OPINION (AN COLÚN): St Patrick, Mariupol, and seeking home

LAST WEEK Minister Pippa Hackett said an additional €1million under the Community Recognition Fundhad been granted for County Offaly. The Community Recognition Fund is tied in with the fact that Offaly is now home to 1,350 Ukrainian refugees and is a way of saying thank you to the communities which have shown great decency and have successfully assimilated the refugees into their midst.
The Fund is administered by the County Council, and has already benefited communities in Offaly. Examples include support of the OFFline Film Festival, Portarlington Concert Band and a combination of Tullamore sports clubs.
“Many communities, towns and villages are experiencing rapid change with the arrival of people from Ukraine and other countries,” said Minister Hackett. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive and this fund recognises that – and the need for a whole of community approach. This new allocation of €1millon will undoubtedly see tangible and long term benefits delivered across the county, in consultation with communities and focused on areas that have welcomed people from Ukraine and other countries.”
People's better natures have been shining through repeatedly in their kindness and compassion towards the refugees. For example, in Kilcormac a few months ago people banded together and said no when the government and the council wanted to move 16 of the 60 refugees living in the town. A very officious and cold-sounding letter was sent to the refugees on Friday December 8 saying they would be moved to one of three places across Ireland the following Monday. This frosty bureaucracy was met with the anger it deserved. The locals pointed out that the refugees were mostly women and children and they were well settled in the town, having been there for about a year. The children, for example, were attending the local school and had made friends. The government backed off and allowed the refugees to remain where they were. People Power in instances such as this can be a heart-warming and wonderful thing. A lot more of this sort of People Power is badly needed in the countries of the West where we aspire to a more enlightened form of governance but frequently fall short.
When I read about the terrible suffering inflicted upon people I often put myself in their shoes and ask myself, what would it be like if that happened to me? I asked myself this question this week when I was chatting to a young man from Mariupol. Like most inhabitants of the city he got out when the Russians began to pulverise the place two years ago. Mariupol, once a pleasant place beside the shores of the Sea of Azov, became the embodiment of hell on earth. The young man's home was destroyed in shelling and he fled. Eventually he arrived in Birr where he greatly appreciates being able to live in a peaceful setting, far removed from the violence and aggression which relentlessly assaulted his home city. As I listened to him I imagined what it would be like if Ireland was invaded by an imperialist, ambitious, highly aggressive and frequently morally-vacuous power; what it would be like if Birr was shelled and the buildings pulverised, including my own house, and we were compelled to flee for our lives. For me, my greatest happiness is living in my own home, in a house which has my unique imprint, which is an extension of my imaginative world; living in a home which is a loving environment. This is the ideal. This is happiness. If that was to be taken away from me because of the brutality of life and human behaviour, then I would be cast out into chaos. Rootless, wandering, my soul riven by grief, there would be one primary thought in my mind fuelling and driving me forward; namely, to forge the ideal once again – to settle once again with my loved one, in a home.
On one side are the ambitious, the greed-driven, the worldly. On the other side is sanity.
When I see refugees, when I see people from other countries, my first and principal response is not to see them as other but to see them as part of the same human family which we all belong to. By doing so I can sense their pain, fear and caution; and can respond to them in an appropriate manner.
I use the same response when I think of our patron saint. We know very little about St Patrick. What is certain is that he was a foreigner in Ireland, abroad in a strange culture, far from home. He might have come from Wales. He was seized by an Irish raiding party roaming the British shores seeking slaves. Chaos-makers and being uprooted by violence. There are similar tropes between 5th Century Ireland and 21st Century Ukraine. Horrific human behaviour and its frequency.