There was suitably noble talk of ideas and aspirations as well as a number of light notes when Amnesty International celebrated a new book of poetry, Human Rights Have No Borders, at the Mansion House on Monday evening. One of the book's editors, Kenneth Morgan, was MC for the night, thanking the many poets who got involved in the project and explaining a little about the book. Fittingly, it was put together by Amnesty's Rathgar branch, which at 35-years-old is the oldest in Ireland, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Rathgar branch, said Morgan, is exclusively female: "Except me of course, but I rather hoped that was self-evident. I enjoy living dangerously." They are also rather a good example of international co-operation themselves, as the members are from England, the Netherlands, France, the US and Germany, and Morgan says they compete over who has the strangest accent.
The gathering was also addressed by Senator David Norris, no mean campaigner for human rights himself, who described the power of poetry with an anecdote about his own trip to East Timor, where a poem given to him by Bono attracted attention and got him out of a fix. Mary Lawlor, director of Amnesty International, and the artist Louis le Brocquy also spoke.
Guests at the Mansion House on Monday included poets Gerald Dawe, Anne Haverty, Anthony Cronin, Leo Cullen, Mary O'Malley and Theo Dorgan, director of Poetry Ireland, who is putting together a new books programme, Imprint, for the new year with director Bob Collins (not the director general of RTE, before you all write in).
The book itself is what one might call a "highly presentable gift" and a darn good read, even if there was a rather unfortunate (and subsequently remedied) incident with Richard Murphy's poem, Anne Haverty's introduction and a shredding machine.