Interview by Dr Kate Smyth, Strategic Communications Officer
“My childhood and adolescent formative experiences helped my understanding of social justice and migration,” Caoimhe Butterly says, in thinking about how she became active in frontline responses to war, violence, and persecution. “I grew up in a family where there was conversation around human rights.”
Her father was a United Nations economist and her mother was a family therapist for survivors of political violence.
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She lived with indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala for years and after 9/11 worked in the Middle East including in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria: “It was supposed to be a gap year, and it turned into almost two decades.”
She became politically conscious after seeing TV footage in the 1980s of Israeli soldiers in the West Bank using rifles to break the bones of young Palestinian detainees. In going to Palestine herself, she worked with youth projects and as a First Responder on ambulances in Jenin and Gaza, witnessing “the profound bravery, but also tenderness of Palestinian medics and ambulance workers throughout various invasions and attacks”.
Caoimhe was shot by an Israeli soldier at the age of 23, while trying to lead a group of Palestinian children to safety.
“The experience of getting shot is distinct and singular, I think, from other forms of physical violence. There is something specific about how the body holds and remembers. It becomes almost a cellular memory.”
She has since returned to Ireland and went back to education in her thirties, completing two Masters. She is now a trained psychotherapist, working with refugees and asylum-seeking communities.
She recently returned from working in refugee camps in Greece, with many families from Gaza. She also focuses now on doing “care-for-the-carers type of work.”
She tries to offer the resources and support to young volunteers and humanitarians that would have helped her in her early 20s.
“In order for any human rights or solidarity work to be sustainable, we need to acknowledge and have real space to process trauma, moral injury and overwhelm. To normalise the impacts that bearing witness to immense suffering can have.”
In thinking about how we can cope with the injustices happening in the world around us, she says:
“All emotions are valid, and that the deep, collective grief many are feeling needs to be a compass as well – the profound injustice, the fuelling of it, the complacency of so many governments globally.
"I know, personally, I will never unsee the broken bodies of children that we dug up from underneath the rubble in Gaza.
"I will never unsee those massacres, and the devastating grief of families in their wake.”
In the context of Ireland, Caoimhe says the community and voluntary sector here provides much of the support for people from more vulnerable communities, a culture of community and care that is often not provided by states or governments.
“There’s so much patriarchy in many political systems, in what we prioritise and valorise, and what is seen as too soft and not enough to do with productivity or success.”
She says that community education, in Ireland and beyond, can mirror the kind of approach taken by indigenous communities in the Global South, focusing on holistic practices of care.
“In community education settings in Ireland and in many working-class communities, there’s often food, and a focus on creating spaces of welcome and hospitality. But often people have to make a case for funding for any ‘extras’, like a tea and biscuit budget.”
In times of increasing division, anti-migrant thinking, and widespread political moves to the right, “we need to organise, educate, and use story-telling that is grounded in rights and social justice.”
She says that marginalised communities are often denied the services that would support them, including mental health and wellbeing supports.
“These are things that help us to make meaning in these times, and create the potential for intentional joy, and community, even within adversity. When we’re reacting to injustice and trauma, that space for joy contracts.
We need to resource and bolster the potential for creative resistance, but also for collective care.
“In school systems, children are being exposed more now to simple practices like mindfulness and breathwork. This is important because the very act of bearing witness to a world of such inequality can bring with it pain, and feelings of being anchor-less.
But in the five minutes a day that we could be doom scrolling, we can move into a more intentional space, around mobilising, but doing so from as grounded and regulated space as possible, from our own internal islands of refuge.”
However, she says, “that doesn’t mean we’re cloistered from the world outside. We must remain active and adaptive and responsive in terms of political movements and organising.
But we also need to integrate good psychological, physical, and emotional practices too.
Music and art, creative expression, being in nature, food and gathering, recognising that we’re living in a structure where the collective nervous system is often so dysregulated, and part of soothing it is through intentional, daily practices.”
Against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the very real horror of the atrocities being committed, as well as the ongoing injustices and inequalities here in Ireland, Caoimhe says she maintains a “deliberate” and “steely” approach of optimism and hope.
Referencing Kae Tempest’s poem “People’s Faces”, she says: “I see the potential for beauty and care on people’s faces. It’s a practice of trying to always lean into that space of compassion and curiosity, around every stranger, every human passed in the street.
"There is a subset – and unfortunately many of those are in positions of power globally at the moment – of narcissist, sociopathic, deeply violent beings on this planet. But I believe that most of humanity, if given the opportunity to act in ways that practice care for each other, will do the right thing.
I’ve worked in communities where even within the most difficult conditions and the most painful of losses and traumas, irrepressible seedlings of solidarity and love emerge.”
In thinking about how to maintain that sense of hope and collective action, she says:
“I often think of the idea of lighthouses of hope and courage signalling through the storms. I imagine all the organisers and community activists on little fishing boats in tumultuous seas, holding up a string of lights. I remind myself that we are many. I remind myself of our collective power and the quiet power of love. Joy, too, is a form of resistance.”
Caoimhe Butterly was the keynote speaker at a recent education policy discussion on community education and collective care, held by AONTAS at the Richmond Barracks in Dublin. Read more.