A measure of the bleakness of the current international situation regarding human rights is that the messages enunciated by Seán MacBride on being the first Irish recipient of the Nobel Prize for peace, 50 years ago this month, still resonate alarmingly.
The 1974 prize was shared with former Japanese prime minister Eisaku Satō for his work on nuclear disarmament.
MacBride had certainly travelled far by 1974; from young IRA volunteer and Civil War prisoner to government minister and international peace advocate. A founding member of Amnesty International in 1961, in 1963 he was appointed full-time secretary general at the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, and in 1973, UN commissioner for Namibia.
There was much hostility towards MacBride because of these roles and his past. Journalist Alexander Cockburn noted after MacBride’s death in 1988 that at the time of his funeral, a London Times editorial denounced him as a “cosmopolitan high priest” of the “cult of violence”.
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But he also provoked animosity because he was in the business of, in Cockburn’s words “jabbing at injustices that will not go away”.
As The Irish Times saw it in welcoming his Nobel Prize, “he is aware of individuals, not only of people in the abstract”.
He was also distrusted by the Israeli authorities and their supporters. He was minister for external affairs in 1949 when Ireland granted de facto, but not de jure, recognition of the new state of Israel.
As historian Dermot Keogh recorded, the then 4,000 strong Jewish community in Ireland did not succeed in persuading MacBride to opt for formal legal recognition. Nonetheless, MacBride made assertions in 1949 that were not unusual for Irish nationalists: “We know how cruelly and unjustly the Jewish people have suffered from intolerance and persecution . . . I think that we can claim that our common suffering from persecution and certain similarities in the history of the two races create a special bond of sympathy and understanding between the Irish and the Jewish people”.
What guided MacBride at that point was the wish to align Irish foreign policy with the Vatican and a desire to see international control of the Holy Lands before de jure, or legal, recognition, a stance strongly supported by the powerful Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid.
De jure recognition came in 1963, but it was not until the same month MacBride received the Nobel Prize that an exchange of ambassadors between the two states was agreed, though they were initially non-resident.
The increasing focus of the EEC on the plight of Palestinian refugees heightened tensions with Israel at that stage, as did increased calls for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation to be accepted as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Ireland supported this which led to a retort from Israel in 1974 that Ireland was involved in the “encouragement of Arab extremism” and Israel’s foreign minister Yigal Allon rebuked Irish minister for foreign affairs Garret FitzGerald in person at a meeting in New York.
In 1982, MacBride chaired an international commission on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to examine “reported violations of international law by Israel”.
He was also critical of Nato that year as he believed it was largely responsible for “the injustices perpetrated on the people of Namibia, Southern Africa and Palestine . . . it is their money, their arms, their tanks”.
He was adamant that Irish neutrality should not be compromised and opposed Irish involvement in a common defence policy; he also remained a stinging critic of the partition of Ireland.
His Nobel Prize acceptance speech was typically provocative. He asked, “if those vested with authority and power practice injustice, resort to torture and killing, is it not inevitable that those who are victims will react with similar methods?”
He questioned the effectiveness of the UN when it came to conflict prevention, mediation and investigation of human rights abuses, and concluded “the signpost just ahead of us is ‘Oblivion’. Can the march on this road be stopped? Yes, if public opinion uses the power it now has”.
He also offered this reflection: “In my life I have found that women have a much better understanding of the imperatives of peace and are much less easily ‘taken in’ by the specious arguments of experts or diplomats. They should be given a real decisive role in all disarmament negotiations and conferences. War and peace is surely the concern of women as much as it is that of men – and perhaps much more so”.
During this era of the self-styled “hard men”– Putin, Netanyahu and Trump among them – the terror they wreak and the hate they speak, MacBride’s words and mission remain paramount.
Ireland, if it wants to give real meaning to the idea of an independent foreign policy, needs to use every available means to keep “jabbing at injustices that will not go away”.