Moving Towards the Light: Meeting the challenges of conflict and climate.
Registration is free but donations are important to help us maintain our independent activism, campaigning and development education work. Donate upon registration , at www.afri.ie/donate and/or consider us in your future fundraising plans.
Event host: Ruairí McKiernan, author and activist
Line-up:
- Lighting the Flame: Rita Minehan, co-founder of Solas Bhríde Centre and Hermitages
- Our Climate on Fire: Ciara Murphy, Environmental Policy Advocate at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice
- A Vivid Spark: The Downpatrick Declaration, John Maguire, retired professor of Sociology in UCC
- From Darkness into Light: Richard Moore, founder of Children in Crossfire, blinded by a rubber bullet in Derry as a child, , whom the Dalai Lama describes as his hero
- The Fire and the Light: Abjata Khalif, freelance journalist and a development worker from Kenya and Chair of the Kenya Pastoralist Journalist Network
- Sharing the Light of Peace: Mairéad Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate
- Music by Tommy Sands, legendary County Down folk singer
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For the second year in succession we will be unable to gather in the beautiful Solas Bhríde Centre in Kildare for our annual Féile Bríde event. We will miss the warmth and welcome that are such a feature of Solas Bhride, but we will come together online instead to celebrate this wonderful festival of Brigid.
Moving towards the light: meeting the challenges of conflict and climate is the theme of this year’s event. We are inspired by the way in which so many young people, especially, have taken up the challenge of tackling the climate issue and are demanding action from governments that will put care for our planet central to everything we do.
As we mark Féile Bríde 2022, we are mindful of the tragic death of Ashling Murphy in Tullamore for whom our hearts are heavy. We remember all who experience violence, in whatever form; we must do all that we can do to challenge the culture of violence. As a society we must redefine the meaning of maleness – where the characteristics of aggression and dominance are replaced with the values of kindness, strength and compassion, values espoused by Brigid of Kildare.
We will also examine the wider issue of violence and war and how it affects people – especially in the global South. Four decades ago, at Afri’s first ever conference in Sean MacDermott St in 1982, the great peace activist Richard McSorley asked, ‘how can governments condemn individual acts of violence when they threaten violence daily through war and the weapons industry?’.
And it is a great tragedy that our own Government is now actively promoting the arms industry, as demonstrated by an online seminar hosted by the government in Nov. 2021, which explicitly sought to identify and promote opportunities for Irish companies to work with and join global armaments producers. This is a new departure for an Irish government – but it is not yet set in stone. We call on the Government urgently to reconsider and reverse this misguided initiative.
And, as St. Brigid’s Day is to become a public holiday from 2023, we will work to ensure that her message of peace, her ‘selling her father’s sword to buy food for a poor person’ remains a central image and a central message.
We look forward to seeing you on February 5th.
Joe and the team at Afri
www.afri.ie
