FOR all the intensity of human experience, our memories are alarmingly short. Seemingly earthshaking events are forgotten in a few years, whole traditions within decades. Take Biafra, for example; now just a dim memory for most of us, with vague links to Africa, conflict and hunger. But for a whole generation of missionary priests and aid workers, the civil war and famine that broke out when Biafra seceded from Nigeria in the late 1960s stand even today as a defining experience.
Few were unmoved by the suffering they witnessed, or the indifference of the great powers to the catastrophe that unfolded. Biafra radicalised a generation of missionary clerics and catapulted sleepy Ireland into the maelstrom of global human suffering. Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia had the television cameras, but Biafra's famine was the daddy of them all.
Back in 1968, Aengus Finucane was one of those young priests in the thick of great events. In his parish at Uli, the one good road was converted into an airstrip. Up to 40 flights a night ferried in much needed relief supplies under cover of darkness, where they were hurriedly unloaded by Finucane and his parishioners.
By day the airfield was bombed by the Nigerian air force, but each evening the damage was repaired. "Uli was bombed every day but the Biafrans were lined up in the forest with truckloads of gravel and as soon as darkness came there was massive movement and bulldozers moved in to fill the holes in the runway," he recalls.
"The Irish government wasn't at all pleased, as the recently released State papers for the period showed. Our actions were seen as jeopardising trade relations with Lagos, where Guinness had a big brewery.
Biafra made the world a smaller place. Here were priests - of all people - standing up to international authority and siding with the people they were ministering to. Ordinary Irish people realised, perhaps for the first time, that this country could - and should - help in emergencies in distant lands.
THE result was the formation in 1968 of Africa Concern, a motley collection of Catholic and Methodist missionaries, lay workers and others who came together to charter a ship to bring emergency supplies to Biafra.
Today, that organisation's successor, Concern Worldwide, is Ireland's hidden multinational a world leader in the business of emergency relief and development. More than 5,000 expatriate and local staff work for Concern in 13 different countries, and the annual budget runs up to £30 million in busy years.
The former parish priest in Uli has been chief executive of Concern for over 17 years, but now "Gus" Finucane stands on the brink of retirement. Although Concern has always been a non denominational organisation, it will be hard to imagine it - without the bluff Limerick priest at the helm, assisted by his brother and fellow Holy Ghost father, Jack.
The next chief executive will be a lay person, possibly someone from the private sector with more interest in the bottom line than in Biafra.
The traces of regret and foreboding are not hard to detect when talking to Finucane in his office at Concern's headquarters in Dublin. This month, he should be celebrating the completion of a glorious and fulfilling career in the service of the poor. Instead, there is a touch of the wake to his departure.
Like the view from his office over the building sites at the top of Camden Street, the external environment is changing rapidly. Vocations for the missions have long since dried up. Most of the missionary priests are, as he says, "either gone to their graves or fading fast".
Back in the 1960s there were more than 750 Irish missionaries in eastern Nigeria alone; today their number could be counted on two hands.
The decline of the church, has been, well signalled but, as Finucane points out, it has been accompanied by a less well heralded, slump in numbers of Irish people volunteering to work abroad.
"When I was field director in Bangladesh in the mid 1970s I had over 60 volunteers from Ireland. We haven't that number of volunteers in total, everywhere, now. Who would have thought, he asks sardonically, that the "wealthier, well travelled Irish" of today would show less interest in working in the Third World than earlier generations?
There are other reasons for the drop, such as the increasing desire of developing countries to take over the running of projects. "But whatever the causes, I would be concerned about the trend. Non governmental organisations are a very important voice and that voice is not going to stay strong unless they continue to have a presence and a living experience of developing countries."
And then there are the faded hopes of a better world. Finucane arrived in Nigeria in 1960, within months of independence: "It was such a hopeful time for Africa, full of enthusiasm and optimism." Today, Nigeria has gone through a thousand fortunes in oil revenues and stands corrupt, chaotic and collapsing, a testament to bad management and bad luck. Its story is repeated all over Africa. "It hasn't been all bad, only so much worse than we hoped for.
IN Ireland, too, the ground has been pulled from under the clergy. In his travels, Finucane is constantly having to relay the bad news of scandals and spats in the home church to Irish missionaries in far flung parts of the world. Yet his faith still burns brightly.
"I found the events of recent years most distressing. It made me wonder how gullible and naive we all were." However, he questions whether the "complete picture is emerging, especially in relation to the allegations of brutality and severity by the religious orders.
"Things have been taken out of the context of the time in which they happened. After all, a cane hanging by the door was a normal part of the kitchen equipment in the Ireland of the 1940s. What would have happened to the children in Goldenbridge if the nuns weren't there to care for them? Why aren't people talking about the parents who abandoned them in the first place?"
He is scornful of the abuse heaped on his colleagues at home and goes to particular lengths to defend his former mentors, the Christian Brothers, against what he sees as unwarranted criticism.
"The hand that has fed is often bitten, as with the maligning of the Christian Brothers. Yet they pulled Ireland up by the bootstrings when we had nothing else."
Finucane clearly belongs to the liberal wing of the Irish Catholic church. He tends to don clerical garb only when he feels it is expected of him: among Irish Americans, for example. He is strongly in favour of women priests and bishops. "Put it this way: if I were a woman, and particularly a black woman, I would be angry all the time." As for married priests, he isn't quite ready to walk that gangplank, but he says an end to priestly celibacy is "inevitable".
The current Pope's unyielding opposition to birth control leaves Finucane unimpressed. In his office he carries a large photograph of a teeming street scene in Calcutta, which he shows to anyone who raises the population issue. "I tell them that if any further papal encyclicals are to be written on the subject, they should be prepared on the pavements of Calcutta. That would give a different perspective from Castel Gandalfo." Yet he still maintains that "education is the best form of birth control".
Finucane was a "Eucharist Congress baby" born in 1932 who grew up in a Limerick that produced poverty and priests above anything else. He came, from a middle class background - his father was a company secretary - but voluntary work with the St Vincent de Paul gave him an insight into how the other half lived. There were plenty of priestly uncles about, so it was a natural step to join the missions, and by 1960 he was in Nigeria.
Limerick also gave him a passion for hurling and rugby that thrives to this day. Finucane is very much the avuncular priest, firm but friendly, with a fine repertoire of stories and the odd song. In his office, he skips lunch in favour of a low calorie soup, patting an all too evident gut by way of explanation.
The office is dominated by a huge map of the world, few parts of which he has not visited. But there are also other, more poignant mementoes such as the copy of a poem by an American nun who died working with Concern in Bangladesh in 1972. Beside it is a photograph of Valerie Place, a 23 year old Concern volunteer who was shot in Somalia in 1993.
Finucane, who took the picture the day before her death, was travelling in the car in front when the ambush happened. At other times, he has been attacked, bombed, mugged, as well as suffering serious bouts of typhoid and malaria, but somehow seems to have come through relatively unscathed. Asked how he survived the rough and tumble, he raises his large hands and laughs: "I was always big, the difference between then and now was that I was fit."
Bangladesh, where he spent six years in the 1970s, retains a special place in his affections. Here it was possible to "make a difference"; if the world hears little of Bangladesh these days, it is because Concern and other agencies have helped to alleviate the worst problems of food shortages. Yet 25 years on, Finucane can still recall the stench of the vagrants' shelters he visited, "where people were kept worse than cattle".
A stint in the refugee camps in Thailand followed. Another eye opener, where plentiful resources were squandered by incompetent UN bureaucrats and squabbling refugees. "There is a lot of cock eyed thinking about dealing with refugees, about how they behave towards one another as though the normal laws of society ceased applying and they all help each other. In the camps, you had doctors charging their patients, getting all the supplies at the front door, and selling them at the back door.
"I mean, the poor screw the poor as much as they can - the only time they don't is when they can't."
In Uganda, he witnessed at first hand the scourge of AIDS, the newest disaster to befall Africa. Up to 40 per cent of mothers in some parts of Uganda are HIV positive, and whole generations of skilled workers have died prematurely.
If he thought his globetrotting days would cease when he took the desk job as chief executive of Concern in 1981, it hasn't turned out that way. The accelerating pace of disasters in the 1980s took Finucane from one blackspot to another, providing him with more fodder for nightmares than he cares to think about.
In Rwanda, for example, he entered the country shortly after the genocide in 1994 to see "the dead bodies of victims floating down the river, their hands tied together, some of them decapitated and abused in every way".
"In other places, it was Muslims killing Jews, or Muslims killing Muslims, but here you're into Catholics killing Catholics - in the church - with pictures of the papal visit on the walls. Then you go into the prison and they point out the priests and nuns who were involved. You kinda wonder what it's all about."
Asked what he feels is his mission in Finucane quotes the Indian poet, Tagore: "Build bridges by your lives across ping world blasted by hatred" But he thinks of himself as "a practical person. If I'm an idealist I'm one very much with my feet on the ground and a feel for the people".
In keeping with this philosophy, he leads with his heart and follows with his head. It is clear, by his references to the "bureaucrats, with their targets and five year plans": that he thinks many in the new generation of development specialists have wrongly reversed these roles.
"We have different standards about how, we judge things at home and how we judge: them overseas. A lot of trouble with development agencies has to do with them trying to live out things overseas they wouldn't try at home and coming up with unreal approaches to real situations.
URBAN poverty, he predicts, will be the greatest problem of the new century. "I saw the beginning of the problem in Bangladesh 25 years ago. The same escalation of urban slums and misery is happening all over Africa, with a corresponding reduction in food production and increased dependence.
The problem is being made more acute by the debt repayment crisis in many countries: "In order to pay the debt, you have to grow cash crops by doing what was done during the Irish Famine. You shove the people off the land and you grow, crops which make money. All over Africa, people are being pushed off the land and are drifting into urban environments where there is nothing for them.
"Donors should be more honest by giving things which hurt, such as free access to, markets, instead of loans to buy arms which are then used to kill people," he suggests. "Africa is awash with sophisticated weapons purchased with soft loans."
Retirement will not mean a total break from Concern, as he plans to stay on as a fundraiser, particularly in North America. Already, the date of his departure has been put back from April to June while the search for a successor goes on and it is apparent that he would gladly stay on even, longer if be could.
