. Ian Paisley have agreed to share power. Unionists and nationalists sit side by side, their compromise the sweetest gift that Ireland has been given in many, many years.

We thrill to the idea that we might be able to lighten another’s burden, that somehow we could mean something: instead of an anonymous shadow passing on the street, we could be a source of love. We can know, understand, value; and be known, understood and valued in return. We dream of the power to bring happiness – and we have the hope that helping others, whether it seems doomed, hopeless, or unrealistic, will influence attitudes and improve lives. This is altruism. This is Mary Robinson, and the Ireland she helped create.

posted by Anonymous @ 2:54 PM