Ruadhán Jones
Luke-Peter Silke At just 23, Luke-Peter Silke leads a very busy life. As well as studying Creative Writing in university, he is the secretarial assistant to Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín, a local representative for the same party and is active among many of the pro-life organisations around the country.
Mr Silke believes it’s important that Catholic values have a voice on the public stage and this inspires him to devote his time to politics.
“I would just encourage other young people – I’m 23 myself – to get involved in politics because so much of our society is dictated to by the world of politics,” Mr Silke tells me over the phone. “If we want to make change, we really need to invest ourselves in politics, ideally one pro-life like Aontú, and get active. It’s amazing what can be done.
“There’s no need for despair. When we reflect on the age my generation is in, I’d be very confident that we could make great strides in my lifetime and it’s my generation that will be able to change things for the better.”
Faith was part of Mr Silke’s life from the beginning. He was brought up in a rural village, he explains, and went to Mass along with the other local families every Sunday.
“I always had a little bit of faith,” Mr Silke begins, “and then when I went to secondary school in the Holy Rosary College of Mountbellew. There was a nun on the board of management and there was a nun who was kind of a chaplain in the school. She was really a lovely, lovely person and I had a very positive experience in religious education in the school, and indeed the work of the Church, the work they were doing and what that particular congregation of nuns had brought to that rural town.
“They had practically built the school from a galvanised shed when they arrived in 1965. They started teaching in a galvanised shed and bit by bit they built into fantastic school. I was impressed by their mission and attitude to people, the concern they had for students.”
In transition year, Mr Silke took the opportunity to explore his passion for local history by interviewing older people in his village and writing a book. This process gave him a deeper appreciation for the faith and what it meant to people.
“I cycled round my village, interviewing lots of elderly people about their life stories and in many cases the hardships they endured,” Mr Silke says. “I spoke to a lot of elderly people who had a large number of children and experienced extreme poverty in their youth. Their faith really impressed me.
“The way they soldiered on without complaining – I’d often hear them say, we offered it up. They offered up any suffering they experienced in life. There were a number of priests and nuns in that generation that I was interviewing, who would have done fantastic mission work abroad and there were incredible stories of the work they did.
“One particular priest in my locality was missioning in communist China in the 50s and was expelled from China by the communists. Hearing these stories really impressed me and I began to value more the faith that I had, and the faith my family and friends had. To me faith was very natural, I suppose it was just something always there but I didn’t cherish it so much until I began to speak to people and study stories of saints and the history of Catholicism and Christianity in the country and what it meant to people in this country.”
It was in part this new-found interest in the faith, and partly the nature of modern Ireland, that drew Mr Silke into political activism. The values of Catholicism and the work done “by Catholic and Christian organisations in feeding the poor or issues like human trafficking… these would be values very close to me and values that I suppose are excluded from the political sphere”, Mr Silke explains.
“The right to life would be one of those issues, we should value all human life at all stages. That translates into a number of different policies, which are all part of the vision of Aontú, party formed by Tóibín after the 2018 referendum on abortion. I joined that party and started helping him. I’m still doing creative writing in Galway, so those were the kind of skills I brought to the world of politics, in terms of writing and debating and things like that. I’m Deputy Tóibín’s secretarial assistant, so I work in the Dáil and I’m very much enjoying it.”
Luke-Peter’s involvement in politics began in earnest when he started college. The debate around abortion and the Eight Amendment was heated at the time, and there was a lot of tension on campus at the time, he says.
“I got involved in that and even more so after we were defeated back in 2018,” Mr Silke continues. “I’m involved in students for life as well, and we have a number of student groups active on campuses across the country. For example, here in Galway, we had a campaign in the last year or so, there were moves to increase the fees for the creche on campus.
“We would have been one of the first groups to oppose that and act against it. It would be issues like that and I think as well, you know, a lot of people in the Catholic world might have an us versus them mentality and think that colleges are a cold place for people of faith. To an extent, that is true, but I find when you are working on issues like this, you can actually find common ground with people.”
Looking toward the future, Mr Silke hopes to continue working his way into politics. He has been nominated as Aontú’s local representative for Tuam and hopes that “with the help of God I’ll be contesting the next local election in this area”.