REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE CONFERENCE OF THE IRISH COMMISSION FOR PRISONERS OVERSEAS
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE CONFERENCE OF THE IRISH COMMISSION FOR PRISONERS OVERSEAS TO MARK ITS 25TH ANNIVERSARY
Dia dhibh go leir a chairde.
I get to attend many anniversary events as President but this is one of the few where I can say I was there when it started those twenty-five too short years ago. I am very grateful to Brian Hanley for kindly inviting me to open this Anniversary Conference and the chance it gives me to say thank you for the fidelity this Commission has shown to Irish Prisoners and their families since that launch back in 1985.
Then as now, prisoners do not easily evoke public sympathy or concern. Their alleged crimes or convictions have a way of putting distance between them and the general public yet, at any given time, there are probably around 1 000 Irish men and women in prisons abroad. None of us would argue that if they have broken the law they have to go through the criminal processes and pay the penalty but those processes and that penalty are seriously aggravated if you are in prison in a strange country or culture, isolated from family and friends. What is more, the awful injustice visited upon the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which the Commission championed when it was singularly unpopular to do so, should teach us something about the potential for human frailty and fallibility of processes, particularly where they are under enormous pressure. There is a care that is needed for prisoners abroad and their families and a vigilance for justice that is embodied in the work of the Commission.
The circumstances which bring people into contact with ICPO can differ wildly. Many will involve prisoners in Britain but they could also be in any part of the world and the great strength of ICPO has always been its location at the heart of the Social Justice outreach of the Irish Catholic Church, as a sub-committee of its Council for Emigrants. The Church has access to a unique global pastoral network with an ethic of care for the outcast and for the prisoner. That ethic, that commandment to love even the most marginalised, is fundamental to the work of ICPO whose services are offered to all Irish prisoners regardless of creed or crime and it is expressed through a range of support, advocacy and information services nowadays part funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs Emigrant Support Programme, the Irish Catholic Church, the SVDP and many fundraisers who have made this their cause. Aside from the services offered by our embassies abroad, no-one apart from ICPO is doing this work. It is done by a small cohort of professional paid staff and a team of volunteers whose invaluable work helps ICPO to stretch its reach and its services for they are able to draw on pro bono expertise across all the complex areas that care for prisoners provokes.
Over the past twenty five years, as many people turned away from prisoners and washed their hands of them, it was your unexpected and reliable hand of friendship which let them know that they had an innate dignity that no system could overwhelm and no act of their own could obliterate. As families struggled to deal with distance, unfamiliar places and judicial systems, different languages, money worries and the hard reality of imprisonment, its effect on family life, its effect on life chances downstream, you were and are their rock, their centre of gravity, their guide through hard to navigate waters.
None of this work was ever done for thanks, for recognition or for an expectation that it might change lives around. Yet it has changed lives. I think today of Anne Maguire stepping into then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office to receive a public apology for the wrong that robbed her, her husband and family of precious years of family life. It was thanks to ICPO’s insistent advocacy among others that the truth eventually emerged. It is thanks to ICPO that prisoners’ families who feel unable to cope are reassured that there is help and they will get through the obstacle course ahead. It is thanks to ICPO that so many men and women in prison have access to your practical, pastoral care which honours so convincingly those challenging words in St Matthew’s gospel - “I was in prison and you visited me”.
Martin Luther King once said that “darkness is only driven out by light.” Twenty-five years ago a small group of men and women lit a light that has quietly but emphatically driven out darkness in many lives. It would be impossible to ever truly or fully quantify the good that ICPO has done, for the numbers of clients dealt with and the nature of their circumstances tell only a tiny part of the narrative. The rest is filled out by hours of talking, holding hands, drying tears, reassuring, organising advice, information, accompanying families on visits, writing letters to prisoners, writing letters to key influencers in order to advocate human rights or justice issues, smiling a smile of welcome as a nervous mother comes across the door for the first time, being there the day a prisoner is released to help life begin again ….. who can count such things? We can on this day only acknowledge them with gratitude.
I thank all who have made the work of ICPO their business these past twenty-five years. I thank all those who have used its services and vindicated the decision to found this Commission and to sustain it through all sorts of ups and downs. I am conscious that two of those first founders have gone much too early to their heavenly home, John O’Connell and Fr Breifne Walker. They would be pleased to see ICPO make this anniversary so vibrant and so dynamic with a history of remarkable success behind it and a secure, determined future in front of it. This work is relentless. It is ever-changing and ever-needed. I hope this Conference fills each one of you with enthusiasm for the next part of the journey and that in the sharing here of experience and ideas there will be a fresh, distilled wisdom to guide the next best steps of ICPO at the start of the next 25 years. ICPO taught me a lot. I will be forever grateful to have been part of it.
Thank you again for inviting me here as you celebrate this special anniversary and to wish you well in your continued efforts on behalf of Irish prisoners throughout the world.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir.