Previous winners have come from all walks of life, from all age groups and from all backgrounds all with one thing in common they inspire others. Share this article:. Brian found safety and peace in Westport following his release. Belfast is Brian Keenan's home city. Wreckage after a car bomb explosion in Beirut in January, Join our community for the latest news: Subscribe. One moment please Related News. News 1 year ago. By: Harry Brent - 1 year ago shares. News 1 hour ago.
Latest Sport. Sport 16 hours ago. By: Conor O'Donoghue - 16 hours ago 18 shares. He was taken to Mater Hospital in Dublin but against doctors' advice, quickly discharged himself. He also turned down all offers of counselling. Get ahead of the day with the morning headlines at 7. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up.
His determination to recover from his ordeal in his own way meant he didn't evenstay long with his two sisters, Elaine Spence and Brenda Gillham, who had campaigned relentlessly for his release.
I now see them regularly. He disappeared into the depths of the Irish countryside, where he remained for three years, barely seeing another soul.
Most people felt his continued isolation would turn him into an unstable recluse. Keenan knew better. It was the only place he could go, initially to wait until his co-hostage and soulmate John McCarthy was freed. He hadn't wanted to leave without him. McCarthy's release took another year. Then Keenan felt he could really heal. I had to do that on my own. Brian Keenan is small in stature, but in all other ways a giant of a man.
He thinks and feels deeply particularly about good, evil, love and hate and has that rare spiritual quality of inner peace usually found only in deeply religious people. Contrary to what one might expect, his horrific experiences have left him with an enormous capacity for love. He is compassionate rather than bitter. I also believe there's goodness in every individual. Even those who held me captive. Violence is a sign of frustration, anger and what happens when people cannot express their needs.
I hated hearing their anguish and pain. He bore his own torture with fortitude and bloody-mindedness. As the recipient of regular torture and violence at the hands of his captors, he cannot bear gratuitous violence of any kind. Like An Evil Cradling, the new book is lyrical in parts, drawing on a depth of emotion that seems all the more raw and honest because it contrasts so radically with the picture he paints of his parents' unwillingness, or inability, to indulge in the self-reflection at which their son has become a master.
But it's the nuts and bolts of his early life, in a working-class neighbourhood in the s, that strike you most forcefully. Keenan exquisitely describes the contrast between the exotic street names — his own was Evolina Street, next along was Syringa Street — and the ordinariness of life for its cash-strapped, often work-starved, inhabitants. His dad, who had been given up for dead after a plane crash in Africa while serving in the RAF during the war, later marrying his mother in a church in which his name had been carved prematurely on a war memorial, settled into life as a bus conductor and then a telephone engineer without complaint, never leaving the house without his cap and "singing in the morning as he stood in his vest and trousers at the kitchen sink sloshing handfuls of soapy water into his face".
Keenan remembers that his Sunday afternoon task was to cut up newspapers into six-inch squares as toilet paper for the outside loo. His mother, meanwhile, was at the heart of a street-centred community. In Evolina Street, no one locked the front door, even at night; other women came and went without knocking, simply blustering into one another's back rooms as if they were in their own homes.
When Keenan was born, girls from the street were chosen to help Brenda, his older sister, take him for walks and look after him. In a very real sense the street was your family," he writes.
That existence is light years from the spacious, comfortable, middle-class Dublin house in which Keenan is bringing up his own children it even has electronic security gates and one can only imagine the surprise with which it will eventually be read by Jack and Cal.
All the same, though, their father's childhood isn't entirely another country: the values instilled in Evolina Street, says Keenan, are still the values he lives by and wants to pass on to his sons. Keenan's parents are both dead — his father's death was pivotal in his decision to go to Beirut. It was as he carried his father's coffin that he made the decision to leave Belfast, and to seek a new life overseas as a teacher at the American University in Beirut.
At the time of the kidnap he was wearing one of his father's shirts, and that connection was a crumb of comfort to him — in An Evil Cradling, he writes movingly about how his dad became "not simply a memory but … a real presence … a presence I could feel more than see, a comforting reassurance that eased the hurt into a deeply filled sadness, yet that same sadness as it became reflective, lifted me". His mother died in having survived his captivity — something she rarely spoke about, Keenan says.
Mr Keenan is expected to be handed over to the Irish foreign minister by his Syrian counterpart at a ceremony in Damascus on Saturday morning. His release leaves around 12 Westerners held in Lebanon. Campaigners for the British hostages are urging the British Government to follow Dublin's lead and foster better relations with Iran.
Iran's ambassador to Britain was recalled last year after the controversy surrounding the publication last year of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses".
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