I couldn’t tell you when I first met the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education, sometime around the turn of the century I suspect. I feel like I’ve known Phil Glendenning and his comrades there since forever, the reason being that you instantly recognise the people who you could easily be fighting alongside in the trenches of our beautiful, collective struggle for a just society. 

The image is wired to my brain.  October 1999, a group of five Australian Aboriginal leaders gather outside the gates of Buckingham Palace having just met with Queen Elizabeth to discuss the issue of rights and reconciliation.  In the lead up to the meeting, Patrick Dodson had invited youth representatives of ‘both sides’ in Northern Ireland (part of our Let’s Talk project) to join them at Buckingham Palace.  Nothing captures the relationship between our NGO 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World in Ireland and the Eddie Rice Centre in Australia better than that event.  

Resistance as a response to injustice and social inequities is not new. It is part of the experience of many religious and secular groups. It has received a boost as people protest top-down abuse of power: women’s rights and domestic violence; rights of asylum seekers, Indigenous people, climate justice, gay rights and racism. Social media has put resistance on the radar. It occurs within a particular social context and requires navigating various social, political, and economic relationships.

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