Dumbo Feather – February 2019

which reflects some of the atrocities done here by the British Empire. And some of those

atrocities are atrocious [laughs]. When you look at the famine, you know, 1845 a potato blight

ravaged Europe and arrived in Ireland. Eight million people living in Ireland, there was food

enough to feed us that was being exported the whole way through the famine. The potatoes

failed but there was beef and corn being exported the whole time from Ireland to England,

often by people who were literally dying of starvation. And they did die. ’Cause in three

years a million people died and a million people left. And that is a terrible thing. There are

famine graves all around the place. So the famine is a profound living memory in the Irish

consciousness. When it’s called, “The potato famine,” Irish people sometimes gristle; we

prefer to call it, “Gorta Mór,” the Big Hunger. Because that is a much better description of it.

I don’t believe that there’s any such thing as a natural disaster famine. There’s always policy

and power behind it. There is usually the impetus of something that might be a natural

disaster, a drought, a blight, et cetera, but there are decision-makers behind it who can use

it for their own betterment. So that is all true. And what’s also true is that of the million who

left during that era and continue to leave over the rest of the 1800s, so many of them when

they went to other places—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Jamaica,

Montserrat—participated in the colonial projects and slavery projects as white people.

Discovered that we’re white! So for me there’s courage in looking at the past as well. And not

being satisfied from the point of view of Ireland to just look to the past where we exacerbate

the stories of our victimhood, true as they are. The truth of the reality of Irish suffering is not

eradicated by recognising the truth of the reality of Irish racism that we exported all across

the world. I think when you look at some of the things that are happening now in policies

around the world, in the way that refugees and asylum seekers are being spoken of, leaders

talk of recently arrived peoples (and by that I mean peoples who have arrived somewhere in

the last 300 years, that’s recent) as if they’ve been there for far longer. And they act in a way

that Indigenous people have not. So I think

Yeah.

I think one of the things that religion does

is it provides a gathering story. When it’s

working well. And a gathering story is an

extraordinary thing, whether you believe

it or not. Because it is an attempt to put

narrative around the experience of the

there needs to be courage to name the supremacist

addictions of our people’s pasts in a way that

confronts us with the luxuries “we” as white people

just take for granted now in lots of places we call

the Western world.

I think there’s a lot in Australia’s past that could be really spoken to by that awareness.

There’s just so much unmet and unacknowledged grief about our relationship with

Indigenous people and the massacres that many still refuse to admit occurred. So I really

agree, a courageous act to confront the past in this way. Because if we can’t we’re just

continually locked in opposition of defending our own point of view and demonising the

other. Which, you know, leads us worse and worse down these paths of extremism.

I want to also talk about your work as a theologian. I noticed

you used a beautiful piece of language when talking to

Krista Tippett where you said that religion was something

you’d been both haunted and consoled by. And that really

resonated with me with and made me think of the thing you

say, that we can be both shelter and shadow to one another.

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PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

DUMBO FEATHER