Japanese disarmament campaigners won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize “for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”. These survivors of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel committee said, had described “the indescribable”.
Delivering the peace prize lecture in Oslo 50 years ago, Nobel laureate Seán MacBride warned that the world’s superpowers had chosen the “dangerous” option of increasing their nuclear capability. He called on them to begin a process of general disarmament. MacBride, the UN commissioner for Namibia, then occupied by apartheid South Africa, shared the 1974 peace prize with a former Japanese prime minister, Eisaku Sato, who also opposed the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
MacBride was a relatively unusual Nobel Prize winner in that the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1977. Previous winners included Pablo Picasso and Fidel Castro. MacBride regarded the honour as “an indication of the interest which the Soviet Union has in putting an end to the arms race”. Nato’s “warmongering generals”, he argued, ridiculed this objective.
The “fantastic sums” being poured into researching new missiles should instead be diverted into projects that would benefit mankind such as technology to develop solar, tidal and wind energy. On this occasion MacBride’s award was greeted with less enthusiasm, being seen as a dubious prize for an international human rights activist.
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The Lenin committee, however, lauded him as “the outstanding statesman” of Ireland, whose career should be seen as “a brilliant example of selfless service to noble ideals of peace and progress”. The Russians here had conveniently forgotten about MacBride’s “anti-communist” tenure as minister for external affairs.
In 1947, blocking Ireland’s bid to join the UN, a Soviet spokesman stated that de Valera’s Ireland and Salazar’s Portugal could not be regarded as “peace-loving” because they had – by upholding neutrality – “supported fascism” during the recent World War. He also contended that they maintained “particularly friendly relationships with Franco’s Spain, the last offshoot of fascism in Europe”.
The same year, having made his name as a lawyer defending former comrades in the IRA, the new “republican” party led by MacBride, Clann na Poblachta, threatened Fianna Fáil’s dominance by winning two byelections. It then won 10 seats in the “put them out” election of 1948.
With Fine Gael’s John A Costello as taoiseach, MacBride became minister for external affairs in a five-party government whose first act was to send a telegram to the pope desiring “to repose at the feet of your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and devotion to your August Person”. In doing this the Cabinet overruled the objection of the secretary of the taoiseach’s department that such wording was inappropriate for a sovereign government. MacBride then got involved in the Italian general election.
Amid fears that a communist/socialist alliance would win – the Irish ambassador to the Vatican feared this contest amounted to “a fight for western civilisation” – the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, made a radio appeal for money to combat the left in Italy. Other bishops followed suit and more than £60,000, a considerable sum, helped to fund the Christian Democrats.
MacBride facilitated the transfer of this collection through diplomatic channels, which may have proved more useful than the prayers of schoolchildren in Dublin. Neither the Vatican, nor McQuaid, were pleased when Ireland – a Catholic state in their eyes – did not join Nato. MacBride rejected the Americans’ invitation to become a member of the alliance in 1949, not because he was unenthusiastic about US efforts to contain Soviet expansionism but because Nato membership necessitated recognition of partition.
MacBride’s political career in Ireland never recovered from the “mother and child” debacle in 1951 when the government meekly agreed with the Catholic bishops’ opposition to Noël Browne’s healthcare reform. Browne, who believed that his Cabinet colleagues had submitted to Rome, resigned. He was re-elected as an Independent in the general election two months later, whereas MacBride, who topped the poll three years earlier, scraped in on the last count. Clann na Poblachta returned just two TDs.
Having resumed his legal practice, MacBride lost his Dáil seat in 1957. Over the course of the next decade he became a familiar figure on the international scene, playing an important role in Amnesty International and becoming secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, based in Geneva. When he took on his responsibility for Namibia in 1973, he became an assistant secretary general of the UN.
In 1989, one year after MacBride’s death, as the two superpowers engaged meaningfully to cool tensions, the “delighted” taoiseach, Charlie Haughey, welcomed the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to Ireland. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War came to an end, and with it the geopolitical certainties of that period.
We now live in a more uncertain world, where threats have been made to use nuclear missiles. As the Nobel committee pointed out this year, the “taboo” against their use has come “under pressure” in ongoing warfare – in Ukraine, for example. The possibility of facing “the indescribable” is greater than ever.