Mags GarganMags Gargan speaks to a Mercy Sister working at the heart of global development policy
A number of goals which will shape global development policy for the next 15 years are due to be adopted by governments worldwide at the General Assembly’s United Nations Sustainable Development Summit over the weekend.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which essentially replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are the result of intergovernmental negotiations and the largest consultation programme conducted by the UN.
While world media attention will be drawn to the summit, and Pope Francis’ address to the General Assembly tomorrow (Friday), perhaps little attention will be garnered by the significant influence of faith-based organisations on the contents of the goals – including the Sisters of Mercy, Mercy International Association who are represented by an Irishwoman.
Sr Áine O’Connor, who was born in Limerick and grew up in Dublin, entered the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas in 1995. As a speech and language therapist, she had gone to the States at the age of 26 to do research in swallowing disorders for her PhD dissertation for Trinity College Dublin and while volunteering at a Sisters of Mercy hospital she found “the mission was alive and vibrant” and felt called to be part of it.
Administration
Working initially in health-care administration in mission and values, Sr Áine spent a year and a half travelling to the different countries where Sisters of Mercy are located, to look at the root causes of global poverty and gain experience of the reality of people on the ground, before being appointed to the position of Mercy Global Action Co-ordinator at the UN in 2011.
The Sisters of Mercy, Mercy International Association have had a special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN since 1998, representing the experience of the most vulnerable and providing input into global policy-making. They are one of almost 3,200 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) with a consultative status – about 10% of which are from a faith background with the majority being Christian.
“The reason we wanted to apply for special consultative status was because we are a global organisation. The concerns we were seeing on the ground impacting global justice, global poverty, violence against women, basic issues of life like food, water, land, were global justice concerns. We considered it really important since the UN is the only body who looks globally across issues, an inter-governmental body, that it was a place to be to speak the reality from the ground and to bring back to the people on the ground what’s coming from the UN,” Sr Áine says.
Her experience over the last four years in the UN is that faith-based groups are respected as a credible voice for the needs of the people. “I think we do have a credibility at the UN, not only a moral and ethical voice, but member states know we are there for the people and they know we are focused on a rights-based approach. It’s more about justice than charity. We want to reorder systems that have created poverty and injustice,” she says.
“Member states see that they can rely on us for a credible experience from the ground and a critique that is not motivated by profit but to serve the people’s interest. By the very fact that we are in so many different countries and have a spiritual and faith-based perspective gives us a credibility.
“Member states also know that we will listen and enter into dialogue and that we won’t hold back or sugar coat what we think is causing the issues from the ground. We are respectful, but we bring to the table an analysis very much based on justice and serving the people’s real human rights and needs.”
Most of Sr Áine’s day-to-day work is spent meeting with other NGOs that share the same global concerns, such as unsustainable development and the effects of major mining projects, and in planning for formal meetings taking place at the UN “where we hope to intervene and bring a grassroots perspective and to talk to member states about the policies being implemented”.
As we speak she and her colleagues at the UN are working on a guide to understanding water and sanitation from a human rights perspective, something which the Sisters of Mercy played a significant role in having included in the political declaration which will frame the SDGs, after relentless campaigning with other faith-based groups and global water justice groups.
“The Sisters of Mercy worldwide have a growing concern about the global water crisis,” Sr Áine says. “The statistics are staggering: 1.6 billion drink fecally contaminated water and 2.5 billion remain with no access to basic sanitation. The terrible numbers of children and adults dying from water related disease is increasing.
“Through Mercy Global Action, the sisters from various countries were bringing forward this concern not just about water sanitation and deaths, but depletion, corporations draining water, mega mining projects causing depletion or other devastating big development projects.
“We wanted to see the goal based on the human right to water and sanitation, because the MDGs, which had a target on water and sanitation, have failed in many ways. They didn’t address inequalities. For example you could have a pipe but not have water, and sanitation problems are still terrible. We believe that a human rights approach says to governments that people have a right to water and sanitation, and so it prioritises people and domestic needs over corporations and other needs. It enables people to exercise their rights.”
Management
The “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” is goal number six of the 17 SDGs proposed for adoption by the UN this weekend. However, it does not end there; once the declaration and the goals have been adopted advocacy groups like the Sisters of Mercy will be monitoring how the goal is implemented and interpreted by governments.
“One thing we want to caution against in the SDGs is that governments look to corporations to finance and privatise water services. We are pushing for governments to claim water for the common good, to provide it through a human rights approach and that public funds and finances are used for infrastructure as well,” Sr Áine says.
“I am very cautious that the SDGs don’t radically address the root causes of unsustainable development and injustices happening to people world over. However, it is an opportunity to look with the world to what the Earth and the people need, especially the most vulnerable.
“If we have a human rights approach to this agenda, which is accepted in the declaration, and are open to the challenge of the root causes and addressing inequality, then we will be successful.
“But if we implement it without addressing those, we will have unsustainable development, increased poverty and inequality with increased human rights violations.”
It is an exciting time to be at the UN and while Sr Áine says she does not expect she will get to meet Pope Francis when he addresses the summit, she received a massive boost from the publication of Laudato Si’.
“It was of tremendous importance to us for the recognition of the human right to water and sanitation,” she says. “The encyclical is very inspiring. It is also very radical. I think it looks at the root causes. It looks in the eye what is the role of politics and the economy.
“Pope Francis calls on the moral voice – he talks about how the question of justice must enter the debate on the environment.
“There is a huge call in that and that is seriously one of the reasons why we are at a place like the UN, because of our sense of the quest for justice and having that come into issues of development, including ecological and environmental. I think it is prophetic and has really given hope to people,” Sr Áine says.