Tom Hyland vividly recalls the night a television programme he didn't intend to watch changed his life. It was six years ago and Hyland was sitting with friends in his Ballyfermot home when a neighbour, who didn't have piped television, called and asked to watch a Yorkshire Television First Tuesday documentary about East Timor.
"I said `keep it down low' because I had no interest in things like that. I'd never even heard the words `East Timor' before." But when Olivia O'Leary introduced the programme by referring to "16 years of continuing atrocities" he was suddenly interested.
"I was struck by that - 16 years. We're supposed to live in a global village but here was a part of the village that didn't seem to get any publicity."
By the end of the programme, which told the story of the Indonesian invasion of 1975, the massacre of a large percentage of the East Timorese population and continuing oppression, Mr Hyland and his friends were sitting in shocked silence. "One of them said `can we do something about this?' I said `there's nothing we can do, we're all unemployed'," he recalls. But the next day the group made enquiries to Amnesty International and Trocaire and were given the number of a campaigner for Indonesian human rights, Carmel Budiardjo, an English woman living in London.
Not having a telephone in his home, the former Dublin Bus driver called Budiardjo from a public phone box on Ballyfermot Road. It was then, in a moment's misunderstanding, that the East Timor-Ireland Solidarity Campaign - which Mr Hyland now co-ordinates - might have been strangled at birth.
"I said I was calling from Dublin and we had seen the programme and wanted to do something. The voice that came back to me was very grand and posh, and said `sorry, I haven't a clue what you said, could you slow down and speak again'."
Mr Hyland was about to hang up the phone in despair, but decided to give it another go, slowly repeating the purpose of his call. "She said something then that has always stayed with me: `Ireland, I was waiting for the call'."
Six years on, four of the six people who watched that programme together in Ballyfermot are still active in what has become one of Ireland's most effective human rights groups.
"We try to raise awareness of what's happening in East Timor," says one of the four, Yvonne Moran. "We organise talks in schools and colleges and community groups, trying to make everybody aware of what's going on." Also fighting to raise awareness of human rights abuses abroad is Co Leitrim-born Valerie Hughes who, like those in the East Timor-Ireland Solidarity Campaign, believes small groups of people can make a difference.
It was while compiling a petition here in 1992 about the systematic rape of Bosnian women during the war in that country that Ms Hughes made the first contacts which led to the formation of Ireland Action for Bosnia, which has now evolved into IrelandKosova Solidarity.
The group is made up of a small number of activists based in various parts of the country. But how do like-minded, committed people meet in the first place?
"There are various ways," says Ms Hughes. "You meet people at protests, you watch the letters pages of The Irish Times, you hear by word of mouth, things like that."
Bernie Dwyer of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which works to highlight the effects of the US economic blockade against Cuba, says there are umbrella groups and a lot of reference points for people to link in to whatever cause they want to promote. "I think the important thing is that people try to educate themselves about the actual issue. But it is possible to do something, it's possible to make a change. There's no use saying `this is terrible and I can't do anything about it'."
People prepared to act on such sentiments may be in the minority, but there is no shortage of small, active groups in Ireland - El Salvador Awareness, Ireland-Brazil Solidarity Group, Irish Mozambique Solidarity and the recently-formed Ireland-Algeria Group, to name only four - who believe we really do live in a global village and can all do something to improve it.