Mags GarganMags Gargan meets the first person to hold the new position of CORI/IMU Justice Coordinator
A strong passion for social justice has driven Sr Sheila Curran all her life. With her appointment as the first person to fill the combined role of justice co-ordinator for both the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) and the Irish Missionary Union (IMU), she is currently putting that passion to work on behalf of migrants and refugees.
Sheila is a Sister of Mercy from Letterkenny, Co. Donegal. She joined at the age of 21, considered a late vocation at the time, and was attracted to the congregation because of their work in social outreach, community development and the “option for the poor”.
“My initial background was in social work and community development work,” she says. “I trained in the University of Ulster in Belfast and worked for a short time in childcare in Belfast in the late 80s during the time of some of the most violent years in Belfast, but that also helped me to have a different perspective on the world and to see the after effects of war and violence and what it does to people.”
Sheila then went to work in Dublin’s inner city at the Mercy Family Centre in South Brown Street with a community development project for women, children and young people.
“I lived in the flats in St Teresa’s Gardens which were in full flight of the drugs problem then in Ireland,” she says. Following a Masters in Equality Studies in UCD, Sheila went to work in Peru, where her ministry was shaped by her involvement with the Institute Bartolome de Las Casas, a non-governmental social justice and human rights organisation founded by the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez.
“It was there I suppose that the importance of the link between faith and life was so apparent,” she says.
“Peru had a 20-year internal war from 1980 to 2000 when over 70,000 people lost their lives, and that is a conservative estimate. So the people in coming to the cities were fleeing just like we see today people fleeing war, violence and hunger.
“So if that is your reality, how can you show people how God loves them and then ignore their plight? That has been the root challenge of my life. How can you say God loves people in the situations we have today and just sit back and do nothing?”
Biblical studies
After 14 years in Peru, Sheila completed a MA in Biblical Studies and a doctoral degree in Pastoral Theology in Chicago. She came back to Ireland in July 2014 and had to make a major adjustment coming home after almost 20 years out of the country. Her appointment to the new combined justice role last February means she is once again working at the coalface of social advocacy.
“The brief I was given for this year was to look at the issues of migration, asylum seeking and refugees and all that pertains to that.
“Also to look at areas of theological reflection and how as people who have committed their lives to a particular way of life, we can engage theologically with these very great issues today and to co-ordinate with other organisations who work in that field to be part of the voice of others and to bring a faith dimension to the issues that come up.
“So I would work with the membership and I also work with the Migrant Rights Centre, the Irish Refugee Council, Anti-Racism Network, Crosscare etc.”
Two issues that have dominated her work so far have been the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and the direct provision system for refugees applying for asylum in Ireland.
“We have a working group who have just put in a shadow report to the United Nations Human Rights Review that is coming up in 2016,” she says.
“We also participated in the lobbying on direct provision both in looking at implementing the 174 recommendations of the [government appointed] working group, but looking deeper at an analysis of the system itself because is it unjust and not a dignifying process.”
Sheila says that while Ireland is a strong advocate for the undocumented Irish abroad, we seem to be blinkered to the conditions of undocumented people living on our shores.
“We don’t allow refuges to be educated and we have them in direct provision centres that don’t even recognise their culture or family life, and they are on a pittance of money,” she says.
Moral issues
“To have a preferential option for the poor means standing in the place of others – that gives you the impetus to say there is something badly wrong with this system. Nobody stands in direct provision and asks, is this how I want to rear my family, is this what I want for my home?”
She says seeing the interconnectedness in life is very important and that Christians have a baptismal duty to speak out on moral issues.
“If faith is separate from life, if my life is separate from my neighbour, if my world is just me and not everyone else, if we don’t connect in, then we don’t see the imperative.
“We must see that what I do affects somebody else or the planet, and what happens in one part of the world, whether it is Syria, Sudan or Libya, affects me, and calls on me especially as a Christian to say that is my brother or sister or that is the planet I have been given stewardship of. I think that is the huge challenge,” she says.
“The beauty of being part of an organisation like CORI and the IMU is that we have an international network. We have people on every continent who can give the information and the facts of what’s going on and we know where to get credible information.
“That is the beauty of being part of a universal Church and that is what we can use to work to our strength and speak out as one global voice.”