Former President Mary Robinson has said a new biography of former Concern chief executive Aengus Finucane “brings back very special memories” of her trips to Somalia and Rwanda during the 1990s.
Aengus Finucane: In the heart of Concern by Deirdre Purcell was launched by Ms Robinson in Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dublin tonight.
Ms Robinson’s 1992 visit to Somalia brought the famine and war there to international attention after she said she was “ashamed” of the world’s indifference to the plight of the starving Somalis.
“It brings back very special memories for me, going to Somalia in 1992, going to Tanzania first and then to Rwanda, and indeed more recently going back to Somalia in 2011,” she told a crowd of about 100 people.
The biography explores the life and work of Fr Finucane, who was one of the key figures in the history of the aid agency Concern, turning it from a small charity into an “international phenomenon”. He died in 2009.
Ms Robinson said Fr Finucane “was a larger than life character who lit up the room when he came in”.
“On October 6th, 2009, I happened to be in Malawi,” she said “I was there for the opening of a maternity clinic with the then deputy president Joyce Banda. There was an Irish Aid reception that evening and the word came through that Aengus had passed away.
“I can’t tell you – you know the way you remember certain events – to remember that crowd that evening. It was quite a large crowd and everyone was in tears. It was very hard to speak actually, because there was such a sense of loss and pride mixed up.
“Pride in who he was and what he had done, and a huge sense of loss that we wouldn’t see and hear him again – that somehow he would not be with us.”
