World AIDS Day 2024
In 1917, at the AGM of the Dublin Prison Gate Mission on Blackhall Place, the Rev J.J. Macaulay proposed the adoption of the Annual Report. The Evening Herald at the time reported Macaulay as stating that:
“…the distressing state of the housing conditions in the city should come with a sharp appeal to the conscience of everyone with a sense of citizenship. They might not be directly to blame for this, but yet many of them were to blame, for they had refused to face these things. They had carefully kept to Pembroke, Rathgar, and such districts and let the central poor streets alone.”
This fascinating challenge is made all the more remarkable by the fact that Macaulay was the Minster of Christ Church, Rathgar. He was addressing his own congregants. Growing up, I passed his photograph hundreds of times in the stairwell of that church. Macaulay would go onto become the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, that denomination’s key national leader.
The Prison Gate Mission operated as a laundry for ‘rescued’ young women. Along with another laundry (of the Dublin Midnight Mission) it is oft forgotten in light of more prominent venues, mainly as it operated with a Protestant evangelical ethos and so lies outside the dominant mode of ecclesial and social memory in Ireland.
The Midnight Mission and Prison Gate Mission would merge in 1922 to become Bethany Home which was investigated by the Government for the 2021 Mother and Baby Homes Report, including as a result of much of its time on Orwell Road, Rathgar, a few hundred metres from the local Presbyterian Church.
These interweaving stories may seem like a distant yet interesting historical note, but Rev. Macaulay’s words ring through the decades and connect no less with our contemporary circumstances. The challenge to “face these things”, to acknowledge the paradoxes of “blame” and to reflect on how actions of “carefully [keeping]” away from what was down the road, all resonate this World AIDS Day.
Legend: The Praxis Gathering at the “Home” memorial on Buckingham Street, Dublin. Photo: Chipo Harper
At the recent Praxis Gathering, we brought a group to the “Flame of Hope” or “Home” memorial that sits at the junction of Sean McDermott Street and Buckingham Street in North East Inner City Dublin. The monument remembers those who died from drug-related causes, including HIV, in the local area over the past four decades or so.
It carries a few distinctive characteristics in the lexicon of HIV and drugs memorials. It carries no names, one of the reasons being that the scale and ongoing reality of death mean the size of the edifice would be insufficient. HIV mortality and morbidity may have changed spectacularly as a result of medical advances - someone on the effective medication cannot transmit the virus onto someone else - but drug-related deaths in the broader sense continue.
Also, the monument is partly made by metals donated by local residents. Cutlery and miraculous medals are among the items which were smelted down. So the inner place of shelter and grief, in communities that were devastated by HIV and drug related deaths, comes onto the streets, its wisdom crying out in hope for a new beginning that, it appears, will not come.
What is key to remember here is that these deaths were not a mere accident of fate or even individual personal choice. They are deeply interwoven with the neglect that the north east inner city of Dublin, and many other communities, were afforded over the centuries. The Irish Times, almost one year ago and ten days after the Dublin riot placed this relationship of the area with its neighbouring constituencies into direct terms:
“The truth is that ever since independence successive administrations – and by extension the people who elected them – have treated the population of Dublin’s inner city with suspicion and disrespect. From the tenements of the early 20th century onward, people who generally live in the comfortable suburbs have made decisions that affect the lives of those who live in the centre. Too often those decisions
have been misconceived. Sometimes they have been disastrous.”
Echoing Macaulay’s challenge from over a century ago, this is what we are called to face today. (Side note - if you are bemused or confused that Gerard Hutch in Dublin Central garnered so many votes, then you may need to explore what it means to “face these things” across the lines of our Dublin constituencies).
This facing is the difference between lament and sadness. We may remember with sadness the loss of loved ones but with lament we remember and acknowledge the injustices which may have informed their deaths - naming those injustices in their material form and finding a transcendent hope out of them.
On this New Years Day for Christians, as we begin the annual liturgical journey by waiting in hope for the coming Christ, we remember that St. John of the Cross stated that “Silence is the first language of God”.
Before you celebrate the incarnation itself, take some time, in silence, to hear the cries that He hears. Take some time to face the things that separate us from our neighbour, across unreal lines we have constructed or inherited. Take some time to consider how those lines carefully keep us apart. And get ready, for the startling incarnation of the One who will make all things new, who is promised to tear down rulers from their thrones and send the rich away empty. He will not come, as Micheal Longley’s tiny poem illustrates, in the way we expect:
The cosmos-shaper has come down to earth:
Mary is counting his fingers and toes
Richard Carson leads the team at ACET Ireland, who over three decades on from their founding, continue to respond to HIV in Dublin and beyond with projects in community addiction and migrant health