DonMullan.org

Don Mullan was Director of AFrI (Action from Ireland) for 14 years (1979-1994), a responsibility he assumed at the age of 24. He spearheaded the transformation of the organisation from an ‘aid’ agency into a dynamic justice, peace and human rights organisation. It was here his skills as a concept developer, including re-imagining symbolism, began to find expression.

AFrI was founded by Fr Sean McFerran, SDB, in 1975. While studying at the Development Studies Centre, Dublin, Mullan met Fr James O’Halloran SDB, a confrere of the founder. Fr. Jim, as he is affectionately known, spent most of his life working as a missionary in South America during which he became interested in the phenomena of Basic Christian Communities. He is the author of a series of acclaimed books which have been translated into several languages. In later life Fr. Jim became a much sought after lecturer on the subject, travelling extensively in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe to speak on Basic Christian Communities. An insight into Fr. Jim’s rich life, dedicated to the gospel of the poor, and his global contribution to the development of such communities, may be accessed by clicking here. 

Fr. O’Halloran recommended Don to Fr Sean McFerran and following a number of meetings McFerran offered Don the role of Director, adding that his main reservation was Don’s age, but nonetheless, decided to hand the reigns to him.

Mullan invited Joe Murray to join the AFrI Executive Committee and later brought him on board as his assistant. After Mullan left AFrI in 1994 to take up a position with Concern Worldwide, Murray assumed responsibility for the organization. He remains in that position today and continues to develop and manage many of the legacy projects and concepts that Mullan introduced.

A number of Don Mullan’s AFrI initiatives can be accessed by clicking the following links:

1982: International Conference on World Peace and Poverty

1983: St Brigid’s Peace Cross Campaign

1983-84: Olinda-Recife, Brazil: Dom Helder Camara

1984-87: The Dunne Stores Strike

1984: Fr Niall O’Brien and the Negros Nine Campaign

1984: Wedding Day – AFrI HQ burned down

1985-87: Fr Rudy Romano and the movie ‘Missing’

1986: ‘Just a Second’ Campaign

1987-1994: The Great ‘Famine’ Project:

1988: The Annual Doolough Famine Walk

1989: The Choctaw-Ireland Great Famine Connection

1990: Famine Graves and Markers

1992: 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of America by Christopher Columbus

1992: Tom Hyland and East Timor

1993: White Paper presented to Irish Government

1993-1994: The Grosse Ile Campaign

1993: Don Mullan discovered he is dyslexic

1994: Inauguration of President Nelson Mandela

1994-1996: Concern Worldwide

1995: The Carrigaholt Collection

1996: Concern Universal – Children in Crossfire

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don Mullan’s ability to utilize historical symbolism, as a method of informing and influencing the present day, first manifested itself with a major International Conference on World Peace and Poverty to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the birth of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226).

Mullan hitch-hiked from Paris to Assisi in the summer of 1978 with a friend from Derry, John Coyle. They travelled on a budget of 2.50 per day, and slept in a tent. That journey became the inspiration for the international conference in 1982.

Mullan was particularly drawn to  the universal appeal of St. Francis of Assisi, which transcended both Roman Catholicism and Christianity. St Francis is the patron saint of peace, animals, ecology and stowaways, all of which offered to Mullan’s creative mind the opportunity to explore related themes pertaining to the local, national and international community. Recalling the quotation of Mahatma Gandhi that ‘”he Earth has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed,” Mullan was particularly drawn to St. Francis’ commitment to simplicity of lifestyle which, again, resonated in a world of growing inequalities.

During his time at the Development Studies Centre, Dublin, Mullan came to realise the importance of listening, especially to the voice of the majority world, then referred to as the ‘Third World’. The St. Francis Conference, therefore, had participants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, as well as Europe and North America. The conference was particularly unique as AFrI decided to hold it, not at a conference centre or hotel, but within the inner-city parish of Sean MacDermott Street, involving the local community both as presenters, as well as organizing volunteers.

It was chaired by the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prize winner, Sean MacBride SC, and was attended by, amongst others, Rev. Jesse Jackson and Desmond Tutu (via video, as his passport had been confiscated by the apartheid regime).

The Irish media largely ignored the conference, much to the ire of Sean MacBride who was deeply critical at a poorly attended Press Conference on Monday, 1 October 1982. Unfortunate for AFrI, on the weekend of the conference, an attempted overthrow of the then Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey TD, had occupied the attention of the Irish media. However, the highly popular BBC Radio programme, ‘Sunday Sequence’, sent an outside broadcasting unit and dedicated an entire programme to the conference.

Related to the St. Brigid’s Peace Cross Campaign, AFrI brought a large group of young people to Assisi in 1995 to explore themes related to justice, peace and human rights.

Mullan is currently thinking about a follow-up conference in 2026 to mark the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi.

He has begun to explore with members of the Franciscan Order and the Roman Catholic hierarchy the possibility of a five-year global pilgrimage of the relics of St. Francis of Assisi.

Sean MacBride SC became AFrI Special Adviser and Desmond and Leah Tutu accepted Mullan’s invitation to become the patrons of AFrI.

Inspired by the generosity of five young boys from his hometown neighbourhood, who made and sold St. Brigid’s Crosses to support his work with AFrI, Mullan developed with them the St. Brigid’s Peace Cross Campaign. The five boys were brothers Eddie and James Doherty, Peter and Maurice McGowan and their friend Neil Mahony. The Nobel and Lenin Peace Prize winner, Sean MacBride SC, travelled to Derry to launch the initiative in 1993.

Taking the ancient tradition of making St. Brigid’s Crosses on 1 February, the first day of Spring in Ireland, Mullan helped AFrI reinterpret much of its ancient symbolism in a 20th Century context. Of primary interest was the discovery of the story of Brigid giving away her father’s sword to a poor man. Mullan saw in this story a Celtic parable of disarmament and development.

His research also lead him to the site of St. Brigid’s Fire Temple in Kildare Town, which had burned perpetually for over 2000 years before it was extinguished during the Reformation. Only women could be keepers of the fire. Mullan became determined to help rekindle the ancient flame.

The St. Brigid’s Peace Cross Campaign became the seed of several other ongoing initiatives, including the rekindling of

Brigid’s Fire and the annual Feile Bride Festival, Kildare (1993), and greater involvement by the Brigidine Sisters in Justice and Peace initiatives, including the establishment of Solas Bhride Centre and Hermitages. Mullan developed a strong relationship with the Irish Brigidine Sisters and invited Sr. Eileen Deegan onto the AFrI Executive Committee, a role she fulfilled for several years.

Working with Mullan, Youghal Carpets, Cork, designed a hand-woven carpet depicting St. Brigid giving away her father’s sword to the mendicant. Two carpets, containing over 100,000 individual woolen pieces, were made by Irish school children and presented to the peoples of the USA and the former USSR.

 

 

In 1983-84 Don Mullan spent six months in the diocese of Recife and Olinda in Brazil’s north-east, then under the leadership of Dom Helder Camara, a world figure renowned for advocating social justice and change through non-violence. Mullan had been deeply influenced by two books written by Camara: The Desert is Fertile (1976) and Spiral of Violence (1971). These small volumes deeply influenced his work with AFrI and remain sources of inspiration to this day.

While in Brazil Mullan learned of an area north of Recife known as the Seca region where drought had raged for over a decade, causing famine and mass migration. Working with his AFrI colleagues, and Irish missionaries in the region, he helped organize relief to the area.

In December 2016 Mullan returned to the diocese of Recife and Olinda to testify before an Ecclesial Commission investigating the sanctity of Dom Helder Camara.

Mullan’s favourite quotations of Helder Camara are the following:

“Without justice and love, peace will always be the great illusion.”

–

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

–

“Become an expert in the art of discovering the good in every person.

No one is entirely bad.

Become an expert in finding the truthful core in views of every kind.

The human mind abhors total error.”

 

“The protest by Mary Manning and her colleagues was exceptional—they were joined only by a single worker at another store—and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions withheld even rhetorical backing for over a year. Nor at first did their actions appear to engender much sympathy among members of the public… Public perceptions of the strike were to change, however. There was growing support for the movement, partly as a consequence of a meeting in London in December between the strikers and Archbishop Desmond Tutu while he was on his way to collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.”

– Professor Tom Logue, History Ireland

In the summer of 1984 Bishop Desmond Tutu, then Secretary–General of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), accepted Don Mullan’s invitation to visit Ireland as the guest of AFrI. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship between both men.

Shortly after Tutu’s visit to Ireland, Christine Mulvey, an AFrI colleague, informed Mullan that an anti-apartheid strike had begun at the Henry Street branch of Dunnes Stores in Dublin, and recommended he investigate. After visiting the picket line and meeting with Mary Manning, Karen Gearon and other strikers Mullan recommended that AFrI should support the young strikers in whatever way possible.

Fortuitously, that same year, Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize. Mullan informed him about the strike and Tutu, who had already begun to call for economic sanctions against the apartheid state, agreed to publicly back the young shop workers. At Mullan’s suggestion, Tutu agreed to meet

representatives of the Dunnes Stores Strikers at Heathrow Airport en route to Oslo. The meeting proved to be a major turning point in the strike. For the duration of the strike Mullan was Tutu’s adviser.

In 1985 Mullan negotiated with the SACC and Bishop Tutu, then the 1^st black Bishop of Johannesburg, to invite the Dunnes Strikers to South Africa for the first anniversary of their strike. Along with the strikers he was detained at Jan Smuts Airport and refused entry. The strikers, their trade union representative, Brendan Archbald, and Mullan, were all handed a legal document before being escorted onto a London bound flight. The document informed them that the non-visa privilege, available to Irish and British citizens, had been withdrawn by the apartheid regime.

Mullan raised the funding for the majority of the strikers to travel to South Africa.

Later in 1985 Principle Management called Mullan and asked him to bring the Dunnes Stores Strikers to Windmill Studios as U2’s Bono wished to record with them his contribution to the Artists Against Apartheid song, I ain’t gonna play Sun City. Don collected some half dozen strikers from the picket-line on Henry Street and brought them to the studio where Bono welcomed them.

In April 1987, the same month the strike ended, Don Mullan’s first child, Therese, was born. The Dunnes Stores Strikers, despite their hardship, bought her a baby high-chair, which all of the Mullan’s three children enjoyed.

At Mullan’s invitation, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah, became joint patrons of AFrI.

Don Mullan returned to Ireland from Brazil in March 1984.  By then the case of an Irish missionary Fr. Niall O’Brian, who had been imprisoned in the Philippines together with eight companions on trumped-up charges, was making headlines. AFrI was actively engaged in the campaign to have them released, primarily through the involvement of a member of the AFrI Executive Committee, Jack Hynes, a former missionary, who had spent most of his adult life supporting the struggle for human rights on Negros Island, the Philippines, the same island where O’Brien had been imprisoned. Hynes and Mullan had become friends during the summer of 1978 while Mullan was a volunteer with the Catholic Agency for World Development, Trócaire.

Fr. O’Brien was working on the sugar-rich along with an Australian missionary, Fr. Brian Gore, Filipino priest Fr. Vincente Dangan, and six Filipino co-workers: Geronimo Perez, Lydio Mangao, Jesus Arzaga, Ernesto Tajones, Peter Cuales and Conrado Muhal, when they were imprisoned in May 1983. They were accused of the murder of Mayor Pablo Sola and four companions, on the outskirts of the town of Kabankalan, 88 kilometers south of the capital, Bacolod City.

The accusations were a fabrication and an attempt to undermine their work for justice on behalf of peasant labourers

and their families – virtual slaves to powerful sugar barons whose loyalty was with the Filipino dictator, Ferdinand Marcos and the Filipino military, including dedicated death squads, ruthlessly imposing martial law.

Working closely with other development agencies, including Trocaire, human rights groups, missionary orders and the Filipino Irish Group, Mullan joined Jack Hynes and his colleague Joe Murray in mobilizing popular and political support for the Negros Nine in the lead-up to the 1984 visit of President Ronald Reagan to Ireland. This included a hugely effective AFrI initiative, the brainchild of Murray, of placing Fr. O’Brien’s mother, Olivia, inside a makeshift prison cage outside the US Embassy in Dublin and, again, outside the Garden of Remembrance at the very moment President Regan’s Air Force One landed in the Irish capital. By then the profile of the Negros Nine was such in Ireland that President Regan was asked on Irish television to intervene. Shortly afterwards they were released and the charges dropped.

Upon his triumphant return home to Ireland, he was greeted by thousands of people at Dublin Airport, Whitehall Parish, Sean MacDermott Street Parish and the Mansion House, Dublin. Don Mullan was asked to travel with Fr O’Brien from Dublin Airport into the city in recognition of the seminal work done by AFrI and other Irish justice and human rights organisations. The visit to the inner-city parish of Sean MacDermott Street was particularly poignant as it was the location of AFrI’s headquarters and AFrI had engaged the local people in fighting for the freedom of the Negros Nine.

The 1984 RTE Report of Fr. O’Brien’s homecoming can be viewed by clicking here:

 

On 6 October 1984, Don Mullan and Margaret Beatty were married. As well as families and friends, all of Mullan’s AFrI colleagues and Executive Committee attended, as did the AFrI special adviser, Sean MacBride SC. Many AFrI supporters also attended, including the Derry boys who had inspired the St. Brigid’s Peace Cross Campaign. AFrI’s patron, Fr Robert Nash SJ, officiated, assisted by, amongst others, Fr. Niall O’Brien. Mullan’s AFrI colleague, Joe Murray, was groomsman.

On the evening of their wedding AFrI’s headquarter’s, The Third World Centre, Summerhill, Dublin, was attacked and set on fire. It was the third attack in as many months, but on this occasion it was to end AFrI’s very positive engagement with the local Summerhill and Sean MacDermott Street community. The newly weds spent the afternoon of their first day of marriage sifting through the rubble of AFrI before leaving on their honeymoon around Ireland.

AFrI moved temporarily to nearby Buckingham Street where they were welcomed by the Prisoners Rights Organisation (PRO). Following discussions with Mullan and his colleagues, the PRO made discreet enquiries locally to determine whether the attack had been carried out locally or by outsiders. Originally, when AFrI suffered its first attack, its premises had been ransacked in a manner that could have been the work of petty thieves from the locality looking to see if money was kept on the premises. They got nothing. The second attack and finally third attack in which its premises were set on fire, showed a degree of intent and intimidation that seemed beyond the motivation of petty thieves. Furthermore, Mullan and his colleagues had developed a very good relationship with the local community, the highlights of which were the 1982 international conference on world peace and poverty; the stop-off by Fr Niall O’Brien upon his return to Ireland following his imprisonment in the Philippines; and the visit by Bishop Desmond Tutu in the summer of 1984.

AFrI suspicions that the attack may have been my outsiders was heightened by the opinion of the organization’s Special Adviser, Sean MacBride SC. All three attacks happened in the aftermath of the visit to Ireland by Bishop Desmond Tutu, hosted by AFrI, during which he again called for economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. And, more recently, Mullan had persuaded Tutu to publicly declare his support for the Dunne’s Stores Strikers.

MacBride was of the opinion that the attacks may have been politically motivated by agents of the apartheid state whom, he said, were active throughout the world; and who were tasked with disrupting the work of groups and organizations who were running effective campaigns against the regime.

Following their investigations, the Prisoners Rights Organisation informed AFrI that their contacts in the locality had reported back to them that locals had not been involved in the attack.

Those responsible were never identified.

Within a couple of months of the destruction of their premises, AFrI moved to premises on Mountjoy Square, Dublin. A major part of AFrI’s spirit – its relationship with the Sean MacDermott Street community – was lost.

The move, however, was to have a silver lining for Mullan. A floor above the new AFrI offices in Mountjoy Square housed the premises of Wolfhound Press, one of Ireland’s leading publishers, founded by Irish poet Seamus Cashman. Occasionally Mullan and Cashman met on the stairwell leading to their respective offices. The two men became friends, a friendship which remains strong to this day.

In 1996, when Mullan was working on Bloody Sunday, it was to Seamus Cashman and the Wolfhound Press he turned. Their partnership was to play a significant role in changing the course of history.

 

‘As a family, we were lucky to learn that Charles was dead. The torture of not knowing is the cruelest of all.’

• – Joyce Horman

Fr Rudy Romano was a Filipino Redemptorist priest associated with the Irish province. He was committed to the work of social justice and joined the popular movement for political and economic change. On 11 July 1985 he disappeared and has not been seen since, presumed murdered by a pro-Marcos death squad. Amongst the campaigns Mullan spearheaded in AFrI was the sending of 1000 postcards to the head of the Filipino military who later complained about them to the head of the Redemptorist Fathers in the Philippines, and asked that the people of Ireland stop sending them. That news was a confirmation that we were on the right track and we intensified our efforts.

AFrI also funded a documentary film about the disappearance of Fr. Romano and the inconsistencies in the Filipino

State’s denials about his whereabouts. The documentary was featured on RTE’s main television news on the night it was publicly screened at Trinity College, Dublin, on 26 April 1987, the same day Mullan’s first child, Thérèse, was born.

To help highlight the campaign, Mullan and his AFrI colleagues organized a special screening of the 1982 Costa Gavras movie ‘Missing’, about the disappearance and murder of Harvard graduate, Charles Horman, following the US-backed overthrow of the Chilean President, Salvador Allende in 1973. Charles’ young widow, Joyce (played by Sissy Spacek), and his father and mother, Ed (played by Jack Lemmon) and Elizabeth, came for the screening at the Savoy Cinema, Dublin, and stayed with the Mullan family in their modest home in Clondalkin, Dublin.

At the end of the screening Joyce addressed the packed cinema stating: ‘As a family, we were lucky to learn that Charles was dead. The torture of not knowing is the cruelest of all.’

Elizabeth Horman, a distinguished New York artist, returned to her home in Manhattan where she completed two paintings reflecting on her visit to Ireland. One, of children playing on a swing at a tree close to Mullan’s home; and the other portraying a young Don Mullan in a field, seeking a lost sheep. She told Mullan that it was how she thought of him.

Following the death of Ed Horman in 1991, Elizabeth presented the painting of the children to Don on a visit to New York later that year. She told him that it was Ed’s favorite painting and it hung on the wall of his nursing home room until he died. Elizabeth Horman passed away on May 10, 2001, aged 96.

The Mullan family and Joyce Horman remain good friends.

 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 1953

Mullan created AFrI’s ‘Just a Second’ Campaign. Its primary objective was to demonstrate the wastage of the Arms Race in a world of hunger and poverty. The campaign, working with schools in Ireland, raised the equivalent of ten-seconds of Arms Race expenditure (based on UN figures) 1980s to:

(i) fund small poverty projects in the developing world and

(ii) demonstrate how resources could be used for life-giving rather than death dealing purposes.

Amnesty International, quoting the think-tank journal ‘Solutions’  estimate that the global arms trade is currently approaching US$100 billion annually.

AFrI made available the results of the ‘Just a Second’ campaign in a publication by the same name.

In 2015 AFrI revived Mullan’s idea.