Pádraig Grant, founder of Orphan Relief
Interview by Eoin Colfer
January 18th 2009
I have known Pádraig Grant for most of his life. I say his life because if I didn’t then I have no doubt that Mr. Grant would write a scathing note to Mr. Mooney pointing out that I am several months if not years older than him. We have many things in common; both of us are fine handsome Wexford men, we both spent most of the eighties hanging around the Arts Centre and we were both dressed by his Mammy at one stage or another.

Myself and Pádraig were passing acquaintances in the CBS. We could not really communicate as Pádraig was a townie and I was from Clonard which was considered the culchie boonies at the time. By the time I had kicked the cowpats from my wellingtons of a morning, Master Grant and the other townies would already be ensconced in the most comfortable school desks, sipping from little cartons of the best vintage Snowcream and having their temples massaged by a student teacher.
So our paths diverged. I went off to Carysfort College to pursue my ambition to become a primary teacher and Pádraig forged a career as a wonderful photographer whose popularity surpassed even that of Abba or Mike Murphy. It has been said that by nineteen ninety one in two Wexford families had an illegally copied photo of Pádraig’s hanging over the fireplace (I paid for mine, honest).

It was until about five years ago that I actually sat down with Mister Grant and had a meaningful conversation. This did not happen in the Tom Moore as might be reasonably expected, but rather in the depths of Mordor, or as non movie geeks call it: New Zealand, where Pádraig was now living and where I was on tour with the latest Artemis Fowl book.

So we met in a bar, surprise surprise for two Yellowbellies and much as I tried to steer the conversation back to myself, Pádraig insisted on talking about what he insisted were more important issues.
I slowly realised that Pádraig Grant is one of those mythical creatures who actually cares more about others than he does about himself. I’d read about these people in National Geographic but never actually met one before.
I had heard that Pádraig went into countries devastated by war and famine, and shot photographs for aid agencies, but what I hadn’t heard was that Pádraig had founded one of these agencies himself: IceAid which later became Orphan Relief chose small projects in Liberia and made a significant difference in the quality of life for the people there.

This pub chat led to several more chats back in Ireland and a relationship that has seen IceAid change its name to Orphan Relief and recruit several willing and able volunteers in Wexford. While most of us live in fear of a recession, Pádraig Grant continues to devote his life to the welfare of others.

Anyone who knows Pádraig is aware of how private he is and of how little he enjoys tootling his own trumpet, so it was with great difficulty I managed to drag the answers to the following questions from him over a series of coffee mornings and e-mails:
Was there a specific moment when you knew that you had to make aid work your career?
I am becoming more closely associated with aid work now because I chose to point my camera at some of the abominations of our time. I have been and always will be a subscriber to that brand of photographer that is a passionate participant rather than an objective observer. I am addicted to seeing new things because I am a photographer and vice versa. I have been to Somalia and watched 300, mostly kids, die from starvation every day in Baidoa, a small central town and endured the civil war that caused it courtesy of my five militia body guards. What could I do? I helped out any way that I could. I became the guy that would go and get stuff for the nurses, I took a road train of aid from Mogadishu to Baidoa at one point.
I have been arrested, briefly, as a British spy in Khartoum (“I’m not fucking British”, I indignantly told my accusers!) and wandered through the magnificent ancient birthplace of humanity that is Ethiopia. These experiences have left some scars and provided much more by way of inspiration and understanding.
I am still a photographer, I am still an aid worker. I guess I just followed my heart.


Eoin Colfer is the acclaimed
author of the Artemis
Fowl series
of books and is Orphan Relief's Patron


Padraig Grant is a photographer
and founder of Orphan Relief
Do you ever get disheartened by the sheer volume of help that is needed?
The big one obviously was in 1994, on the Congo border with Rwanda and 1 million people had set up refugee camps having fled from the genocide over the border. I was standing in an open field and as far as the eye could see there were decaying, swollen, bloody corpses littering the landscape. We’d spent two weeks clearing the roads and ditches of rotting bodies and transporting them to the burial site where the French military bulldozed them into vast pits; each layer of bodies covered with lime to aid decomposition.
Two weeks into my time and I was mentally, emotionally and physically wrecked, crushed, by the weight of it all. There were no positive lessons to be taken from that situation. Just pointless, fatalistic ones. So in the spirit of Beckett I said to myself “I can’t go on……I’ll go on”. The alternative doesn’t bring any joy.

Do you have any heroes in the business?
The real heroes are the people who have to endure calamity. Then there are the many, many thousands of local aid workers struggling to get good work done with little or no resources. Orphan Relief works with local aid workers to achieve locally appropriate results.
Of the western aid workers John Ging immediately springs to mind. He’s the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza and been all over the world‘s media during the latest slaughter . I worked with him in Congo in 1994 when he oversaw the GOAL operation including the body disposal and medical relief intervention. In these most extreme humanitarian crises you’ll find Irish people trying to fix the problems. I’ve seen it over and over on my travels and it’s something we can be very proud of as a race.

Are there misconceptions about aid work?
There is one misconception that I keep hearing and this is the notion that we can simply send things in a container to the poor people that need it and that‘ll sort the problem out. In development situations this doesn’t work because it undermines the local economy, it is expensive to ship and the vast majority of items shipped are found in country. (However, it is sometimes the only way to provide relief in emergency situations ). Orphan Relief believes, absolutely, that we must source materials and personnel locally. In this way we help the local economy in the best way possible.

On our next project in Liberia we will have with us the expertise of professional carpenters, electricians and architects but we will be providing employment on the work for about 40 local brick makers, carpenters, mechanics etc. The two guys from Wexford are Steve Wilson, a carpenter, and John Hayes, an electrician, will be coming out to Liberia to carry out urgent structural work at the Alfred and Agnes Memorial Orphanage in Monrovia. 

You are a calm person generally, but there must be some things that annoy you?
Waste, narcissism, greed and ignorance. Actually, these personality traits are all pretty much found in the same package. So I guess you could say that some people annoy me!
Seriously, of them all, though, it is waste that really gets my fire stoked. The waste of the world’s greatest resource, the waste of so much un-harnessed talent; the colossal waste of not providing basic educational opportunities for every child in the developing world.

Who is your favourite children’s author ?
Eoin Fowl or Artemis Colfer? (Just checking that you were awake- that is the correct answer, sort of)

What does your family think of you spending time away from them to help others?
I try to make my journeys as infrequently as possible and for as short a period as possible. I miss them terribly especially the little guy Olly who is 3 and a half now.

Why did you choose orphans specifically?
Pardon the pun but I needed to focus. I asked myself who were the most in need and the answer came back orphans in post conflict societies. No point throwing away development money on countries still experiencing war. However, Liberia has a peace process, a new government, a disarmament process and lots of new investment. It is at this time that they need the most help or they risk slipping back into older darker ways.
And after Olly came along it became a no-brainer.

Are we Irish a charitable nation? Or was that down to the Celtic Tiger?
Ireland donated the most amount of money per capita of any country to the Ethiopian humanitarian crisis in 1984 during the depths of the bleakest recession. I don’t expect or think that one period of boom, recently ended, has undermined this innate sense of generosity.

Do you think Wexford in particular is a generous town?
I am staggered by the generosity of Wexford people! Ever since I mooted the idea of a new Wexford based international development agency people have been so forthcoming with donations and ideas to raise money and offers to come share their skills on our projects. We even have a couple of the schools involved too. Fair play.

And so Pádraig rides off into the sunset with a twinkle in his eye and a six pack of stout under his arm. But seriously, there are hard times coming to Ireland, but if they are hard for us they are unimaginably harder for those already suffering terribly in the aftermath of famine and war. And while it would be easy to turn our back on the children of Liberia, preferring to look inwards for as long as this recession lasts, there are some local people, like Eleanor McEvoy, Michael Londra and Pádraig Grant who are prepared to go where others would not and see that what needs to be done, gets done.
I hate to be clichéd, but we need more of these people.
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