TWENTY YEARS ago I was as familiar with the dusty streets of Darfur's most westerly town, El Geneina, as any member of the newly deployed UN "blue helmets" might be now after a couple of weeks on the ground, writes Denis McClean
It's not a big place and a desert runs through it.
During that first sojourn in Africa as a volunteer with Goal, I thought Darfur was one of the most God-forsaken places on earth with all the peace and solitude of a Leitrim bog on All Souls' Night.
That's a slight exaggeration. El Geneina does sit astride one of Africa's last great nomadic trading routes. The calm was occasionally disturbed by banditry and lawlessness in the desert at night. And by skirmishes between the Chadian and Libyan armed forces which sometimes spilled across the Sudanese border.
Nonetheless, it seemed a world removed from the appalling death, destruction and slavery visited on the African population further south in Sudan by the forerunners of the Janjaweed who operated under licence from Khartoum, to terrorise the African ethnic minorities who generally supported the Sudan People's Liberation Army. A precarious peace still holds in the south, while Darfur now suffers.
The closest I ever came to bearing witness to war as murder-by-proxy was viewing the burnt-out train carriages which remained in place some weeks after a notorious episode in which some 200 African Sudanese fleeing to safety were locked in and burnt alive by a raiding party supported by the local population.
Two of us had been driving a newly arrived Goal vehicle for three days across the desert from Khartoum when we stopped near the site, south of Nyala, to buy food. The hard looks we received were confirmation enough that there was not much to be gained by asking too many questions about "the train crash".
There seemed little reason to believe at the time that such terror tactics would ever be deployed further west against the population of Darfur. The ambience of El Geneina was convivial. It was pleasant to walk barefoot through the sandy vegetable gardens on the banks of the great wadi. We ate goat or chicken every night in the tiny market. We could quench our thirst on a Friday by crossing the border into Chad to taste the beer outlawed in Sudan.
I was the most unqualified aid worker in the world and my days in El Geneina were spent acting as a kind of major-domo to the Goal nurses and doctors who fanned out into the villages of an area the size of France on a mission that I still find mind-boggling today.
Never more than about 20 or 30 strong and augmented by a similar number of local staff, Goal sought to introduce basic mother and child health services, to train traditional birth attendants and to fight female circumcision in many of the villages which have now been burned to the ground, their inhabitants murdered or scattered.
The ambition of Goal's Darfur initiative after the great Sahel famine of the mid-1980s reminds me now of that scene at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidwhere the two unsuspecting outlaws confidently move to blast their way to freedom only to find themselves completely outgunned.
The human whirlwind that is John O'Shea, the founder and CEO of Goal, can often barely recall what he was doing 20 minutes ago, not to mention 20 years ago, but I can still remember the first words he barked at me when I joined the Irish Press newsroom in 1982: "Where's your fiver for Goal this month?" A mad lunatic indeed, as Bob Geldof affectionately described him on the occasion of Goal's recent 30th anniversary.
The Irish Press had more than its share of colourful characters, none more so than those who constructed the back page of the Evening Presswhere John's scoops, alongside Con Houlihan's incantations, often made it a glorious thing to behold for sports fans.
One could only pity O'Shea's rivals trying to keep up with his daily output of exclusives harvested early in the morning. The copy kept flowing as much out of his contacts' respect for his own sporting prowess (magnified by John whenever he thought it necessary), as out of his inability to get his head around the meaning of the words "no comment" or anything resembling an expletive unless uttered by himself. Useful training for anyone who wants to become CEO of a large NGO!
The back page out of the way, John could devote himself to saving the world at the expense of the de Valera family who provided the working environment in which an organisation which has spent almost half a billion euro on behalf of the poorest of the poor over the last 30 years, could take off in its early days without having to worry about international phone charges or paying the boss a salary.
Recognition is starting to trickle in. The Open University recently gave him an honorary degree of Doctor of the University. The citation reads in part: "he brings to the world of international relations and aid the fiery rhetoric of a street preacher. . . He says openly that western aid ought not to be channelled through governments that are proven to be either corrupt or brutal - and he is happy to name those regimes."
His beloved Westport threw him a civic reception on March 27th as the town hosted the 10th Annual Mayo Goal Golf Classic, which he had to sit out due to a dodgy knee. Soon he leaves for the US where a major university will bestow another doctorate on him. There's also some chance that the long-awaited biography might appear in the not too-distant future.
Is it reasonably safe to assume that no other aid agency will be founded and run from the sports desk of an evening newspaper, in Dublin or anywhere else? Even if the de Valeras could not save the Irish Press, let's give them some credit for enterprise development. Happy birthday, Goal.