"In the Name of Love"
by Francine Cunningham, MORE, 1993
"Out of the Blue, Into the
Black" by Joe Jackson, Hot Press, 1993
"Irish Aid Convoy Flees
Radiation Fire in Chernobyl" by Diarmuid MacDermot, Cork Examiner,
27 Mar 1996
"The Unforgettable
Fire" by Rosemarie Meleady, The Big Issue, 1998
"The Sweetest Thing"
by Kathy Sheridan, The Irish Times, 4 Nov 2000
"Bono's Wife Takes Nuke
Plant Protest to Blair's Door", Reuters, Apr 2002
"Introductory Address
on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws,
honoris causa, jointly on Ali Hewson and Adi Roche" by Prof.
R. Curtis, National University of Ireland, 29 Jun 2002
"Stream of Consciousness"
by Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 22 Feb 2005
"Bono's Clothing Line
is Not Just About Fashion" by Samantha Critchell, AP, Mar 2005
"You, Too, Can Dress Like a
Rock Star" by Donna Freydkin, USA Today, Mar 2005
"Bono and Ali's Dream
Marriage" by Jon Myles, ca. 2005
"Sit Back and Relax? Bono's
Wife Can't" by Liz Jones, This Is London, 2 Mar 2005
"Ethical Culture"
by Susan Mitchell, 6 Mar 2005
"In the Name
of Love" by Francine Cunningham, MORE, 1993
From the outside, one can only imagine how difficult
it could be to hold on to any sense of your own identity, when married
to one of the most famous men in the world. "I suppose it could
be," says Ali Hewson, wife of U2's Bono. "But I really don't
have a big problem with my own identity, because I am a very private
person, so I've always let Bono take the brunt of anything that was
coming along. He is happy to do that; I am quite happy to make my
own way around things."
Ali Hewson, formerly Alison Stewart, grew up in the
less affluent suburbs of north Dublin and met Bono at school - Mount
Temple interdenominational. He tried to chat her up on her first day
there, but she brushed him away. He pursued her for several years,
using humour as his calling card. The relationship moved slowly, because
she didn't want to become just another of Bono's girls.
After his mother died, it was the more practical Ali
who helped look after the scatter-brained Bono, taking care of the
essential things like food and clothes and house keys. The couple
were married when Ali was 22, at the old Guinness Church of Ireland
in Raheny, Dublin, in August 1982, with U2 bass player Adam Clayton
as best man.
Ali Hewson comes across as open, natural, and sincerely
warm. She is not inclined to make false claims of herself, or pretend
to have any more knowledge than she has. Her smile is frequent, and
often self-deprecating. At the age of 33, she has gained a degree
in social science, politics and sociology, as a mature student, and
now devotes most of her time to her daughters, Jordan and Eve, and
to doing some campaigning work for Greenpeace.
"It is hard, sometimes. I hate being called 'Bono's
wife,' and being identified just as that. I know that people who know
me well enough don't think of me like that. But there are always going
to be others who don't see me as having a separate identity, who just
see us as the one person. At the end of the day, I don't really care
what people think, just so long as I feel strong enough about myself."
Ali is forced to fall back on her own resources a great
deal because her husband is away touring so often. "That is different,
that is a bit harder. Especially when the children get to the stage
that they won't listen to you anymore," she says. "I say,
'I'm going to ring your father, and tell him to give out to you'.
It doesn't work, I'm afraid, with my two, particularly as they have
his character! They are both strong-minded."
It was having children that made Ali Hewson start thinking
about the environment in which they would grow up. She got involved
with Greenpeace, campaigning against the Sellafield nuclear power
plant, 200kms across the Irish Sea, on the northwest coast of Britain.
And to lend strength to the campaign, she agreed to present a powerful
and moving documentary on the effects of the fallout from the Russian
Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Black Wind, White Land, shown recently
on Irish television.
More than 600,000 people were evacuated from the former
Soviet state of Belarus, following the Chernobyl accident, in 1986.
Since then, leukemias and childhood cancers have doubled, genetic
deformities tripled and people of all ages are traumatised. Radiation
levels must be checked before children can be allowed outside to play.
There is talk of young girls being sterilised when they reach puberty,
to reduce the incidence of birth deformities. Already, the birth rate
has dropped by 50%.
Ali and the film crew were, naturally, anxious about
exposing themselves to radiation during their three-week stay in Belarus.
"We were in the exclusion zones, where the radiation was highest.
The main dangers now are dust particles and contaminated food, and
the soil. We just brought along dried food and our own water. But
people wanted to give us food and drink, and look after us. There
was no way that you could say, 'It's okay for you to eat that, but
I'm not going to eat it, thanks very much.' So we did eat and drink
there, and just sort of hoped for the best," says Ali.
Despite her own involvement, she declines responsibility
for U2's recent protest at the imminent opening of a second plant
at Sellafield. "We probably both influence each other, we both
share the same concerns," she says. "I am really frightened
about the second plant at Sellafield opening up. And I don't want
to sit back and let them do it without me protesting, which is all
I can do."
As a wealthy person, she feels she has a responsibility
to do what she can to raise awareness on such issues, if only because
she is not tied to a nine to five job. "I am very privileged
from that point of view. I would not feel right about taking money
for anything I do. It's really nice to be able to get into something
without having to feel I'm financially dependent on it." There
is a set of women married to rich, high profile men, who involve themselves
in charity work. While their work is both worthwhile and commendable,
does Ali ever fear that she will be branded as another one of the
so-called 'Ladies Who Lunch'?
"I can really see where that criticism comes from
- that these people are rich and can go out and raise money for charity,
and feel like they have done something, but never really care. But
I don't think that's justified. People who criticise these women are
probably giving into cynicism, and I think if you get cynical about
life, you lose the real meaning of it. I couldn't allow the fear of
someone saying that about me to stop me from doing what I believe
in," says Ali.
"A lot of these women do really good work, they
are necessary, and they are people who really care. Fair play to them
for putting themselves in a position where they are going to be ridiculed
sometimes for what they are doing. Especially if they are filling
a gap where the government has let people down. They are giving back
and I think that is a good thing. They could sit on their ass and
do nothing if they wanted to. They could go to lunch without raising
money for charity."
Ali Hewson has chosen to live apart as much as possible
from the glittery, celeb-encrusted circuit. "I wasn't raised
for that. I'm from the northside! It's just the way things have fallen
really. I know a lot of people in those circles, who are really good
friends. But it just doesn't seem right for me. It's not where I would
really feel comfortable, I suppose."
She hopes her environmental work will not keep her in
that limelight too long. "I will probably do my best to avoid
that. This is an exception, made for what I thought was a very good
reason. I'm very protective of my kids, and of my life with Bono.
It has worked very well up to now, the sort of life where I can go
out and do all the normal sort of stuff, and he can take all the heat.
I'd like to stay that way. I'd rather work behind the scenes."
She refutes any idea that telling Bono of her experiences
at Belarus may have fed into the mood of his recent compositions.
"Bono is not influenced by me in the slightest!" she laughs.
"We have only had one really good conversation about it since
he became famous. We have seen very little of each other in the last
year and a half. Our communication has been erratic." Is it hard
to keep track of a relationship in those circumstances? "I suppose
we are used to it by now, we have been together for long enough, and
it works for us. I usually find that after a separation, the relationship
jumps a bit; when you get back together, it has moved on.
"It can be really difficult to readjust to having
someone living back in the house. I can't help thinking, 'What are
you doing in my bed?' or 'What are you doing in my bathroom?' or 'Why
are you leaving your clothes all over my house?' Bono always says
that he feels like a bit of litter around the house, that I just want
to tidy him away.
"But apart from the practical adjustments like
that, I usually find that we are much closer together after a separation.
You don't take each other for granted, like you do if you see each
other every day. There is always something new to talk about."
Dealing with the coming down process, after Bono returns
from a major tour, could present difficulties. "Going away to
Belarus for three weeks was quite interesting because I went through
that when I came home. I had never been away on my own like that before,
away from Bono and the kids, working on an independent project. So
I could really understand how he feels when he comes back from a tour,"
says Ali.
"It is very hard for him to come back home and
say, 'Yeah, I'm normal.' He wants to climb on the table at 11 o'clock
every night and try to perform! He's wondering where are the 50,000
people. We sort of laugh at it now."
Does she worry that home life for Bono will seem dull
and boring by comparison? "Well, he never makes me feel like
that, at all," she says.
Occasionally, doesn't Ali wish she had married Joe Bloggs
from north Dublin? "Sometimes, yes, but I have never met Joe
Bloggs! I don't know anyone who is normal - everyone has their own
little quirk. Sometimes I wish life was just a lot simpler. But I
can't imagine Bono in a nine to five job. He would have lost his marbles.
"It would be nice to walk down Grafton Street,
and do lots of of things that we can't do together. But I have kept
my life private, so at least I can still do it." It would be
easy to resent someone coming home and bringing a load of cameras
with them. "Well, it comes with the territory," remarks
Ali. "But we are fortunate - at least the job pays well, so we
can get out of it if we want to. We can go and have a holiday somewhere
away from it all. So it all works out in the end."
Bono will sometimes come home drained after his touring
schedule with U2. "You have get the band aid out, and try to
fix all the bits that are broken. But every relationship goes through
that. It is just a matter of whether it works or not, and if it does,
everything is fine. I think Bono is happy," says Ali, smiling.
"I don't feel threatened. You can live your life
being scared of losing someone, and, at the end of the day, if he
is going to leave you he'll leave you, and that's it," she laughs.
Back to top ^
"Out of the Blue,
Into the Black" by Joe Jackson, Hot Press, 1993
One can safely assume that there aren't many people
who hook into a Bono interview because he happens to be the husband
of Ali Hewson. However, Ali knows that the opposite is probably true.
Likewise, in relation to her involvement in BIack Wind, White Land,
the Dreamchaser documentary on the aftereffects of Chernobyl, which
was screened on RTE this week and will soon be seen on at least 35
television stations worldwide.
Sitting in a hotel in Bray, with her daughter Eve, on
an October Saturday morning, she matter-of-factly accepts that Bono's
status as her husband will undoubtedly inspire a high level of public
interest in her private life - maybe even moreso than her first hand
experience of lives destroyed and families fractured by that accident
at Chernobyl seven years ago. Yet when she sighs and says "it's
all part of the territory" one suspects she's also secretly reflecting
the difficulties involved in being married to one of the world's biggest
rock stars. Is she?
"That's a difficult question to answer," she
says, laughing. "For example, no matter how much Dreamchaser
wanted me to present this documentary, not because I'm Bono's wife
but because they feel I'm right for it, it's still a complication
wrapped up in all of this. But I really don't mind that. I know people
will respond in a voyeuristic way to the programme but I'd hope things
move beyond that level after the first five minutes.
"In that sense, being 'Bono's wife' can be used
to do something good. In terms of interviews, I try, as far as possible,
not to go into that aspect of my life. But I realise that is virtually
impossible. And while I may not like being seen simply as Bono's wife,
it does enable me to get out there and do something like this documentary,
in the sense that I don't have the ties in terms of time and finance
that could have kept someone else from doing it."
Ali accepts that many people will also probably argue
that she got the job of presenting Black Wind... because Bono is her
husband. That argument is fairly annihilated by her obvious gifts
as a presenter, which include a sense of quiet compassion that draws
forth the best from the people she talks with -- particularly children,
and her ability to melt into landscape, if one can appropriately use
such a phrase in this context. She blushes at the suggestion, countering
the praise with a quote from one reviewer who claimed that the documentary
is hugely effective - until Ali speaks. "There were seven of
us on the Dreamchaser team and it was pretty tense at times and we
fought a lot in terms of how each of us felt the documentary should
go," she recalls. "It was shot on film, rather than video,
so we didn't see what we were getting until we came back to Ireland.
But the point of being there was to make the programme, so I really
do believe if I hadn't seemed right for the job or presenting, I wouldn't
have been doing it. And the other side to all this, is that because
I was presenting the programme there probably is more interest being
shown in it than might otherwise be the case."
On the other hand, Ali knows very well that there also
are certain newspapers which would rather give over acres of space
to gossip about her and her husband, than even touch the issues explored
in Black Wind ....
"I understand that this, too, is all part of the
territory but It's really a shame if people just read that kind of
stuff and don't read, say, interviews like this, because than they
couldn't possibly have a balanced view."
"Both kinds of stories are part of what we are,"
she adds, "though some obviously are made up by certain people,
whatever their motives. As a reader, you've got to try to figure out
where a journalist may be coming from, and why, to get between the
lines and find the real truth behind a story. lt's strange for me,
doing interviews at the moment. For years Bono has gone through all
this and I'd say, in terms of reviews or whatever, 'don't read all
that stuff.' He'd tell me, 'l've got to, to have a balanced idea of
what people think'. Now I'm In the same position. But our marriage
Is strong enough to withstand the gossip.
"What I think is more cruel is when these writers
pick on couples that have broken up, who are really vulnerable. And
I just wonder if journalists like that sleep well at night. I really
don't know how they can get out of their beds and go into work and
feel they're doing a worthwhile job."
And yet it's not just gossip columnists who can violate
privacy and be cruel - inadvertently or otherwise. While preparing
my own Bono interview for HOT PRESS earlier this year I did have to
pause and wonder how Ali Hewson would react to hearing her husband
say that he sometimes gets so hooked into the 'hit' from a 50.000
strong audience, while touring, that part of him doesn't want to come
home. Or to admitting that anyone who needs 50.000 people a night
to tell them they're okay is obviously lacking something in terms
of ego.
"This is going to sound terrible, but I never got
around to reading that interview!' says Ali, smiling impishly. "But
I do totally agree with what Bono is saying there. People think he
must have a huge ego but someone else said, probably more accurately,
'I don't know how his ego survives, operating on those levels'. But,
yes, the other side of it is that he does often expect us to suddenly
take the place of 50.000 adoring fans! I often have to say 'I am not
50.000 people, right?' Particularly when he jumps up on the table
at nine in the evening after coming back from a tour and says 'where's
the audience'!"
Ali may be laughing but isn't there also a darker side
to this, where Bono does find it immensely difficult to deal with
the comedown after a tour, when he has to change from MacPhisto back
into AIi's husband, and the father of Jordan and Eve?
"Of course there is,' she says. "Because he
definitely is at such a pitch when he's on tour - like an athlete
in training - that his mind and body Is totally geared to going on
stage, at a particular time every night. He also has 160 people on
tour around him, who are all working towards the same goal, so it's
very hard for him to go straight from that to being back at home.
But, children do bring you back to reality because they have to be
fed every day, and watered, or are just there saying 'daddy, I want
to do this', or whatever. So he has to deal with that pretty quickly.
"In a very minor way, having been in Chernobyl
for three weeks working with seven people towards our own specific
goal, when I came home I really understood what happens to Bono after
a tour. It is an out-of-body experience you have in those setting
and it takes quite a while to readapt. I've always known how it was
for Bono, because he told me, but maybe I wasn't always as sympathetic
as I can be now. And the point is that I was only away for three weeks,
he could be away for two years, touring."
Ali has revealed that often, after Bono does come home
from touring she has to get out those metaphorical band aids for the
man. But what about herself? Doesn't she have similar needs and find
It equally difficult to readapt to these changes?
"Absolutely. When he's away I build up my own life
and then when he comes back I wake up and ask, 'what are you doing
in my house?' she says, laughing. In fact, he often tells me he feels
like a piece of litter that I'm trying to clean up, to get things
back to how they were when he was away! But, seriously, yes, it is
difficult for all of us to readapt to these changes. He had a break
from the tour, when they started doing Zooropa, but that was like
six months in the studio, which sometimes is even harder for us to
deal with.
"When Bono is away and working we know we're not
going to see him and we get the phone calls and it's understood what's
happening. But when he's home, and in the studio fourteen hours a
day, in a way he's still not there with us. Like, I'm getting up to
bring the kids to school and he's just getting in. That's even harder,
because you know he's there and yet you can't really reach him.' So
does all this mean that Ali Hewson often is forced to become father
and mother to Jordan and Eve, a family unit complete unto herself?
"Yes and, actually, that is as hard as it is for
any single parent. But then the difference is that if something goes
completely wrong I can just phone Bono and find, again, that he's
probably one of the best psychologists I know! He knows me really
well and in terms of analyzing whatever I say - no matter how garbled
it may be - he really gets it right and always comes through for me.
So in that sense he, too, is applying the band aid. That's how it
works for us.
"When he's garbled and broken I help put him back
together and he does the same for me. That's why the relationship
works as well as it does."
This belief in the concept of a family, allied to her
love for her own children, if not all children, is a key factor in
terms of Ali Hewson's involvement in the documentary Black Wind White
Land. She has admitted that becoming a mother made her more aware
than ever before of the potentially devastating dangers of nuclear
radiation, a realisation that led her to protest against Sellafield,
and which similarly influenced U2. Now, her abiding memory of the
aftereffects of Chernobyl is how the disaster destroyed the lives
of children.
"They're all ill, weak, with bad diets and immune
systems that are breaking down because of what is known as Chernobyl
AIDS. They also see their parents devastated by the fact that the
children are ill. They see their fathers, who were once farmers, now
trying to become builders in high rise apartments, their grandparents
forced to move away, and their families broken up, often because of
death. So there's no sense of innocence there and that was the most
startling thing I encountered. And it's an image that still haunts
me."
Ail suggests that, for her, these firsthand experiences
were necessary in order to turn the horrors of Chernobyl from a vague
abstraction into tangible fact. Yet does she fear that, as with the
response of many people to comparable horrors in Warrington, Belfast
or wherever, in time the lessons of this memory may fade?
"No," she asserts, emphatically. "Not
for me. I think that when you internalise certain images they stay
with you for life. And the good thing about the documentary is that
it is a filmed record of us being out there. It can't go away. So
either way, I'm not likely to forget what I saw, and experienced."
Some of the most disturbing images in Black Wind ...
are those that feature children born with genetic deformities. Equally
chilling are statistics which suggest that, since the disaster at
Chernobyl, it is now three times more likely that children will be
born in this condition. Thyroid complaints among infants also has
increased by 800% and leukemia and cases of newborn cancer have doubled.
"I was there during the filming of all those children
at that Care Centre and it is a place I want to do more work for,"
Ali says. "There are 70 children there, but there are no facts
and figures that relate directly to that, so all the doctor could
say was 'I can't tell you that these children are a result of Chernobyl,
because there are deformed children in every society. All I will say
is that the figures have increased by three times the amount since
Chernobyl.'
"But we didn't want to focus too much on those
physical deformities because, psychologically and economically, similar
problems have come about there, as a result of Chernobyl. Besides,
the real extent of physical deformities will not be known until the
children who were children at the time of the disaster start to give
birth, because it's their ovaries, and testicles, that have really
been affected."
The economic problems that are facing the people are
savagely highlighted at one point during the documentary when a woman
reveals that, having been relocated following the disaster, she is
expected to live on roughly a $5 State allowance per month. How did
Ali respond to that?
"I could relate to it, of course," she says.
"I didn't come from a poor background but then neither do I come
from a wealthy background. My father struggled really hard and although
I always had what I wanted, I really don't find it very difficult
to identify with the pain of people who are impoverished. I've been
to Ethiopia where, from a material point of view, people have nothing
at all yet linking those people to the people I met in Belarus, was
the faith they had to hold on to, a spirit of defiance. I also could
relate to that."
Ali admits that when she compared the plight of that
woman living on $5 a month allowance to her own privileged base she
was beset by moral doubts.
"That point struck me with the same force in Ethiopia
and Bono and I struggle with this all the time," she says. "I
know that people are bound to say, sarcastically, 'Oh, that we all
had the same problems.' But it is a moral dilemma that both Bono and
I try to work out in our own way."
Not surprisingly, Ali Hewson's experience at Chernobyl
has brought to the fore her awareness of the dangers of Sellafield
and Thorp.
"One of the reasons I went out to Chernobyl was
because I'd listened to all the alarmist theories and had been told
what could happen if there was an accident at Sellafield, and told
what is happening as a result of the legal amount of waste currently
being discharged,' she elaborates.
"But I wanted to see what actually did happen at
Chernobyl. No real reports had come back to us over here. The disaster
happened seven years ago so people seem to have forgotten about it.
It wasn't an issue any more. But one thing I did learn from going
out there is it will be forty years before, magically, we begin to
really see what happened to people as a result of Chernobyl.
"I wanted to see if things are as bad as I'd heard.
They are," she adds. "And when Thorp opens it's going to
be even worse here than it already is. And I really don't understand
how the world's worst nuclear accident could happen seven years ago
and yet the place isn't crawling with scientists trying to figure
out what the negative effects of long-term low-level dosages of radiation
are.
"Anyone who lives 600 kilometres around a nuclear
installation should be concerned. If it happened at Chernobyl, it
can happen anywhere. And the point is that the fallout from the Chernobyl
explosion was carried on the wind, with 70% landing on Belarus. That's
exactly what could happen in relation to Ireland if there was an explosion
in Sellafield. Apart from that there are emissions every day. So if
we're being asked to live with low-level dosages of radiation, why
aren't we being told its effects, why must we take the risks?
Surely the simple answer to that question is the profit
motive. "Of course it is," says Ali. "But the people
of Ireland aren't going to benefit from Sellafield. The only 'benefit'
we get is higher levels of radiation than we would ever get were the
plant not there. There are people being born with Down's Syndrome
and higher numbers of cases of leukaemia on the east coast of Ireland
but the research is not being done into this. No one is saying, 'yes,
we accept that this woman's leukaemia is the result of low-level radiation
dosages from Sellafield.' There is one Irish doctor, a wonderful woman,
Dr. Patricia Sheehan, and she's the one trying to correlate all the
information on Down's Syndrome, but they're just not interested."
One of the most infuriating aspects of Black Wind...
is the way in which it highlights the blind faith the people showed
in their politicians, who basically lied to them about the explosion
and needlessly condemned many to death. Aren't there figures which
show that of the 60,000 people involved in the clean-up operation,
for example, 13,000 are now dead and a further 7,000 have been disabled?
So why does Ali pull back from pointing the finger at politicians,
and suggesting that they should be lobbied on the subject of Sellafield,
etc.
"Although I agree that people should lobby their
politicians and make their position known to the government, the one
thing I love about Greenpeace is that they cut out that middle area
and get right to the heart of the problem,' she says. "And I
think that once you start to deal with politicians you get in to the
area of compromise, of trading-off, of people saying 'you look after
Northern Ireland and we won't mention Sellafield', for example. Politicians
are important in this fight but only if they do their job right in
this context, which many don't. So I've told people that I'm not going
to get involved in politics at that level because I don't want to
get into that area of compromise.
Mightn't better results be achieved if, for example,
a band like U2 threatened to withhold part of their taxes until the
Government acts more decisively on the matter?
"And they might end up in prison!' she says, smiling.
"But I certainly agree in theory with what you're saying. And
if there is someone out there with a good idea in terms of how we
all can act to make the Government move on the matter, then I'm sure
people will listen. Maybe we should chain ourselves to the Dail.
"Certainly something drastic must be done and whatever
it is, I'll be there with them. Because I really believe that putting
children at the kind of risk they're putting them at, on a daily basis,
by opening Thorp, and continuing Sellafield as it is, is complete
madness. More than that it's murder. And I can't think of one politician
who is being as publicly supportive as they should be. That's why
I lack faith in them and don't involve myself at that level."
So, is Black Wind... a one-off or was Ali revealing
something of her future plans when she earlier said she'd like to
do something else for the children with Chernobyl AIDS?
"When I said that I meant I'd like to do something
more private," she explains. "Those children are kept in
that hospital until they are four but then, because the State only
gives a certain level of financial support, they're put in Romanian
asylums, along with adults, where they remain. I want to help that
hospital to try to extend its services until those children are, say,
18 - though many won't live that long. But this documentary probably
was a one-off thing. I don't think I'll be getting involved in making
another documentary unless it's Living With Bono: Black Feet, White
Flag! (laughs)
"Certainly not presenting, though I might do research
or work in some way behind the camera. Mostly because, though I believe
the set-up worked well in this situation, I can imagine someone else,
on seeing 'Bono's wife to do another documentary in another place
of disaster', saying, 'Oh, not her again'. It could lead to the kind
of criticism we spoke about earlier, in terms of wealthy women who
are seen as 'do-gooders.' And, because of that it could damage projects.
"I have very strong, personal feelings about the
issues I get involved in, and if I felt that people could overcome
that potential prejudice, see me as more than that, I'd like to get
involved in something else. But what's most important is that I must
feel that I could carry the project, above and beyond being 'Bono's
wife'.
And what if, at some point later in her life she suddenly
feels a need to define herself in a new context, as women often do
after their children leave home?
"Definitely," she says, laughing. "If
I felt I was in the right position, at the right point in time, I'd
go for something like this. And the point is that presenting a documentary
like BIack Wind, White Land was not something I planned. It just happened.
And it has turned out really well. But right now I'm certainly not
driven by any desire to define myself outside the life I'm living.
I'm very clear about who I am, very strong in relation to who I am.
"And though I may not really like it, I don't have
any huge problem thinking, 'I hope people don't see me as just Bono's
wife and nothing else!' I have really good friends, a great family
and people close to me who know who I am and accept me, as me! So
does Bono. We're definitely two individuals, but we are together at
the same time. We are -- One! (laughs)"
So Ali Hewson isn't one of those stereotypical, complacent,
rock n' roll wives happy to remain in the background while her husband
does whatever he damn well chooses? "You've interviewed Bono,"
she says smiling. "You've had an insight into him and you must
know he wouldn't be with someone he doesn't respect, as is often the
case with those rock 'n' roll marriages you're referring to. And I
am the same. The one thing we have for each other is total respect.
As a result of that we are still together.
"We've known each other since we were kids and
we've been through a lot of stuff at this stage. "Part of it
is that we know how to give each other space. In all these ways, it
is a good relationship and that's why it has survived. It's certainly
not a stereotypical rock'n' roll marriage."
Back to top ^
"Irish Aid
Convoy Flees Radiation Fire in Chernobyl" by Diarmuid MacDermot,
Cork Examiner, 27 Mar 1996
Ali Hewson spoke yesterday of her flight from a deadly
radioactive cloud near Chernobyl.
Ali was with a convoy bringing aid to the victims of
the world's worst ever nuclear accident when fires swept through five
abandoned villages near the nuclear plant.
"Five villages were on fire," she said. "It
sent radiation levels soaring into the atmosphere. The wind was carrying
it south. That's exactly what happened in the first Chernobyl and
it turned around and came back up to the north west."
"We got a speeding ticket on our way out. We got
out of there as fast as we could," she said. "Had the wind
caught up with us we would have been at high risk," she added.
"We couldn't do anything until we got back and then we all had
showers. It's very basic protection what people have out here!- what
we have and that's what we brought with us. We weren't expecting to
go into the exclusion zone or anything, or to be in any particularly
highly contaminated areas on this trip.
"We were just going into where people are living
and where the government permits them to live. We weren't in a highly
contaminated zone but we were close to the exclusion zone.
Ali, perhaps best known as the wife of U2's Bono, was
travelling with Operation Hope III, a mission of mercy carrying 2
million pounds' worth of equipment and medicine for the people of
Belarus and western Russia which suffered some of the worst fallout
from the blast. The convoy, consisting of 34 ambulances, two medical
cars and four trucks packed with aid left Ireland earlier on this
month. The mission was financed by donations from Irish people and
was the latest venture to the Chernobyl area by Ali and the Chernobyl
Children's Project.
The convoy was organised to coincide with the tenth
anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986 while the
power station originally exploded.
The UN has estimated that at least nine million people
were affected in some way by the blast and Ukrainian officials say
that 125,000 have already died.
This week's fires started among dried pines and abandoned
homes in a village six miles from Chernobyl and quickly spread to
the other four villages. Fire-fighters rushed to the scene in an attempt,
to prevent the spread of the deadly radioactive particles.
Back to top ^
"The Unforgettable
Fire" by Rosemarie Meleady, The Big Issue, 1998
Paul Hewson, now known worldwide as `Bono,' the lead
singer with mega-big rock band U2, fell head over heels in love with
the attractive brown-eyed girl the first day she arrived at Mount
Temple Secondary School, Dublin.
At first, Ali played hard to get as she was not going
to be "just one of Paul's girls," but by his 17th birthday
they were going out together. Now married for 16 years, Ali and Bono
have two children, Jordan and Eve.
Ali Hewson is not the typical superstar's wife who lends
her name to any charity that asks. Bono's childhood sweetheart has
successfully kept her world private amidst the status which world
fame brings. 38-year-old Ali, who exudes natural beauty, intelligence
and warm friendliness, is the active working patron of the Chernobyl
Children's Project (CCP). Alongisde CCP founder and presidential candidate,
Adi Roche, Ali has driven the gruelling 2,500-mile journey from Ireland
to Belarus in desperate missions to bring aid to some of the four
million chidren who are chronically ill as a result of the Chernobyl
Nuclear Disaster in 1986.
"I've been out there seven or eight times. The
first time I went (in 1993) I didn't realise what i was going to be
faced with. I don't think anybody did. Seven years on, poeple thought
Chernobyl had gone away and the problem was over."
The eleventh aid convoy to Western Russia will be leaving
Ireland in April, delivering everything from life-saving machines
and ambulances to shoes and toys. Ali will not be accompanying this
convoy.
"I've got two kids and their daddy has been away,
so one of us has to be here."
Ali plans that when husband, Bono returns from his PopMart
world tour she can head out to Belarus in October to do some hands-on
work.
For the first time the convoy is linking with two other
foreign charities, one of them being the Scottish charity Mission
East, Ali explains: "They are going to the Ukraine and we're
providing a truck for them. They were on the (RTE television chat
show) The Pat Kenny Show and they showed some horrific footage of
children being led in for operations without anaesthetics and being
tied down to chairs. It was horrific. I couldn't watch it. Adi is
going with that truck though. to find the place."
Although Ali plays a very active part in CCP, she would
love to be able to do more.
"I don't have a skill. My biggest regret in life
is that I never became a nurse because I'd be able togo out to all
these countries and really help hands-on and really get stuck in."
Although Ali lives in Killiney, Co Dublin and the CCP
office is in Cork, she has figured out a way of still doing continuous
hands-on work.
"I sort of take on unusual cases, like little Yulya
who has a very rare disease called PKU. She's not able to absorb protein
into her body, so she has to have food that has absolutely no protein
in it. If she takes in any protein she could go into a coma."
Ali sourced two companies - one in Spain and the other
in Ireland - who now send a continuous supply of the specially manufactured
food which Yulya needs to survive.
"I also just link inot hospitals and doctors who
can help with different children like for little Alexei, we found
Michael Hurley at Temple Street Hospital (in Dublin)."
Alexei had an operation to remove a tumour from his
eye socket the size of a baseball. It was a really complicated operation
which actually involved completely taking his skull apart and putting
it back together again. He will need further treatment.
"He's a great little fella and really smart,"
says Ali proudly
CCP is on the brink of an international adoption agreement
between Belarus and Ireland which they have been negotiating for the
past two years. This would enable the five children being fostered
in Ireland from Belarus to be adopted by their Irish families.
"I've had little to do with the adoption agreement
really but all the children we have brought in have severe physical
disabilities but are very mentally capable."
CCP wouldn't be encouraging people to contact them in
relation to adoption as they are dealing with children who have very
special needs.
"There are many families who would love to take
a child but there are only certain families who could take the children
with such intense physical disabilities."
Ali continues: "In Belarus, these children, if
they had survived there, would have gone to institution after institution
and would have been totally institutionalised as mentally capable
children just lumped in with children who are mentally incapable of
doing anything. All the children need help but these ones were in
immediate need".
"If we can, we do intend to bring over more severe
cases. Hopefully, the agreement we have been working on for two and
a half years will come through. We will be the first country to have
an adoption agreement with Belarus and then we will be able to take
more children over."
When asked what will the five children's fate be if
the agreement does not come through, she answers definitely: "That's
not going to happen."
I feel that if blood had to be spilt over this, Ali
would be the first in the firing line.
"We won't let that happen. No. We just won't let
that happen. Alexei would have died if he had stayed where he was.
And little Alanna, who is now down in Cork, was in very serious danger.
She had to get iron rods put into her body because she has a degenerative
bone problem and even handling her could break her bones. She's a
very smart and well adjusted kid now."
When Ali was working on the award-winning documentary
`Black Wind, White Land - Living With Chernobyl,' she struck up a
particularly strong bond with Anna, one of the Belarusian children.
She's now her godmother.
"I met Anna during the documentary. She wasjust
nine months old and my own little girl was about 18 months old at
the time. We met her in the children's Number One House, which is
where children who are abandoned because of their disabilities are
kept if they don't have to be in hospital.
"Anna is in the documentary. Both her legs are
short. Both her ears are closed. But she is very alert and she's a
lovely kid and I don't know, I just picked her up and it's just one
of those things where we bonded...And it's incredible now to see her
living down in Bandon with her new family...She's an amazing character
and she's taken over Bandon, I think!"
Being the caring person she is, Ali does find it difficult
to leave the children behind when leaving the orphanages. So did Ali
and Bono ever consider adopting a child?
"We have thought about it. Yes. We have thought
about it strongly with some children from Belarus. It's very hard
going over there and you'll not be able to bring them all home but
you have to be as objective as you can about it. In the end, I decided
that...well, we decided that to take a child with disabilities would
mean constant attention to that one child and it would mean not being
able to work for the project and for all the children.
"And there are so many families who are prepared
to take the children, who can support them and give them the one-to-one
attention. Plus it's difficult for any child to come into our family
because of who their daddy would then be," Ali says with a grin.
"That would be an extra spotlight on them and it's
going to be hard enough on them to adjust and to deal with what they
have to deal wihtout that end of it." Ali continues: "
So for those two reasons, at this stage, I've decided
to keep working with the project in the hope of helping more children
in general."
Back to top ^
"The Sweetest
Thing" by Kathy Sheridan, The Irish Times, 4 Nov 2000
Here's a teaser for the resident malcontent. Guess what
kind of car Ali Hewson drives? Well obviously something so wickedly
hip, so stratospherically beyond the reach of dull plods like ourselves
that it's just embarrassing. So what is it? OK. It's a Volkswagon
Golf. 1991. Diesel. And, eh... it's white.
"I've always driven Golfs; this one runs really
well," Hewson explains brightly. Well, sure, but... "I know
there are people who see their car as an extention of themselves;
they need a car that says a lot about them. But I don't need a car
to confirm my personality. I think this one says a lot about me.
Still, some people just don't get Ali Hewson. Her arrival
at a recent premiere is aid of the Chernobyl Children's Project was
described by one paper as "true Hollywood style", because
"she sneaked in after the lights had gone down and the film had
started".
Wrong, twice. One, she was settled into her cinema
seat well before everyone else because she had been photographed there.
And two, Hewson is no more "Hollywood style" than your most
self-effacing neighbour.
She arrives into the Clarence enveloped in a great black
comfort blanket of a coat, minimally made-up, under-eye shadows induced
by an all-night stint with the baby, so quietly spoken that the resulting
tape is virtually inaudible. The one give-away sign of her status
as the very famous wife of a very famous rock star is that she can
abandon the Golf outside and hand the keys to reception.
She goes back to order tea while explaining why (well,
money's no object) she hasn't hired a night nanny for the youngest
Hewson, now 14 months old. "We have a nanny coming in five days
a week. But the night shifts are mine. I've always believed that they
need a parent there if they wake in the night. With the two girls
it worked beautifully, but this little blighter has other notions."
The little blighter may be suffering from residual colic,
she thinks, but she can't mention his name without a misty grin. She
talks of the girls (now nine and 11) with a similar expression, about
their foibles and wisecracks, their different temperaments, how their
father's occupation affects their lives.
She could be any mother discussing the problems of keeping
three children sane and healthy - until one considers the double-decker
tour bus that slowly trundles past their gates at 3 p.m. every day,
its occupants craning to see in; the fans on eternal vigil outside;
the crowds that mob the family in parts of Europe and the US.
But Hewson has somehow managed to hold on to her roots,
to the need to make a lasting contribution, to being plain nice. Hardly
an obvious candidate for typical rock star spouse? She thiks about
this: "Maybe the fact that I'm not a typical rock star wife is
more a reflection on Bono than on me."
They started dating when they were 15 and 16 at Mount
Temple school in north Dublin. Later she worked in motor insurance
("glamorous, eh?") and with her father in his electrical
business, before hitting the road with Bono and marrying him at 21.
What she really wanted to be was a nurse. "That's
still my biggest regret. I wanted that personal contact with people,
the one-to-one, the medical expertise. I still do." Even at 26,
Hewson was still thinking about it. "But Bono's life had taken
off in one direction and I realised that if I went into nursing, I
was going to have to live-in for four very intensive years. It would
have been too much on the relationship."
The next best thing was a social science degree, centered
on politics and sociology. "I wanted to do something that would
give me an understanding of social policy and help me effect change
in that area, something that was akin to nursing." Her first
baby's arrival two weeks before her finals didn't break her stride.
She got her degree and set her sights on a masters in moral and political
ethics.
Pause for a laugh: "And then I had another baby."
For all that, she still talks of nursing as her lost vocation. In
many way, that probably sums up Ali Hewson.
A few years ago, while unpacking gallons of bottled
water and Marks & Spencer pasta sauce in a grimy apartment in
Belarus, Hewson reflected on the irony that the two people she is
most identified with - her husband and her great friend Adi Roche,
the former presidential candidate - both thrive on public contact,
on the roar of the crowd. "One on either side of me." she
laughs. "Do you think there's a pattern there?"
It isn't a rueful laugh; the supporting role is one
that fits her comfortably. "That's definitely how I would see
myself. I wouldn't stand up and make passionate speeches but I have
an ability to be supporitve and it seems to work. I've no desire to
be a star. I see how hard it is, how cruel it is; how to be in that
place you have to expose yourself, and how relentlessly cruel that
can be to a person. What Adi had to deal with as a person when the
presidential campaign here was all over was huge, and terribly hard."
So why take on causes like the CCP that she knows will
expose her? "Well, if it means the project has gained some degree
of awareness, then I think, why not?"
Why not? Well, watching Hewson huddle behind a curtain
at Dublin's Point Depot, during the supermodel-studded charity fashion
shows she and her priceless contacts book helped organise, smiling
beside Adi at fundraisers, eating contaminated food in the high-rise
Minsk apartment of a destitute family, cradling a cruelly deformed
child for hours in a foul-smelling orphanage, the same question recurs:
Couldn't she simply write the occasional fat cheque and hang on to
her privacy and considerable comfort?
The notion horrifies her.
"Oh I couldn't do that, I really couldn't. I couldn't
be that removed. I was always going to end up doing something. I suppose
I'd prefer to be wandering up and down some hospital ward handing
out medicine, feeling that I was contributing, but I don't have the
experience, I don't have the training. I always wanted to be hands-on;
it's about showing solidarity, about physically being with the people
in some way, spending time with them - almost the same as you'd do
as a nurse. And whatever comfort that brings them, then that's what
it's about for me. It's the way I operate."
But doing it Hewson's way has meant raising her head
above the parapet, emerging from the private cocoon she prizes so
highly.
Was she fearful when approached by Roche to present
Black Wind, White Land, the 1993 Chernobyl documentary? "Oh yes.
Very fearful. As our lives have becme more and more public, I have
become more and more private. It honestly wasn't until I got out to
Belarus and saw the children that I realised I wouldn't be able to
go home and just forget it. And I have to say that as a person I've
benefited probably far more that anybody else from that experience.
I often think that you get a lot more from giving than you do from
receiving; many people don't realise that.
"I certainly learnt a lot, value-wise, from seeing
those children. And when I went to Ethiopia with Bono in 1985 at the
height of the famine, I certainly didn't expect to come home enriched
by that experience. But I really was. The children out there had nothing,
nothing, yet they seemed to be really alive spiritually.
For me, the culture shock was in coming home, back to
supermarkets full of food and children who seemed spoiled, who had
everything, and yet were so starved of spirituality and any understanding
of what life was about. Those people... maybe it's because they had
come so close to death, but their eyes seemed so alive"
That "culture shock" has shaped the rearing
of Hewson's own children. "I had great fears for them. But through
the project, they've met a lot of the Chernobyl children. They can
clearly see that many of them don't have two arms of two eyes but
they appreciate that they're still full human beings, and it's taught
then to appreciate what they themselves have physically. So they do
have that awareness.
"It's not perfect, of course. Our children are
like any other; they see something, they want it. But they also travel
and see things that maybe other kids wouldn't, which I think gives
them more of a sense of the world as a bigger place."
The challenge of keeping the Chernobyl cause alive is
a daunting one, ranged alongside so many others, cooler, newer, more
heart-rendingly at their peak. "Fundraising can be very, very
difficult when you're working around a 14-year-old disaster that everyone
thinks is well and truly over - or certainly not as it's peak. But
the truth is that we have not seen Chernobyl's peak yet. Those who
were children in 1986 are having their own children now; it it believed
that only in the next 10 years will we see the worst effects."
But there are plans at least to close down the entire
Chernobyl complex? "Yes, they're supposed to be closing it down.
The problem is what they're going to do with it. They poured so much
concrete on top of it that it's sinking into the ground and once it
hits the water table, it will poison all the rivers. They just don't
know what to do. Adi's famous saying is that the next Chernobyl will
be Chernobyl."
The other reason Hewson became involved in anti-nuclear
campaigning was to ensure that such a disaster could never recur.
Clearly, she believes that we have become rather blase.
"Belarus, like Ireland, had no nuclear power plants
within it's borders. People have to grasp this: that if there's a
foul-up in Sellafield and the wind blows in the "wrong"
direction, that's the end of Drogheda, Dundalk, Dublin. They're gone.
Nothing. Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,400 years." After
seven years of campaigning, one might expect something practiced in
Hewson's tone. There isn't. Her trips to Belarus keep her sharp and
focused. It is partly why she is no pushover when it comes to other
charity work and is emphatically not driven by "guilt" or
the need for applause.
"When I became involved, I felt that I was in a
situation where I could be doing what so many other people wanted
to be able to do but couldn't because of time or financial restictions.
At the time, I was lucky enough to have neither. But people do make
assumptions; there's a sense of 'how could you say no?'. But you know
how much you can give. If you spread yourself too thinly, you just
end up frustrated and those who end up most frustrated are the very
people who need the help"
Hewson has taken on a new cause: a Children's Museum
for Ireland. "It's the other end of the scale. From the children
in Chernobyl who have nothing, not even clean air, to here, where
our children have all that but need the next step, which is to realise
their own potential.
"I had been to a few museums in America with the
children and saw that they could be such educational, interactive,
fun places for children and parents to spend the day together and
explore all aspects od science, information and technology. A small
museum in Dallas, for example, had a huge set of teeth in the middle
of the room which you could lift out of it's gums; in others you could
play with soundwaves or step into a bubble and even tackle issues
like recycling or racism.
"But it's also about the whole family having a
good day together. You can bring a child to a playground but you can't
get on the climbing frame with him. Anyway, we don't even have proper
playgrounds here. When you look at how children are welcomed and included
in France or Europe generally..." she trails off in exasperation.
"I suppose it will happen here eventually but it's all so slow.
We tap into the French health system a bit because we spend time there
and it's just amazing - no queue for the A&E room and never more
than 200 francs in a bill for an X-ray or something.
"Come to think of it, where does all the money
go from the Lotto? I'm all up for the arts or hurling or whatever,
but a decent standard of health and education should be any goverment's
priority. Why can't we look after old people properly, give them really
good, well-paid nursing care in comfortable, well-renovated homes?
Why can't we build a children's hospital wing that is generously staffed
and equipped?"
Hewson comes from what she calls a "very ordinary
background". Her questioning nature was probably inherited from
her father, a man she describes as "self-educated, strong, liberated,
forward-looking, world-conscious, argumentative, constantly questioning".
He and her mother ("still beautiful, always baking, never stops")
have retired to the south-east and are big into DIY work around the
house; his birthday gift to her mother this year was a cement mixer.
She and Bono, she acknowledges, have "a very nice
life, but it's also a very fast life. It's very demanding on both
us and on the children. Every day is full, between the children's
routine and his plans changing every couple of minutes. I'm forced
into the children's routine, which is great for our normality as a
family. He's now on a promotional tour involving 10 or 11 transatlantic
flights in eight weeks."
They survive as a couple, she says, because they never
take each other for granted. "You can't, you're not allowed to
take each other for granted. Sure, it can lead to a lot of frustration,
but it really does make you stronger. We're very committed to each
other, to the children, to the relationship. And anyways, he's been
home for a good while now - about two years - working on the new album,
and that's great."
At home, Hewson says, they try to find time to read;
stuff of a serious bent by all accounts, with Bono "speed-reading"
his way through volumes on philosophy and economics (reports suggest
he recently reduced the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to tears with his advocacy of the reduction of Third World
debt); her own most recent reading has included How the Irish Saved
Civilisation and The Gifts of the Jews, both by Thomas Cahill.
Despite the publicity suggesting that their home (with
the waves lapping beyond the hedge, the wonderful pool, the exquisitely
simple, stone-built guest lodge) is airport central for a slew of
supermodels and the likes of Salman Rushdie, Hewson says that most
of their friends are not famous. "But the famous ones you tend
to have something in common with to begine with. It's not like you
go out looking for famous friends. There's no training for being famous
- unless you're royalty - and that creates a bond, I think, because
you're all trying to cope with the same bizarre situations that you've
been catapulted into.
"The people we're drawn to are of similar mind,
trying to hold on to all the things they valued in the past, differentiating
between their famous personas and their real personalities. That can
be very hard if you come from a difficult family background."
Why? "Most famous people are insecure," Hewson
says. "After all, what gives then their drive and ambition and
even heightens their talent is the desire to be recognised as a real
person. But then the irony is that what the fans see is not the real
person; what they see is a kind of icon, and if the stars themselves
end up confusing the two, that can't be healthy. And you have to have
something else. I see it in people. You get to a place where you have
everything and realise how empty it is. The unhappy ones tend to be
those who have no causes."
But all that dosh surely makes a difference? "Money
has huge advantages, but it does bring responsibilities with it. It
is not the answer. It can give great freedom - if you need to get
away, you can just go. You can afford things others struggle for.
If you have a friend of family member in trouble, you're able to help.
But it can cause more problems. People who win the Lotto come to understand
that. When it's new, people around you can feel very threatened; it
can separate you from your friends and your family.
"And minding it is a huge responsibility. You always
have people trying to take advantage. The attitude is 'think of a
number and multiply it by tow, sure they'll never notice'. You get
that a lot. That side is nasty because you feel you can never trust
anybody."
Of course, Hewson knows this will elicit damn-all sympathy.
"The thing people hate more that anything is anyone who has money
going on about how tough it is. You certainly won't get away with
that in Ireland and they're right not to let you get away with it.
But I think money and fame are very complicated.
"For us, becoming famous, we realised you have
to have the money because you couldn't protect yourselves from fans.
It's a strange thing. For example, you have to travel business class
because Bono wouldn't get a minute's peace otherwise. You do have
to protect your privacy - and that takes cash."
Then again, there is that new apartment in Manhattan:
"Now there's an upside," Hewson agrees happily. "I've
grown to love New York." And there is that villa in the south
of France (co-owned with The Edge). "We spend about six weeks
there in the summer because we can," she says with a chortle.
"It's very easy down there because the French just don't care."
So Ali Hewson's not denying the good times. But her
desire to do good - when she could easily defend doing nothing - is
utterly convincing. "The whole point of your life, I think, is
to give some chance to even one person. I don't want to end my life
feeling I've only looked after myself, that everything I did was to
protect myself. I want when I die to believe that I've achieved what
I was supposed to achieve - that is, to help other people in whatever
way I could."
Back to top ^
"Bono's Wife
Takes Nuke Plant Protest to Blair's Door", Reuters, Apr 2002
Irish protesters chose the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster Friday to bombard Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prince
Charles with postcards demanding the closure of Britain's Sellafield
nuclear plant.
"Sellafield has the potential to be 80 times the
size of the Chernobyl accident," leading protester Ali Hewson,
wife of Irish rock star Bono, told reporters after personally handing
in a postcard at Blair's Downing Street office in London.
In the world's worst civil nuclear disaster, Chernobyl
exploded on April 26, 1986, and its radioactive contamination was
blamed for thousands of deaths in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and
for a huge increase in thyroid cancer.
The Sellafield reprocessing plant, on England's northwest
coast across the Irish Sea, has long caused friction between the two
governments due to Irish fears of accidents or pollution.
"Tony, look me in the eye and tell me I'm safe,"
said Hewson's postcard to Blair under a picture of a staring green
eye. It was one of more than 1.2 million such postcards sent by Irish
households for delivery to Britain Friday.
Long a focus of protests for environmentalists in Britain
and Ireland, the anti-Sellafield lobby said the issue has taken on
new urgency since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
"That's the reason that people are rethinking exactly
the problems of Sellafield," said Hewson, whose husband Bono,
of the U2 rock band, is a leading campaigner against Third World debt.
"It has 75 tons of plutonium sitting on its site. It can't but
be at the top of any terrorist's list."
Energy Minister Brian Wilson issued a statement decrying
the "emotive and misleading arguments" of anti-Sellafield
campaigners and citing "facts and evidence produced from reputable
scientific sources about the negligible impacts of activities at Sellafield."
"The U.K. government would not pursue any course
of action which is damaging either to our own people or to our neighbors
in Ireland," he said.
Back to top ^
"Introductory
Address on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor
of Laws, honoris causa, jointly on Ali Hewson and Adi Roche"
by Prof. R. Curtis, National University of Ireland, 29 Jun 2002
On April 26th 1986, the unthinkable occurred, the explosion
of a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl and the worst man-made disaster
of our time unfolded. The scale of the disaster, though initially
shrouded in secrecy is now well known — the 4-day struggle to
contain the fire, the 30km exclusion zone, the evacuation of 15,000
people from their homes and the 2000 dead from radiation sickness.
This calamitous event brought both radioactive and economic fallout
on over 4 million men, women and children in Belarus,the Ukraine and
Russia, most of whom are still living with the horrendous consequences16
years later.Today we honour two remarkable women — Ali Hewson
and Adi Roche - who have madean extraordinary contribution to environmental
issues generally, and to the Children ofChernobyl specifically. Adi
Roche is the founder and Executive Director of the ChernobylChildren
Project, an Irish registered charity, and Ali Hewson is its active
working patron.Tireless and seasoned campaigners for those innocent
victims of the nuclear disaster,they continue through diverse aid
programmes to improve survivors’ health care intandem with raising
awareness of the ever present danger of another such accident occurring,
particularly close to our shores in Sellafield.
So where did this commitment to others begin? Ali was
born to Terry and Joy Stewart in Dublin in 1961. She was educated
at MountTemple Comprehensive School and at University College Dublin
where as a mature student she was awarded a Bachelor of Social Science
degree. She is married to Paul Hewson better known as Bono, one of
the most famous singers in the world and acclaimed Drop the World
Debt campaigner. This year they are celebrating their 20th wedding
anniversary with their four children -Jordan, Eve, Elijah and John
Abraham.Deeply moved by the news images of the famine in Ethiopia,
Ali spent 5 weeks in 1985 working on a famine relief project. Informed
by this experience, she returned homeimbued with the belief that long
term preventative strategies is the way forward, not short-term relief.Following
the birth of her older children, she became particularly aware of
environmental issues and became involved with Greenpeace campaigning
against the Sellafield Nuclear Plant. On April 26th this year, the
16th anniversary of Chernobyl, the latest stage of the Shut Sellafield
campaign was launched with 1.3 million postcards urging its closure
being sent to Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles and Norman
Askew, head of British Nuclear Fuels. Ali personally delivered a giant
sized card to number 10 Downing Street of an eye withthe slogan ‘Tony,
look me in the eye and tell me I am safe. ’ Ali was invited
by Adi Roche to produce and narrate the first English documentary,
BlackWind-White Land, Living with Chernobyl, which Adi had initiated,
researched and coordinated.
This award-winning documentary dramatically brought
the story of
Chernobyl to our consciousness and was viewed on national television
throughout the world. This was the beginning of the partnership that
has delivered so much to the Children of Chernobyl.
Having worked for a number of years in Aer Lingus, Adi
took voluntary redundancy towork full-time as a volunteer for the
Irish Campaign for nuclear disarmament. She devised a Peace Education
programme and delivered it in over 50 schools throughoutIreland. In
1990 she became the first Irish woman elected to the Board of Directors
of theInternational Peace Bureau in Geneva. In 1991 filled with compassion
and a zeal tocontribute, she established the Chernobyl Children’s
Project.She is author of the book Children of Chernobyl. Her dedication
to this cause has beenrecognised by several awards including European
Woman Laureate and Irish Person ofthe Year — both in 1994, the
Belarus National Honour in 1996 and an honorary Doctor ofLaws from
University of Alberta, Canada 1998. Adi’s and Ali’s numerous
visits to Belarus and their key involvement in the documentaries,Black
Wind — White Land, Living with Chernobyl, Deaths Dream Kingdom
and Alexei Child of Chernobyl consolidated their continuing commitment
to ensure that an accidentof this magnitude and its tragic consequences
should never occur again. (We are verypleased that Alexei and his
parents Chris & Len Barrett are here with us today).Fortified
by the support and shared values and belief systems of their husbands
Seán, Bono and of their extended families, the humanitarian
record of Adi and Ali fills one with awe. Whether utilising their
driving skills leading humanitarian aid convoys to Belarus ortheir
communication skills bringing the cause to governments, school-children,
businessorganisations and voluntary groups or using their persuasive
and organisational skills inraising funds for the Project, one thing
is certain -The Chernobyl Children’s project has had a major
impact not only in helping the survivors to a better standard of health
carebut also in implementing orphanage refurbishment and in the introduction
of nursing programmes in Belarus. To date over Euro26 million has
been raised and distributed. These funds underpin Operation Hope Humanitarian
Aid convoys of which there have been 19, the Summer Rest and Recuperation
Programmes where to date, 8,500 children have come to Ireland for
short stays to help reduce levels of radioactivity. The Life saving
operations and medical care programme where over 60 children have
been brought to Ireland for surgery and hundreds of terminally ill
children come to Paul Newman’s gang camp at Barrettstown each
year.
Adi and Ali’s contribution furthermore ranges
across community care and hospice programmes in Belarus while they
are continuously involved in research and education in collaboration
with the United Nations. They negotiated a historic adoption agreement
between Belarius and Ireland for the rights of the Chernobyl child
being adopted.
Due primarily to this dynamic duo - Ali Hewson and Adi
Roche, Ireland is the largest donor country of aid to Belarus and
thus it was not surprising that Kofi Annan, SecretaryGeneral of the
United Nations looked to Ireland and particularly to the Executive
Director and Patron of CCP to mount an exhibition of Chernobyl for
the 15th anniversary of the nuclear accident in the UN in New York
in 2001. The Chernobyl legacy was demonstrated through digital imagery,
photographs and sculpture and in 2002, it had its European Premiere
in Dublin. The exhibition has had a profound impact on all those who
have seen it, particularly those too young or not yet born at the
time of the explosion. Energetic, committed, passionate and selfless
are just some of the attributes that come to mind when one reflects
on the life and work to date of these women. Three of their parents
are in the audience with us today - Terry and Joy Stewart and Chriss
Roche (Adi’s dad sadly died recently). They must feel an enormous
sense of pride in their daughters’ achievements and know that
in their parenting of them, they did something remarkably right.
Recently Ali Hewson said and I quote — ‘I
don’t want to end my life feeling I’ve only looked after
myself, that everything I did was to protect myself. I want when I
die to believe that I’ve achieved what I was supposed to —
this is help other people in whatever way I can.’ Adi Roche
in an interview a short time ago referred to the work she does as
inspiring and I quote — ‘I think it is a privilege and
an honour to do what I’m doing and I get it back a hundred fold.
If I can in someway reach out and change the lives of other people
even in a small way, then it is all worthwhile.’
Adi and Ali have certainly lived up to their philosophy
of life, have reached out and helped thousands of people. This is
all the more remarkable when one considers that the alternative could
be a life of comfort and even indeed a life of celebrity. These two
women are powerful role models for men and women, for young and old.
They are truly outstanding humanitarians.
Chancellor it is an honour and a privilege for me to
present Ali Hewson and Adi Roche jointly for the degree Doctor of
Laws.
Back to top ^
"Stream of Consciousness"
by Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 22 Feb 2005
Stately, strong-voiced Paul Hewson, a.k.a. Bono, descended
from the stairhead toward the beginning of an Irish day -- bearing
not his sunglasses, amazingly, but his thick, strong-gripped hand,
extended in gracious welcome. With Ali Hewson, his wife, working at
her desk, with his daughter about to sit down to piano lessons, in
a house that feels vast and yet warm only partly because of the fireplace
that is crackling, he intones, in a somewhat gravelly but still immediately
recognizable rock-star voice, "Come and have a look."
At which point, grabbing coat, he walks, semi-solemnically,
down his stairs, out onto the terrace of the Hewson's little guest
house, a terrace that sits high over the Irish Sea, that looks east
toward Europe and, to be metaphoric about it, the world, which is
what Bono, as is well known, is always looking at. He strolls relaxedly
through his little guest house, its bathroom wall decorated with host-sanctioned
graffiti, scribblings of the likes of Brian Eno, Bill Clinton, Salman
Rushdie and Michael Stipe -- Stipe having mischievously signed in
a corner, along, as his host gleefully notes, Bono's crack.
Out on the sea-facing terrace, Bono offers the complete
ocean vista and points out the sights in the half-moon bay, including
the nearby home of the Edge, a.k.a. U2's guitarist, and a mile or
so away, a little Martello tower. A Martello tower, as any fan of
obscure Irish literary landmarks will tell you, is a small military
turret, one of dozens built along the Irish Coast from 1804 to 1815
to defend the country against a Napoleonic invasion. Since abandoned
by the military, they have tended to be inhabited by Irish artists
and writers and musicians -- a group including Bono himself, not to
mention the writer whose writings haunt Dublin and Ireland and all
things written about them for better if not worse: James Joyce. "When
I owned one, I went and read all about them, 'cause I wanted to know
all about them," says Bono in an excited version of his Dublin
brogue. "And I went inside Joyce's tower. And I saw Joyce's guitar!"
Yes, it's true: James Joyce had hoped to be a singer,
a tenor, a rock star of sorts, and today, as Bono heads back to the
house, as he walks his way back up the green hill to find his wife
and set off in the family car and peregrinate the hills of Ireland,
Bono is hoping to be in fashion. And his wife wants to be in fashion,
too, the implication of their desire being that Ali and Bono are about
to take a trip to the country to thank the man whose home inspired
the launch of their new fashion line, this home being a manor house
on a 5,000-acre estate beautiful enough to inspire a thousand designers,
a place called Luggala. "It's the artistic epicenter" is
how Bono describes Luggala. Bono and Ali's new line, called Edun,
is designed by Rogan Gregory, and on Edun's behalf they are about
to transport a very old bottle of very find Armagnac, in thanks for
the inspiration to the lord of Luggala, a man named Garech Browne.
Behind every strong, smart, quick-witted mother and
wife who has, aside from raising four children, run campaigns against
British nuclear-reprocessing plants and driven ambulances to Chernobyl,
is a rock star. Or at least alongside her, which is where Bono is
today. Bono leaves the Maserati in the suburban Dublin driveway and
shrinks into the passenger seat of the toy-infiltrated station wagon.
In addition to two teenage daughters, the Hewsons have two even younger
sons. Ali is wearing Rogan jeans under a blue slip by Yohji Yamamoto,
a simple black Prada sweater, and a black Prada coat. Bono is wearing
jeans, an earthy green-and-black sweater by Lainey Keogh, the Irish
designer and brothel creepers, the crepe-soled black suede boots.
And then, at last, sunglasses.
"Ready, B?" Ali asks Bono. "Yes,"
Bono says, and the two are off on their accidentally peripatetic journal
into the Wicklow Mountains. "Wicklow's the Garden of Eden, isn't
it? Sorry, I mean it's the garden of Ireland," says Ali, tongue
slipping on account of maybe too much fashion excitement.
But as the motorways of dear old dirty Dublin fade in
the rearview mirror, as the lowlands become uplands and the great
gray woolly clouds kaleidoscope the sun across the hills, a mention
of Eden seems apropos: It rains, it drizzles, and the sun breaks through
paradisically gold, all in the space of a few minutes.
"We get four seasons in one day," says Ali.
"It's so inspiring and so beautiful," says
Bono, leaning back in his seat, completely relaxed-seeming.
Like the warrior who never gives up, or at least like
a bard who won't stop singing, Bono is back. There's the new CD, How
to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, another home run for U2, fueled by the
Edge's still-searing guitar and Bono's autobiographical hymns to his
late father. There are the U2 iPod commercials, which are to music
what the Sarah Jessica Parker Gap ads are to fashion. And this time
Bono is working the entirely new (to him) field of fashion to prove
a point about the possibilities of leveling the lopsided trading situation
of the world. He's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2003)
by helping cancel Third World debt, and he's criticized the Bush administration
for its lack of alacrity with regard to African aid. He's used his
rock 'n' roll pulpit to grab evangelical Americans by the lapels of
their Sunday best and force them to see what's going on. Now he's
combining his homeworked savvy about the financial situation of the
developing world with his supreme rock star-status to sell a clothing
line made in factories in Africa and Peru -- a practice of what he's
been preaching. Today he's driving into the hills, but in a recent
meeting in New York with a fashion executive he was overhead to say,
"Politics isn't sexy. Fashion is sexy."
And it's a mom-and-pop fashion label. Ali Hewson is
the Penelope to his Ulysses, the less-seen strategist who, as opposed
to "International Rock Star," signs "Mother" on
her passport on purpose. Ali Hewson may not be a household name in
America, and she may, impressively, mostly shy away from the limelight
everywhere, but she is known in Ireland, at least, as an activist
in her own right, if not the linchpin in the Bono operation. She has
worked to shut down an English nuclear-reprocessing center that contaminates
the Irish Sea. A film that she narrated, Chernobyl Heart, about Chernobyl's
lingering human devastation, won an Oscar last year. ("Bono woke
me up and said, 'You've won an Oscar,'" she recalls, "and
then later I said, 'Wait a minute, does this mean I won an Oscar before
you?'") Once the name Ali Hewson surfaced in the papers as a
candidate for the Irish presidency, and the name was taken very seriously.
In the case of Edun, she's the one talking to the business people
every day, calling Bono in when necessary. "Ali's very good with
the dog whistle," says Bono.
Naturally, Edun is no Britney Spears-wear. It's the
opposite of the typical celebrity clothing line, in fact -- a celebration
of craftsmanship and organic farming and absolute uncelebrity-ness.
It is a company that creates clothes based on a simple but globally
unpracticed concept: fair trade. An apparel factory in Tunisia, another
in Peru, and a plan that uses capitalism but flips capitalism on its
head -- a plan that starts with what the factory makes and then takes
that to the world, rather than planning to find the cheapest factory
in the world and move on when another factory charges less. "People
are saying, 'Can you help us get globalized?'" says Ali. "They
want to be globalized."
"They are against the abuses of it," says
Bono, "and they are suffering the abuses of it. But trade is
good."
Meanwhile, Rogan is not the typical designer. Rogan
Gregory is a creator of street-smart fashions that are still somehow
natural clothes -- high-end and high-concept pieces that thrive in
the streets of the Lower East Side but seem rooted in something by
a forest-based indie rock band. As it happened, Rogan and his team,
before Ali and Bono ever happened into their lives, were already looking
for a new way to do business and had just produced a certified organic
cotton label called Loomstate. "I look at what people do best,"
says Rogan, sitting in his Tribeca studio one recent winter morning,
"and work from there."
"It's about redesigning the design process,"
says Scott Hahn, Rogan's business partner.
"The conscious-commerce model, that's the way we
do things," Rogan continues. "People can like it or not.
That's our mission, to find sustainable models of doing things --
that just goes without saying."
The genius part of the Hewson-Rogan partnership is all
about serendipity, because when Ali was out looking for a designer
who might be able to help her and her husband design a fashion label,
they found a designer who was already thinking along their lines.
"There was definitely an alignment," Rogan says.
Cut to the Rogan showroom, two years ago. See Ali enter,
on a tip from U2's stylist, Sharon Blankson, who is with her that
morning. See Ali's eyes light up in the Tribeca showroom, which is
as much a gallery as a showroom, with found-object sculpture by Rogan,
things that look like Andy Goldsworthy let loose in an abandoned Home
Depot. Imagine the other side of the room, where Rogan and Scott Hahn
are a little freaked out, since Ali was her usual unannounced and
unrecognizable (in the United States, anyway) self. Rogan is thinking,
Who is this person?
The last thing that happens in this silent, Tribeca-situated
style-related pantomime is that Ali freaks out -- internally, of course
-- when she discovers that they have a line that's all organic cotton.
"I thought, Oh, my God!" she remembers. "Alarm bells
were ringing, and I though, Maybe we're too late. Maybe the horse
has left this stable." She left the shop, troubled.
"So we rang them up the next day," Ali continues,
"and Sharon explained to them what it was about. And they were
very open."
Ali brought Bono the second time. He loved the operation,
loved the clothes, and expresses that love in a way that means the
fashion writers and fashion publicists of the world now have to worry
about their jobs: "It completely made a lot of sense to me because
I love middle America. I love the West. I love the Midwest. I love
to travel. I love travel, concrete, the road -- you know, Sam Shepard's
Motel Chronicles. So I'm in a designers' showroom where I feel for
the first time a new American aesthetic that's a development from
casual and workwear. You can see the aesthetic, and it's clear. It's
travel. It's the real America. And you can see it's got the aesthetic,
but it's looking for a philosophy. And they're starting to wonder.
Can they make organic jeans? They want to do that. They're already
there. So when we walk in the room, we say that's what we'd like to
do -- you know, it was the easiest conversation of our life."
All that was left was for Ali and Bono and Rogan and
his team to meet in Ireland a few months later, which they did at
the Clarence Hotel, the old Dublin inn that was once a dowdy place
for priests and punks, until Bono and the Edge bought it and made
it into the coolest place for priests and punks in all Dublin, a lap
of luxury on the Liffey. Ali was happy with the chemistry. "There
were similar spirits, and our desires -- well, I mean, we're worlds
apart in a lot of ways. We're two people coming from Ireland, and
two guys, two New York designers -- but there is a lot of common ground."
"Common values," says Bono.
Over the course of a few days, they hammered out a business
deal and then were left only with the not-so-small detail: Rogan had
to come up with some clothes.
"And I was like, OK, well, which direction are
we going with the designs?" Rogan remembers.
So they took him for a drive into the hills, the same
drive they are on today in their family car -- the drive out of Dublin
and up, up into the Wicklow Mountains, the drive from Dublin gray,
from ticky-tacky roadside development, to euphoric green. "Nature
is my religion," Rogan says, "and it helps me a lot from
a design standpoint to have some landscape to latch onto."
The name Edun, by the way, is nude spelled backward.
Nude being the name of the Dublin organic-food chain in which the
Hewsons have a share. The name was Ali's idea, and Rogan agreed, which
settled it. This is not to imply that Bono is laissez-faire about
all this, despite the fact that Ali is so thoroughly involved. On
the contrary, says Rogan.
"Bono's inspiring," says Rogan.
"And what he really recognizes is that the biggest
scale that you can get requires the simplest idea," Hahn says.
"And he has this ability to connect with people,"
says Rogan. "It's kind of amazing. You can't even get down the
street and he's talking to everyone and asking them questions. I know
how this sounds, but that's what he does. He really makes you feel
good about yourself."
Team Edun is already receiving good orders and good
vibes. "I like the idea that the clothes are being developed
for the greater good," says Julie Hilhart, fashion director of
Barneys. "And I also like the clothes. They're very stylish.
They're things you want to wear." "They're not in-your-face"
is how Michael Fink, senior fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue,
describes Edun. "They're instant best friends. They look great,
feel great, and the cause is great."
Rogan has never appealed to a very wide audience, and
Bono wants to change all that, for his and his wife's sake, for the
sake of the factories, for the sake of Rogan.
"We want to give Rogan a hit single," Bono
keeps saying. Another thing Bono is saying lately is this -- "Shopping
is politics."
So off into the hills, into the Wicklow Mountains, where
on this Irish winter afternoon, Mrs. and Mr. Bono have just entered
Roundstone, the highest village in Ireland, a geography of rolling
green that is as subtly beautiful as it is iconic, a landscape that
naturally blew Rogan, who had never been to Ireland, completely away.
"I couldn't believe it," he recalled shortly after returning.
Ali and Bono sit for lunch in the Roundstone Inn, the bartender waving
them in semi-nonchalantly, a patron choking discreetly on his Guinness.
Ali takes the soup, Bono the stew. The fan who screws up the courage
to approach is greeted cordially by the husband and wife -- they act
like the world's most gracious celebrities, if not Ireland's, and
they are certainly among Erin's most fashionable.
"Ali's seen probably as one of Ireland's most stylish
women," says Ali's friend Mariand Whisker, a former L.A.-based
designer who recently returned to Ireland to create phantasmagorical
Indian-influenced fashions in the Irish capital city near the Artic,
"but in a very unique way, in that she knows what she wants to
wear -- it's her own style. It's not a designer kind of style. That's
why I love working with her. Nobody says, 'Oh, she's wearing a Mariad
Whisker.' I mean, my collections don't bear any resemblance to anything
that's going on in fashion."
"They know exactly what they want, and they are
quite focused in their desire. They aren't excessive or OTT"
-- that's over-the-top, if you don't speak fashion. "They are
subtle," says Lainey Keough, whose little shop on Dawson Street
in Dublin is one of the epicenters of Irish fashion -- which, like
Rogan, is earthy, somehow steeped in nature.
Ali and Bono met in school -- she was twelve, he was thirteen -- but
didn't begin dating until three years later. Her mother, she recalled
over coffee in the Roundstone Inn, made nearly all her clothes, with
the exception of the gabardine. "Gabardine trousers used to be
sent to me from my auntie's relatives in America, and any mom thought
they were the height of fashion, so I was made to wear them, and even
I knew they weren't cool, but I knew there were no alternatives,"
says Ali.
"When I met her," says Bono, "she was
wearing those and a tartan kilt. The tartan thing was what got my---"
"Got your blood pressure---" Ali interjects.
"My sense of mischief aroused. I remember the gabardine
pants, and I remember all the clothes that you made and your mother
made. And I remember this girl who was so beautiful and so completely
unaware of it. I mean, she used to wear Wellington boots and gabardine,
and there was just no vanity. And I thought that this was just the
most attractive person I'd ever seen, a completely unself-conscious
beauty. Pretty sexy making your own clothes, I think."
"My mother made them," says Ali. "She
still would. She'd make all our kids' clothes if they let her."
"I mean, I always that that Ali had a very creative
sense of style -- she never looked like anyone else. I thought that
she leapfrogged fashion. And you know I have a lot of girlfriends."
"That's girl hyphen friends -- did you get that?"
Ali says, Penelope-like, like the one who, while beating off the suitors
at home, doesn't need an oracle to know what's going on out on the
road with wandering rock stars.
"And Ali's the easiest to buy for," Bono continues.
For his part, Bono the Teenager was wearing a black
jumper with colored stripes that his mother made and something like
the mullet that he was known for in the Eighties, which when Bono
and Ali first went to Africa, kids in Africa actually made fun of,
as Bono noted in his recent speech to the British Labour Party. It
was Ali and Bono's first trip to that continent, which they took just
after he recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas�"
with Band Aid, the first celebrity African famine-relief effort, in
1984. Bono and Ali worked for two months with an Irish charity in
Ethiopia, a place where children were left at the gates of the camps,
the parents desperately hoping someone might take the babies in. "I
think the legs were just cut from underneath of us by what we saw,"
says Ali, "and that dragged us out of our teenage years and our
early 20s and a lot of innocence and to a shocking reality of what
life is like for two-thirds of the world."
When they got back they began to recognize the structural
aspect to poverty: that poverty proceeds not merely from natural calamity,
but from calamitous political leadership and corrupt trade relationships.
"We don't let the poorest of the poor keep their products on
our shelves," Bono says, "and with old debts that we're
holding over their heads, we're making them slaves. So you start to
go, 'Oh, wow, while you're passing the plate at your Sunday service,
your government is demanding more money from them than you are giving.'
When you hear that, you're absolutely insane."
Nobody preaches against economic inequality like Bono.
No one understands the rhetorical winds of the media better, and as
he ends the story of his and Ali's economic self-education, Bono points
out that the engine of American charity needs to be tweaked, despite
the common Cyclopean American perception. "We realized that outside
of charity, outside of justice, there's good old American trade, commerce.
And this new idea of conscious commerce -- well that finally is the
only thing that's going to fix this problem long term. 'Cause you
can fix the bad trade agreements -- we're working on that. And you
can increase aid. And by the way, the United States is number 20 on
the list of richest countries in per capita giving to the poorest
of the poor -- i.e., you're at the bottom of the class. And the reason
no one knows that is you can always say you're giving more than anyone
else, and you are giving more than anyone else, but not per capita.
It's just because you're a bigger country. If we use Europe as a comparison
to America, then you're in the dust. But the point is, in the end,
America does have a clue about how to rid the world of extreme poverty."
"If you have it made in Africa," says Ali,
managing to get in a word -- and pointing out to her husband that
it is about time to leave the Roundstone Inn, to get back on the road
to Luggala -- "you create trade there, you can create jobs there."
Thus Edun. Thus a factory in Peru and Tunisia that is
busy filling the initial orders. Thus colors in the fabrics made in
Peru that are, like the fabric, organic, using natural dyes -- coffee,
blue corn, gardenias. Thus Edun's CEO, Richard Cervera, an entrepreneur
brought in by Ali and Bono, has already hired someone to represent
the Hewsons in Peru and also to look for new ways to bring economic
prosperity to a town and to small organic farmers, for new ways to
open other old factories, to create jobs through trade. The Hewsons
see the possibilities of social transformations in trade but see also
the beauty of compassion as a selling point, as a plug, as a pitch
that sails nicely through the marketplace and attracts the customer
that Edun hopes to attract.
"It's making people aware of the story of clothes,"
says Ali. "Do you really want to put on something that's made
---"
"With despair," Bono interjects.
"By somebody who's distressed," says Ali.
"It's like that movie Like Water for Chocolate, where they're
making the food, and if the cook is unhappy and sad, then everyone
is feeling unhappy and sad, and if the cook is feeling sexy then everyone
feels sexy. There's an essence along with them, I suppose, and these
clothes will have a good story."
Likewise, the aesthetic of the clothes matches the idea
of the clothes. "It's back to nature," says Ali exuberantly.
"It's about easy, easy sexuality. This is really about quiet,
confident but sexy clothes. Sure. Just sure. In fact, my own personal
feeling about clothes is -- well, it's been a kind of angst-ridden
experience. But as I get older and more sure of myself and more mature,
now I know what I'm going to wear -- I don't have to listen to fashion,
in a sense. I know who I am, so clothes have started to become who
I am."
"Yeah, you're not who you wear. It's more like
why you wear," says Bono. "And of course it's very revealing
as to why people choose certain things whether it's fit or labels.
But I think we have this idea that we're going to make people label
aware. Which is aware of what's on the label: Where it was made, who
made it, how it's made."
They are getting back in the family car now -- thanks
to the bartender, and a big wave to the little pack of nine- and ten-year-old
boys who realize it's Bono that they've seen on their way home from
school.
"There is a story to every piece of clothing that
we wear," says Bono as they start out of town, the last few miles
to Luggala. "In the past people haven't wanted to know that story.
That's about to change. The same as it changed with the cans of beans
in the supermarket. People are not going to buy a tin of beans with
a load of preservatives if they can buy another one. And if it's 2
cents or 20 cents more expensive then that's how people will feel
more luxurious in the future. And by the way, this is significant
in cultural terms, because this is the end of the Sixties idea that
revolution is around the corner. People now know it's not. It's in
their kitchen. It's in their footsteps, in the choices that they make
to buy this and not that."
"But also, the most important thing is that the
clothes be desirable in themselves," says Ali as they are driving
again deep into the natural vista, into the hedgerow-patterned hills,
which nest a white, sugar-coated peak, off toward the ethereal home
of Garech Browne.
"Or else, all bets are off," says Bono.
Wandering rock star and wondering rock-star spouse --
a betting fashion reporter would put his money on Ali Hewson to know
where she's going, on the road to Luggala or anywhere else. Today,
however, there is a slight complication, in that, unbeknownst to them,
someone has spun the road sign -- as a prank -- so that they are heading
in the wrong direction.
"We're going into the Sally Gap," says Bono,
referring to this vast, ancient mountain pass, a huge granitic high-altitude
plateau surrounded by the peaks of Kippure, Djounce, Tonduff, and
Corrig. Bono says this in a way that, as he quickly notes, is accidentally
lyrical. "Ah, I've got to write that song."
Then, trouble. "These trees don't look right,"
says Ali.
In the next minute the Sally Gap, to their consternation,
does not appear. More wandering, a brief stop at Powerscourt, a waterfall
that is mystical in the mist-thick air.
"Just to interrupt," says Bono, "I think
