Goodbye to a legend and an old friend

Last week Aengus Finucane passed away. He was a Holy Ghost missionary priest who helped found what grew to become Ireland's internationally renowned charity, Concern Worldwide, back in the days of the Biafra famine in the failed secession war against Nigeria. We joined hundreds of friends and his family on Friday last to pay tribute to a great man who became a household face and name not just in Ireland but in the many countries where Concern had a presence.



Ironically for an organisation that was founded and headed by a priest for so many years it was the first Irish NGO to be avowedly non-denominational. It worked to benefit the poorest of the poor in all the various countries in which it worked and the beneficiaries and staff were of all religions and none. It never was a factor, nor should it be. Aengus was a larger than life figure, a genuine humanitarian and he made Concern strive to achieve its slogan of the 70s - Love in Action.

Concern has played a huge part in our family's life. I met my hubby Jan when we were both young volunteers with Concern in Bangladesh in the late 1970s and Concern and our paths have been inextricably intertwined ever since. Aengus was my boss when I went to Bangladesh where he was then Field Director, and after Bangladesh he bacame the Chief Executive of Concern in Dublin from 1981 - 1997.



After Bangladesh we got married and went to Tanzania with another NGO, the Swiss-based Lutheran World Federation, which was a familiar career path for former Concern volunteers, as many of them were now working in various LWF fields. After 6 years in Tanzania we took a break while Jan did a MSc in Development Economics in Swansea, and it was Aengus who interviewed him for his next post, as Country Director for Concern in Tanzania.

We spent 6 more fulfilling and happy years in Iringa and Dar-es-Salaam and then transferred to Lao PDR for another two and a half years with Concern . In all that time and subsequently we maintained links with Aengus through our ongoing involvement and interest in Concern and its activities. We are both members of Concern, Jan is on the Concern Council, and we have kept in touch with our many Concern friends over the years, both at home and abroad. Aengus baptised our youngest child 13 years ago during our home leave from Laos, and we have a lovely video of that day.

Last year Concern celebrated its 40th Anniversary with a huge reunion in Croke Park in Dublin, where hundreds of people from all corners of the world gathered to reminisce and remember the wonderful times they had in their time and involvement with Concern. While the organisation was at the forefront of so many tragedies and landmark events in the past 40 years, from the famine in Biafra to the misery of Darfur, and the Rwandan genocide among the most notorious, there are many moments to treasure, whether the impact was on one person or a whole community.

It is true what his brother Fr. Jack said when celebrating his funeral mass - that Aengus was part of three families - his own family, the Holy Ghost family, and the Concern family. His funeral was truly a celebration of his life and the many moving tributes on radio, TV and both the Irish and International press were a testament to that life fully lived.

May he rest in peace, in the knowledge that his impact on the lives of so many people will live on for many years and he will not be forgotten.

Reflections on Africa - tribalism and colonialism

Years ago (1994) we travelled to Zimbabwe by train from Makambako (between Iringa and Mbeya, our nearest TanZam station) for an overland holiday with our three boys. We only got to Victoria Falls and had a wonderful week there, staying in a hotel with a pool for 3 days and in a town council holiday cottage in the middle of town for the remaining days, as the hotel was a bit outside our then frugal budget.

What I remember vividly about the train journey was the book I read to while away some of the 36 hours trip, Thomas Pakenham's "Scramble for Africa" , which looks at the vast, then virtually unknown continent at the time of the colonial scramble between the 4 colonial powers of England, Germany, France and Belgium. From an Irish person's perspective what fascinated was the realisation that if Gladstone wasn't so preoccupied with "the Irish question" he would have backed Stanley's quest for the navigability of the Congo river, and not left it to King Leopold for Belgium.


Indeed the course of history would have been very different in the area as if Belgium hadn't already a foot in the door with Congo, they wouldn't have been "given" Ruanda-Urindi (present-day Rwanda and Burundi) as part of the carve-up of the former German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in the wake of World War 1.


Just goes to show what the consequences of one action or inaction can be. In the case of Rwanda these have been devastating, and the complexity of the situation there that culminated in the genocide of 1994 is impossible to condense in a few lines of a blog post. Suffice to say that the colonial masters have a lot to answer for in this instance, which is not to exonerate the Interehamwe perpetrators of the genocide.



The Belgian policy of divide and rule perpetrated the existing gulf between the Bantu Hutu and the Nilotic Tutsi who were seen as more "European" looking by the Belgians, who favoured them in education and employment opportunities. This festering resentment boiled over as soon as independence arrived and the first of many genocidal massacres took place around 1959.

The account of the events of that awful year are told in many books, from many angles, and a film has been made - Hotel Rwanda - which gives an accurate portrayal of one aspect of the bravery of individuals. The refusal of the Western world in general and the US in particular to use the genocide term was one of the damning indictments of Clinton's administration, as that would have meant an international intervention, other than the ineffectual UN response, which was miniscule compared to that in former Yugoslavia around the same time. General Romeo Dallaire was one brave man heading up the UN forces who was thwarted every time he attempted to raise the issue of complicity of some Western governments, and the need to empower the UN to be peace enforcers not just peacekeepers.



Other books that recount the events for posterity are Philip Gourevitch's chillingly factual "We wish to inform you tomorrow we will be killed with our families"; Dervla Murphy's account of visiting her daughter and family in Goma in the wake of the genocide in "Visiting Rwanda", and Fergal Keane's (former BBC World Service African correspondent) "Seaon of Blood - a Rwandan Journey" . I have read these and can recommend them, they are compulsive reading for anyone interested in trying to understand African tribalism and the devastation of colonial fallout. I have not read Dallaire's book "Shake hands with the Devil" but it sounds compelling; he left Africa a broken man after what he had witnessed, and it might put into perspective the constraints the beleaguered UN peacekeepers work under, their mandate of non-intervention made them targets for internaional opprobrium, and probably led to changes in their approach to crises in Chad and other global conflict zones.

A more recent book that I read and loved was "Blood River", by Tim Butcher. This is an account of his journey along the Congo River in the footsteps of Stanley, and we were lucky to meet Tim last year when he spoke at Lismore's Immrama Festival of Travel Writing. He recounts the destruction of that country under the despotic Mobutu regime and, sadly, history seems to be repeating itself in Mugabe's reign of terror in today's beleaguered Zimbabwe.

We lived in Tanzania during the Rwandan genocide and worked closely with the volunteers on the ground in the refugee camps in the border Kagera region, which were largely filled with the fleeing perpetrators - a moral and ethical dilemma that challenged the humanitarian ideals of everyone involved. Do we assist the perptrators or do we treat them as they treated their fellow-countrymen and women and children? I don't have the answers to this question, I don't know if there is one.