Courtney McGrailAengus Finucane: In the Heart of Concern
by Deirdre Purcell
(New Island hb, €24.99)
Tony Farmar
Aengus Finucane was clearly a larger-than-life character. His life’s work, with his quieter but just as effective brother Jack, was Concern, the great third-world charity they did so much to develop.
Born in Limerick in 1932 and 1937 respectively, the two brothers went into the mission-oriented Spiritan order (familiarly known in Ireland as the Holy Ghosts) in the years just before and after the second Vatican Council.
The leaders of the order at this time were not inspired: they were slow to react to the Vatican Council, and summer vacation tuition to men who were destined to run huge mission parishes consisted of extra Irish classes (so useful in Nigeria or Sierra Leone), rather than instruction in building or car maintenance.
Leaving
From the 1850s, literally thousands of idealistic men and women left Ireland to bring the Christian message, combined with medical and educational services, notably to Africa, but around the world, from China to Peru.
Many left in their early 20s, perhaps never to return. In the countries to which they were curtly assigned (often without any input from themselves) they frequently showed creative powers of leadership and initiative that frankly Ireland itself could have done with, in the troubled, constrained and repressive years between 1925 and 1965.
In writing the life of this charismatic character, Deirdre Purcell was severely handicapped by the fact that Aengus’ personal archive was, by tragic mistake, destroyed. (His contemporary Dick Quinn points out, however, that given his formation, it is unlikely that the papers would have revealed anything at all about his inner life.)
So the author made a virtue of necessity and interviewed as many people as possible who knew him. The result is a fascinating kaleidoscope of ideas and opinions about Aengus and his milieu. His brother Jack, of course, looms large, but so too do other key players in Concern.
Perhaps the best known story nowadays is of the early days of Concern and the missionary priests and nuns, including Aengus and Jack, who became caught up in theNigerian Civil War of 1967-70. When the war broke out in 1967 there were some 700 in the rebel area, and two or three times as many in the territories of the Federal government.
The dramatic tales of the night supply flights and the hectic distribution of food to the starving Biafrans are well covered here.
When the war was over, there was a lull as literally hundreds of Spiritans came back to Ireland crying ‘give us a job’. As chance would have it more or less at this time Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, and a whole new field was opened for Concern and the two Finucane brothers.
By this account, Aengus spent the best years of his life in Bangladesh, before going to Thailand and Uganda and eventually returning to head up Concern in Dublin.
Here his leadership drove the organisation to new heights. He was not a man to spend time on development theory: his constant simple cry was “what’s in it for the poorest of the poor?”
His objective was to harness the “youthful and skilled idealism and optimism”, as he put it, of the Irish to the betterment of the poorest peoples of the world, particularly those who had suffered some recent crisis or disaster. The extraordinary work of Concern in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, largely led by Jack Finucane, brought the organisation to world notice. And then there were Somalia, Rwanda and Sudan, to name only the most harrowing areas of Concern’s involvement.
Throughout the book we get glimpses through different eyes of Aengus as a much-loved, even revered, leader, autocratic certainly, courageous, compassionate, ebullient, and forceful, with a distressing tendency not to want to go to bed before the early hours (solution? surreptitiously put his watch two hours on, so everyone could get some sleep). This is a fine book about an inspiring man.
Tony Farmar is a social historian and publisher. His history of Concern Believing in Action was published in 2002.
