I keep a rubber bullet in my writing room. It stands, phallic and quietly ugly, on the window-sill, a dark memento picked up by my father from a Belfast street years ago. Over it, you can see on a good day the spread of the city of Galway, the light bruising of Galway Bay and the low hills of Co Clare.
A similar collision of images, of dark and light, takes place in an elegant dining-room near Oughterard in Connemara. There has been a brief interlude of warmth and sunlight in the apocalyptic horror of recent West of Ireland weather; now, in front of the house, stretches a reaped field of Van Gogh yellow towards gently shaded hills of green and grey. Under the blind gaze of African statuary, wonderful Cyprus goat's cheese, grilled, is passed around a cultured room, and a jolly, get-up-and-go woman, everyone's favourite American aunt home for the summer, is describing for me how a tattooed man skipped to a death-chamber, winking at her through the glass as he was strapped into the electric chair.
There are poets in other rooms, quiet-spoken, polite academics moving here and there, neighbours dropping in. Marvellous odours of grilled cooking waft down the picture-walled corridor.
Honorary doctorate
Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, has just been to Galway university, on her first trip to the West of Ireland, to receive an honorary doctorate. She has quite a number of them. She enjoys Guinness in Ireland. She relaxes by playing saxophone. She is sipping a glass of wine now. She does not resemble Susan Sarandon, who played her in the Oscar-winning 1996 film of her novel Dead Man Walking. Two years ago, an operatic version of the story sold out in San Francisco. Now the opera's off to Australia.
The condemned man played in the film by Sean Penn was a composite of men Helen Prejean met on Death Row. The first man she visited was Patrick Sonnier, convicted for killing two teenagers, who died in Angola State Prison, in Sister Helen's native Louisiana. She was born there in 1938 in Baton Rouge and joined the Sisters of St Joseph of Medaille 20 years later.
In these elegant rooms, she is the guest of Prof William ("Bill") Schabas, himself the author of works on the death penalty and chief of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway, and his wife Penelope. Schabas, in a plastic apron, is looking after the food. "Bill's work is so excellent," says Sister Helen. "He's one of the most knowledgable people in the world about human rights. I respect him a lot."
There's more "pomp and circumstance, more ritual," to the doctorate ceremonies here than in the US, remarks Sister Prejean, who has watched the hideous ritual and pomp of state executions. Her first honorary doctorate on this side of the Atlantic was given at Glasgow, where rights activists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass once spoke. That has been the pattern, she says: rights causes heralded in Europe, then adopted in the US - a dynamic she describes as "almost like following the thermal currents, or the Gulf Stream".
She speaks of US anti-terrorism policy since September 11th. "The death penalty can really be seen as a paradigm of military solution to social problem. You target an enemy, you dehumanise him and you terminate him. Terrorists hit New York, OK? Target: Osama Bin Laden. What do we do? Bomb Al Quaeda in Afghanistan. . . .here he is in the crosshairs: 'Get Osama!' You had our President saying, 'Osama - dead or alive!' Now they don't even mention his name. And, I read in the Seattle Times about two weeks ago, that higher-ups in the CIA, the Pentagon, on condition of anonymity, are saying we have complicated things immeasurably."
Death Row inmates
While working in the impoverished St Thomas parish in New Orleans, she was asked to write a letter to Patrick Sonnier, whom she refers to as Pat. At first, she wasn't prepared for his replying, nor for her visit - with its intimidating body-searches and Dante-esque clanging gates - and the subsequent change in the direction of her life. She has visited and counselled five Death Row inmates, seeing them all die.
It was a strange journey for this Catholic nun. "Then I realised that the gospels of Jesus are very subversive." After Sonnier she never wanted to turn back: she is currently working with her sixth condemned man.
When, in 1982, she wrote her first letter to Angola, no one had been executed in Louisiana for nearly 20 years. An unofficial moratorium on the death penalty existed in most US states. The majority of Americans were against the death penalty.
"And then, boom! Things changed quickly. The crime rate escalates, the politicians pick it up, feed it back to the people: 'We need to be tough on crime.' Boom! we're off and runnin'." Sonnier, unlike many inmates, didn't try to con her or ask her for things. Then she was struck by the realisation that he was alone, condemned.
The humanity of Sonnier's face shocked her. She talks of how people are offered images of human monsters, something "other": "That makes it easier to kill people." District attorneys, politicians, use words such as "vermin", phrases like "not fit to live among us." This combines with the genuine outrage people feel over crimes, an outrage she considers is not at all to be dismissed.
Selective outrage
"Our society feels outrage selectively. . . eight out of every people on Death Row in the United States are there because they killed white people." Helen Prejean quotes figures, talks about political symbolism. At the UN Convention on Human Rights in 1998, the United States voted with Iraq, Iran, China and Pakistan in favour of the death penalty. She was there. The acutely uncomfortable US delegates wouldn't talk to her. Sister Prejean has involved herself in other human rights issues such as poverty, and women and the Catholic Church, an organisation that has altered its view on the death penalty.
Sitting in those death rooms, did she ever have a doubt? Looking at Patrick Sonnier, she had said to herself: "No matter what he has done, he's worth more than this one act of his life." She saw the transcendent in him, she says. Helen Prejean has a strong sense of herself as a witness sees the book, film and opera, as means of projecting that "journey" and "witness" - words she uses often.
Helen Prejean is bubblingly full of life, optimism, a sort of holy energy. She has heard of rights and race problems among communities in Ireland; one of the sisters she works with is Irish. We talk of Travellers and of the Irishman Colin Martin, rotting in a Thai jail. But she is no starry-eyed idealist who believes societies can be made perfect.
I mention the rubber bullet in my room. It's there for a reason, says Sister Helen Prejean.