PROFILE: ANNE ENRIGHTis won over by the goodness of an aid worker who signed up for a temporary escape from recession-hit Dublin in the 1980s, and found a vocation
HERE’S AWAYS a slight pause as people try to find the right word for her: “Oh yes, Sally O’Neill. She’s . . . amazing.” Trócaire’s regional manager for Latin America was described to me, before I met her, as “this amazing woman”, or “just amazing”, or as a “force of nature”, which, in my experience, is short hand for “psychopath”. So I was intrigued by the time I shook her hand in the airport in Honduras, and maybe a little wary: how can you trust someone whom no one can describe?
Small, fair haired. She asked about the flight and seemed normal enough. On the way to the car she started talking about Mario Vargas Llosa’s new book on Roger Casement; she couldn’t wait to read it, the combination was too exciting. “If I don’t have a book on the go,” she said. “I get the DTs.”
A week later I was besotted – which is to say, still confused – by this tiny, turbo-charged woman who talks a mile a minute, making easy, immediate contact with everyone she meets. And Sally O'Neill meets everyone: diplomats, prostitutes, aid workers, celebrities, campesinos,politicians, priests, junkies, community leaders, women in labour, bankers, journalists, men with guns, lawyers. Under the stream of talk, you realise, her mind is making all kinds of connections, she is "working it", which is to say doing her job. And her job – to improve the lives of the poor in seven different countries in Latin America – is vast. No wonder she never stops.
The week I meet her she is driving me, a photographer and a cameraman around Honduras, to garner publicity for the Trócaire Lenten campaign. The week before, she was doing the same with seven Irish priests. After we left, she would be back in the office for a week, with events most evenings, and then off to oversee Trócaire’s emergency relief effort in Haiti. A month later she would be in Ireland, for talks, meetings and one 8,000-word lecture, but although she would be travelling close to home, the chances of seeing family would be scant.
All this is done on the cheapest possible fares: with tedious layovers and no choice of a window or aisle seat. I hear no travellers’ talk of tummy bugs or meningeal malaria. If bad things happen in Sally O’Neill’s conversation – and they do, in sometimes spectacular ways – it is always to other people. Her suitcase contains enough clothes to get her, pristine, through two weeks. Perfectly articulate, she can give you two hours on a given subject or a 30-second soundbite. And although she is the go-to person in central America for British and Irish journalists, the interesting thing about working with Sally is the way she uses a media crew as a magnet to draw people out of their shanties so she can talk to them about their lives and possibilities. The propaganda, for her, works both ways.
If Sally O’Neill has her doubts about the monster that is the modern media, she’s not about to tell me. Nor will she be lured on the subject of sandal fashions among modern Irish priests. You can almost hear the clicking sound as she refuses to question people’s intentions: what’s good for business is good for business, especially when there are so many lives and livelihoods at stake. This pragmatism must help when you are talking to the guys from the World Bank, for example, or maybe even to Bono – the modern aid world is a complex place. But it is also possible that Sally O’Neill is not the judgemental type.
In a shack in the middle of nowhere, in Honduras, I see her swing a baby in its hammock. Two weeks before she was born, the child's father was killed in a land dispute with a plantation owner. " O la pobrecita," Sally says to the widowed mother, smiling into the baby's eyes. "The poor little mite, who has no idea of the sadness in which she was brought into this world." Her words are so personal and elegiac; so far from the nice life I bring with me wherever I go. I realise what has been evident for days – these dirt poor peasants are the people that Sally O'Neill likes most in the world, and the people she most admires. Good-ness – that is what I am looking at. Very unsettling. This woman could run a major corporation, I think (and maybe she does).
O’Neill grew up in what she describes as “a strong family” of seven in Dungannon, Co Tyrone. She puts her interest in social justice down to growing up with the civil-rights movement in Northern Ireland. Bernadette Devlin was head girl of her school, a few years ahead of her, and she still remembers the B-Specials in those days, going about “like some kind of private militia”.
She fell into aid work almost by accident. She was about to take a hospital job as a dietician, when she went to a lecture in Queen’s University about volunteering overseas, and she filled in a form “as a kind of a joke”. Two months later she got an offer to interview for a job in Guatemala and, being in her early 20s, she just got on the plane.
For six years, she worked in central and Latin America, trying to improve standards of nutrition at a local level. She was stranded in the Peruvian Amazon when she heard about a health programme downriver, run by an Irish organisation called Trócaire. Impressed by what she saw there, she wrote them a letter, and the director at the time, Brian McKeown, wrote back to her more or less saying, “What the heck are you doing working for the Brits?”, so in the fullness of time, she came back home to Ireland.
She worked as a troubleshooter, going wherever she was needed – the two toughest stints, she says, were in Somalia and the Sudan. She met a man in Honduras and married him, and their three children went to primary school in Dublin. Then she returned to Honduras to set up Trócaire’s Latin American office there. Her grown up family is now scattered on three continents. “Every Sunday,” she says, “we try to Skype.”
Whenever she is asked about why she does what she does, or whether she misses home, O’Neill describes the misery of Dublin in the early 1980s: a town of few jobs and much talk. “You just needed to get out,” she says. But she enjoyed it, too, the gossip and the intellectual energy, living as she did in a cluster of artists, commentators and drinkers off the South Circular Road.
O’Neill is a great storyteller. Her tales have an epic quality: sometimes you feel as though you have heard them already, or some distant echo of them, while drinking with someone who used to drink in those boho redbricks between the canals.
There’s the one about Bishop Casey getting a gun stuck in his chest at a road block in El Salvador. There’s the woman journalist who was stoned in Mogadishu when she showed an inch of skin, getting money out of her fat money belt – this was in a place where petrol, she says, cost $100 a litre. There is the story of the two boat people who left a daughter behind them in the darkness of a Vietnamese beach, and who ended up in Darndale, of all places – after many years, and with the help of Mary Banotti, the daughter was found.
There is, above all, the vague, unresolved story that is Ethiopia in the famine of 1985, where O’Neill went with cardinal Ó Fiaich and changed her mind about emergency, as opposed to long-term aid. There is no punch line to this story, just details – sights and smells that refuse to go away or make sense.
The stories are so good, it makes me think that this is why O’Neill does it, for the sake of an interesting life, for meaning and excitement and things making sense. She talks of life and death, coincidences, big events. She was shot at, she told me, while riding the roof of La Bestia, the “Train of Death”, on which migrants hitch their ride to the US, and it seemed to me she was delighted to be shot at, and to ride past those border guards on the roof of a train. Better than Dublin in the early 1980s, clearly. Better than – or spookily similar to – Dungannon.
Why do you do what you do? This is a journalist’s question, because journalists don’t “do” anything – pretty much on principle. Of course I have my doubts about Sally O’Neill. I realise, in retrospect, that many of her stories of Irish politicians and personalities end up with someone signing a sizeable cheque – such as Gerry Ryan, who saw an antique Mississippi microphone in Radio Progresso’s tin shack in Honduras, and paid so much for it they were able to build a proper studio. It is a good story, a telling exchange.
Maybe the important thing is not why we do things, but the pleasure of the tale. If doing good is a kind of addiction then Sally O’Neill is far from cured. And I find great comfort in the knowledge that she is, at this very moment – at every waking moment –- working for what she believes in. She keeps us all decent, I think. How much is that worth? We should write her a cheque.
