THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:FROM WHERE John O'Shea stood in the early 1970s, the rhythms of life were playing themselves out nicely enough. A signed up, bona fide sport obsessive, he found himself earning a wage from it, firmly ensconced on the back page of the Evening Press. He was recently married and his last job in the coal yard was by now an anecdote. If this was what the future looked like, he'd have been tempted to take it.
As he tells it, it was about this time that his father had a word in his ear and left him with something to mull. “Maybe he was only doing a favour for a friend, a Capuchin priest called Frank O’Leary who was running the Simon Community, or else he genuinely felt I was having too good a time. He suggested to me that I do something for someone else.”
His lack of patience has always been his biggest weakness, O’Shea admits. He was never a reader or a good listener. But after they talked, his father gave him a copy of Bury Me in My Boots by Sally Trench, an Englishwoman who left a middle class home to live and work on the streets with homeless people. He enjoyed it.
So out he went, a couple of nights a week, picking up a few others in his old Volkswagen and looking after the soup run in the city. He remembers a great character of a man who lived in a caravan up in Smithfield. “He was a real Dev man. I was working for Dev but I was very much a Collins man, and we had these fabulous arguments. The poor man – when he died only three people went to his funeral, and they were all Simon Community workers.”
He reckons he learned a lot about life and loneliness on those nights, but though he felt unending admiration for the people he worked with, he never felt he was cut out for it. He left Simon after a year.
“These guys, they wanted to tell you how things might have been and could have been and would have been. I was more interested in, ‘Do you want the shagging soup and sandwiches or don’t you? I can’t solve your . . . Jesus.” He knocks his fist on the table, his bushy eyebrows forming into arcs. “I wasn’t able to do anything, I thought, that could take them out of that position and give them what they needed. I felt frustrated, in other words, that I wasn’t able to do more than give them soup and sandwiches.”
It’s a sunny midweek afternoon, and the tremendous force of John O’Shea’s personality makes his spartan office in the Goal headquarters in Dún Laoghaire feel even pokier than it is. Along the walls are photos from the field, a few calendars and a framed letter from a schoolchild. About a dozen boxes brimming with video tapes are stacked to one side of the room (“I don’t know what’s on half of them”), and for a man who so famously disdains bureaucracy, the chipped desk is suitably bare: a phone, a stapler, a paper tray. He shifts restlessly in his chair, constantly fidgeting, his eyes zipping across the room.
As he speaks, he doodles on a notepad; after a couple of hours, the page is a black thicket of circles and stripes.
From here he runs the charity he founded in 1977, in the kitchen of the family home up the road, with a £10,000 donation for a feeding project in Calcutta, “the place with the little nun” as he knew it when he first pledged his help. In its 32 years, Goal has overseen the spending of more than €536 million on the delivery of aid to the poor in almost 50 countries. It currently has 118 “Goalies” working in the field alongside 2,500 local staff members.
O’SHEA HAS BEEN knocking around Dún Laoghaire since he was 11, when his family first moved in after his father’s job in the bank had brought them to Charleville, Co Cork, and Westport, Co Mayo. He paints himself as a sports-mad teenager with a plausible-sounding surfeit of energy and an easy upbringing. “I realise now, when I see what I’ve seen in the world, how fortunate I was. Rewind the clock. I couldn’t have asked for much more.”
Rewind the clock. Just out of school, with no road map to hand, open to a nudge this way or that. A friend of his was going for the army, so he went for it too. He was an athlete. He was an organiser. Even now, it doesn’t sound like too much of a leap, but in the end he didn’t get in. He recalls sitting at the back of a long room, “a firing squad of generals” with their arsenal of heavy-duty questions. One of them was about the Marshall Plan. Back then, he hadn’t a notion. And anyway, his right eye wasn’t 100 per cent.
“So my father pulled a stroke, as people do in this country, with a classmate of his from Cahirciveen, and he got me a job as a menial clerk in a coal company called Donnelly’s.” Based in the coal yard on Macken Street, his job was to arrange the loads for delivery: a bag of slack for a house in Bray, a sack of coal for the house in Artane, “or if you were up in Killiney, you’d get a ton”.
Promotion to head office duly came, but when they tried to assign him to the country sales run, he didn’t fancy leaving Dublin, so he deliberately failed the driving test and started looking for a way out. Born to argue, he saw in teaching the attraction of getting his voice across and putting his interests to some use, so he enrolled in UCD to study philosophy, history and economics by night. “A lot of priests, a lot of nuns. It wasn’t what you’d call riveting”, is the recollection of those days.
At the same time, he was finding other uses for his views. In the days he spent between the coal yard and the lecture halls on Earlsfort Terrace, O’Shea would put his views on paper in letters addressed to Joe Sherwood, a columnist at the Press. “This was pre-Dunphy and Hook and all these guys, when nobody ever had a view except Joe. So those of us who had strong views would look at his. He’d invite letters, so I’d write feverishly. ‘Why is the Irish rugby team picking so many lads from Ulster? What’s wrong with Connacht? Disgruntled in Monkstown’.”
“All my letters appeared, and I thought I was a great fella. In fact, it was only when I got into the Press I realised nobody wrote and my first job was to write the letters to Joe.”
Goal was the culmination of a process that began with that first inauspicious involvement with the Simon Community. When he left the soup run, he did some fund-raising instead and found himself much better suited to the demands of that sort of job – persuading, cajoling, harassing. There followed some work with Travellers in Dublin, and around the same time he started to read about the Biafran war, picking up the missionary magazines his father would have lying around, learning about places of which, he insists, he was entirely ignorant. There had been idle talk in the pub about setting up some sort of organisation. But it wasn’t until he saw an item on TV that the idea really formed.
“I’d my tennis racket in my hand, I was running out the door, it’s June 1977, and Judy said, ‘Hey, you might be interested in this’. The BBC was interviewing Fr Pat O’Mahony, a priest from Cork who was sending medical supplies in tea chests to various missionaries around the Third World. I was hugely impressed with this.” He rang the priest and introduced himself as “a sports journalist with a bit of excess energy”.
THERE’S NOTHING OF the marketing gimmick about O’Shea and his sport. In conversation, it gives him the backdrop to every memory, lends the syntax for every argument. He still plays golf every Saturday and hopes to get back playing for the Munster Veterans’ tennis team after a long lay-off. He still calls himself a sports journalist. And though he thinks age has made him more pragmatic about the developing world, “I haven’t lost that boyish, Charlie Bird-like approach” to sport.
When he turns over the idea of injustice, he’ll mention the enforced exiles of Kerry footballer Maurice Fitzgerald and Irish soccer international Andy Reid in the same breath as human rights abuses in central Africa. “Injustice to me is injustice. Right is right. Wrong is wrong,” he says. “I’m kind of simple to understand. I suppose a lot of people would say, ‘Yeah, that’s grand, any eejit can take the simplistic route’. Well, that’s the approach I take. Grey areas to me are an opting out situation. What’s going on in Darfur today is wrong.” He thumps the table with his fist. “What went on with Maurice Fitzgerald was wrong, what Charlie Haughey was doing was wrong. So it’s wrong. And if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”
This is classic O’Shea, just the sort of thing that endears him to fans and riles his critics. The latter will acknowledge his passion, his commitment and his generosity, but some see him as a grandstander; a sloganeer with simplistic, untenable ideas about the developing world. A major point of divergence between O’Shea and his counterparts in the business is government to government aid, which he trenchantly opposes on the grounds that corruption prevents it from reaching those most in need.
The aversion to grey spaces and the intolerance for shades of nuance; what he sees are virtues are the grounds on which his critics lay their case. Corruption is never clear-cut, they say, and if a leader is fighting it against difficult odds, western governments should be helping him, not pulling out. Providing substantial aid packages also gives donor governments leverage to push for change, while some projects – drafting school curricula, writing laws – can never fall under the remit of non-governmental agencies. As Hans Zomer, director of Dóchas, an umbrella group of aid agencies, wrote in this newspaper, surely we cannot tell a schoolgirl that her school will close because we don’t like her president?
O’Shea disputes the argument that aid buys leverage, insisting that “when people are brutal and callous and uncaring, they’re not going to change”. He accepts that NGOs are too small to implement the sort of measures that are required, and claims that if the Government decided to give all its overseas aid to the World Food Programme, he’d be the first to applaud it. What is ultimately required is a “revolution in thought” about aid.
“The truth is, the whole aid programme and everything that has happened in my time has not been an overwhelming success. We have allowed – not deliberately – millions of people to die. We have allowed genocides, we have allowed huge famines. And the response of the international community has been pathetic.”
“Organisations like Goal, we’re a canoe going out to the Titanic. And no matter how often we go out, we’ll never solve the problem. We’re too small. We’re too insignificant. The missionaries have done a phenomenal job, and they should be getting far greater credit, as should the ‘Goalies’ and people who work with Concern and other organisations. They’re great heroes. But the bottom line is, if it was a battle or a war, you’d say we’ve lost it. If it’s a match, we’re beaten . . .”
His preference would be for the Government to concentrate its efforts on one or two countries – to go in “like a multinational”, identify vital infrastructural needs and carry out the work without giving a cent to the governments. He has also supported military invasions as a means of delivering aid to countries such as Sudan.
“This is just the critics. In practically every major disaster we’ve had where people were being killed by their own government, people have criticised me, saying he wants the army in there. Well, sorry. If they were your children and you were being attacked by the Janjaweed today, would you not want an army or a police force or some defensive unit around your family to protect them?”
Under whose authority do they go in? Do they do it unilaterally? “What does it matter which way they go in? Doesn’t a fire engine go in unilaterally?” A fire engine is an arm of a sovereign power. “Excuse me. Sovereignty of the human being is infinitely more important than sovereignty of the nation. I would not expect the fire brigade to come to the door of this office and say, ‘We see the smoke but can’t go in here because Mr O’Shea hasn’t given us permission . . . To me, people’s lives are what matter.”
O’Shea’s views, and his penchant for their abrasive delivery, cast him the role of principled, passionate man on the street, standing aloof from the consensus, and clearly he has revelled in it. “I was in opposition to everybody. I’d nobody on my side . . . I didn’t care about cartels.” This is from a description of his role at the Evening Press, where he was a generalist who irked colleagues by crossing onto their patches, and yet you can almost hear him frame his place in the present-day politics of aid in much the same way.
He must know that all of this accounts for a fair share of Goal’s immense popular appeal, and by extension its clear successes in the field. He tells the story of a visit by Zambian President Frederick Chiluba to Dublin some years ago. When O’Shea’s turn came to shake his hand at a reception at Dublin Castle, he took the opportunity to whisper in his ear, “You’re a crooked little bastard”. “Afterwards I told a diplomat all I said to him was, ‘Céad míle fáilte’.” Chiluba was later charged with 168 counts of theft totalling more than $40 million (€30 million), he points out.
BY THE TIME we finish up in his office, evening has set in and the building is all but empty. In a room downstairs are a dozen huge metal boxes containing the latest paperwork from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Goal recently pulled out of the country due to a cut in its funding, and O’Shea hears that another severe reduction is on the way after the announcement in the emergency Budget of a €100 million scaling back in overall aid spending. With private donations also down, these are “turbulent waters” for the sector.
Every wall is covered with posters, decades of newspaper cuttings, letters of thanks and tokens of some of the innumerable nameless lives that have been touched by Goal’s work. There’s a shot of Andrea Curry, an engineer from Armagh who died on her first day at work for the organisation, in Kosovo in 1999, and the only “Goalie” to have been killed on the job in 32 years. He remembers it like it was yesterday, and keeps in touch with her family.
His own family have been with the cause from the beginning, of course. When he was double-jobbing for the first 17 years, family holidays would be spent in the field, and he feels he’ll have to get around to repaying them some time. He and Judy have four children: Johnny is a sports agent, Stephen works as a professional tennis coach and Lisa and Karen are Goal employees.
By the time he drops me off at the Dart, we’ve been talking for three hours, and he has an appointment with his granddaughter Rebecca to keep. But the engine runs for another 20 minutes. He’s in no mood to stop. We haven’t gone into the tragedy in Darfur or Mary Robinson’s courage in visiting Somalia as president or his disappointment at the lack of decent media coverage of Africa. And he has plenty more to say about his boundless love and admiration for the people he works for.
In the end, he says, he’ll be judged not on his diplomacy or his tact but on what Goal has achieved in the field for the poorest of the poor. That he’ll live with.
At 65, he doesn’t spend as much time in the field anymore. A few years ago, he had a health scare when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, though it hasn’t resurfaced since. Then there’s his new-found role of adoring grand-father. He claims not to have given a thought to retirement, but if he had more time, he’d like to spend it visiting schools and talking to children about the developing world. It excites him beyond measure.
“They’re lovely people to talk to . . . That’s what I’d love to do if I had time – just go from group to group, school to school, and try and nurture them, try and instil in them a feeling that if a guy like me, an ordinary sports journalist, can get a Third World aid agency up and running, look what you guys can do.”
He laughs at the recollection of the day he visited a class of eight-year-olds in Skerries after one of his first visits to Ethiopia.
“This kid puts up his hand, and says, ‘Mr O’Shea, my da’s a fisherman and he’s got a boat. He could go to Utopia and he could collect the hungry kiddies and bring them to Ireland and fatten them up. And Mickey’s da has a boat and Jimmy’s da has a boat. They’ll all go to Utopia’. I’ll tell you, it made more sense than all of the United Nations’ resolutions put together.”