A excellent article on Caoimhe

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday December 06, 2002 13:54 by Mic

This sums up my opinions on Caoimhe.

Caoimhe Butterly's actions fail to address the great suffering in the Middle East, writes John O'Keeffe

WE ALL like to imagine that we have friends who would go the extra yard for us. One thing we might not expect of them, however, would be to sit in a tree in Ballsbridge on our behalf unless, of course, we had friends in the Ireland-Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. This particularly noble gesture was carried out earlier in the year on behalf of one Caoimhe Butterly, 23, who is currently fighting the good fight and getting injured on behalf of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories a sort of Kate Adie in pull-ups.

Ms Butterly has had a lot on her mind over the last year, particularly Palestinians whom, it appears, she is going to save from Israeli annihilation thus the tree protest. She was besieged earlier on in the year in Yassar Arafat's compound in Ramallah when two of her mates back home then had the somewhat ingenious idea of hoisting themselves up into a tree in the Israeli Embassy to support her lone struggle against the despotic forces of evil.

Her friends were very cross indeed and were prepared to sit there until they received a "satisfactory statement" from the Israeli Ambassador. Forget suicide bombers, the Intifada or Holy Jihad, one can only imagine the fear of God that must have gone through the Israeli Embassy on hearing this ultimatum. Her friends then cried a little on the Gerry Ryan Show (from their tree) and one of them simply said "Caoimhe is my friend" perhaps the only moment of pathos in the whole interview.

Meanwhile, back in downtown Ramallah, Ms Butterly was offered the option to leave the compound by ambulance due to the fact that earlier she had indicated it was time for her to go. Inexplicably, she got a second wind and refused the offer of escape undoubtedly to spend another night attempting to see the wood from the trees.

Now Ms Butterly is back in the news again. She has now been shot in the leg whilst attempting to bring three Palestinian children to safety. She has advised us all that she is "fine, just feeling very sore". Her description of events leading up to the shooting are instructive. "One soldier stopped but an armoured personnel carrier pulled up and started shooting in the air. Most of the kids dispersed and as I was trying to drag some children away I saw an Israeli with his gun pointing blatantly at me. He shot at me and when I fell down he kept shooting up the road." She was then apparently dragged away by the children and put on a makeshift stretcher, before being brought tohospital.

Ms Butterly's approach to the Intifada may endear her to six-year-old children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers but it does beg the question, what on earth is she doing there? The line peddled is that Ms Butterly and others have been in the Palestinian territories since Israel briefly reoccupied the area earlier this year and are working with other foreigners to provide protection to Palestinians as an international presence. Sorry don't buy it.

Ms Butterly and her colleagues are not only doing little for the Palestinian cause, they are unwittingly harming it. Whatever her motivation, stewarding rioting children and having cups of tea with Mr Arafat et al in Ramallah is not going to better the Palestinians' lot the Middle East conflict runs a little deeper than this.

That the Palestinians have suffered grave injustice at the hands of the Israelis is a given. But Ms Butterly might like to note also that Israelis assemble body parts on a daily basis thanks to extremists in the camps and beyond. She may also like to consider the views of George Mitchell (who brokered a peace in Northern Ireland) that the present Intifada began as a deliberate means of extracting further concessions from Prime Minister Barak, who had been offering a return of 97 per cent of the Occupied Territories.

Barak is now, of course, history but as columnist Kevin Myers has noted, "the Intifada has become an endless celebration of death itself".

Ms Butterly's political tourism not only fails to address the Palestinians and their suffering, it neatly sums up Ireland's designer interest in the Middle East problem. Every so often we hear that she or one of her colleagues are up trees, playing soldiers with Arafat, or, more recently, getting shot and we are meant to applaud their behaviour brave middle class Irish warriors fighting the good fight on behalf of an oppressed people. As she nurses her latest injuries, Caoimhe Butterly might now well like to reflect on the manner in which actions and behaviour like hers fail to address the indescribable suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike.

John O'Keeffe is Head of the Law School at Portobello College, Dublin.