OPINION: We need epic peace, not epic fury
Ronan Scully wrote this opinion piece reflecting on the conflicts taking place in the world today. Ronan, from Charlestown in Clara, works for Self Help Africa.
The other morning, while driving quietly through the Midlands, I was listening to the radio when the presenter played Chris Rea’s haunting song Tell Me There's a Heaven.
As the music drifted through the car, the words lingered long after the final note faded. “Tell me there’s a heaven. Tell me that it’s true. Tell me there’s a reason. For what I’m seeing.”
It is a child’s question in the song that is innocent, honest, profound and painfully direct. Listening to it in these troubled days, I could not help thinking that perhaps it is the question many adults are quietly asking too. Because when we look honestly at the state of our world right now, the heart struggles to make sense of what it sees.
Across our fragile planet, conflicts rage and tensions deepen. Nations threaten one another while ordinary families pay the price. Children grow up in the shadow of sirens and bomb shelters. Communities are torn apart by violence, fear and suspicion. In many places across the world today, people wake each morning unsure if the day will bring safety or destruction.
Experts now warn that we may be living through one of the most dangerous periods in modern history. Billions of people live in regions affected by conflict. War and instability stretch across continents. Old rivalries harden. New hostilities ignite.
And yet behind every statistic are real human lives. Mothers who wait anxiously for sons and daughters to come home safely. Children who fall asleep frightened by sounds no child should ever hear. Communities who long simply for the ordinary blessings of peace. War may be discussed in the language of strategy and politics, but its reality is always deeply human. It is measured not in headlines but in heartbreak.
Earlier this week, I spent some quiet time walking around the graveyard in Clara, saying a few prayers for and to loved ones and friends who have gone before us. Anyone who has walked through an Irish graveyard knows the quiet reverence of those places such as the stillness, the wind moving gently through the trees, the weight of generations resting beneath the soil.
Standing there among the headstones, one cannot help but reflect on how fragile human life truly is. Each stone marks a life once lived, a story, a family, a set of hopes and dreams that once filled the days of someone who walked this earth just as we do now.
Later that same day I saw an image from a recent airstrike in the Middle East that I cannot shake from my mind. Over 170 innocent children were killed. What struck me most was not simply the number, but the haunting way their deaths were marked, 170 chalk-etched outlines in the dust. Small impressions on the earth where young lives had ended. The fragility of human life laid bare in chalk and dust.
Standing earlier among the quiet gravestones of Clara parish graveyard, and then seeing those chalk outlines of children far away, the connection was impossible to ignore.
Every one of those children should have grown old enough to have their own story written in the years ahead, not reduced to a mark in the dust. Each one should have laughed again. Played again. Dreamed again.
The sadness of that image settled deep in my heart. If I am honest, it left me with a mixture of grief, helplessness and a quiet anger that such suffering continues to be repeated in our world. Because the truth is that behind every headline there are human lives, children who laughed, mothers who loved, fathers who hoped their families would have a better future. And yet in our modern world we often discuss war in the language of strategy and geopolitics while forgetting the simple truth that these are human beings.
For those of us who try to stay informed about global affairs, the weight of it all can sometimes feel overwhelming. The devastation in Gaza and Iran and the Middle-East. The grinding war in Ukraine, Sudan and Ethiopia. Human rights abuses in the Congo and other resource-rich African nations. Violence in Myanmar. A worsening climate crisis. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence. The rising cost of living, homelessness and insecurity felt by many even here at home.
At times the list feels endless.
One begins to ask difficult questions about the direction we are travelling as a world. How did we reach a point where virtues like solidarity, compassion and dialogue are sometimes dismissed as weakness? How did we arrive at a culture where greed, aggression and destruction, whether in personal ambition or geopolitical power, are increasingly accepted as the price of success?
We live in an age where outrage spreads faster than understanding. Social media amplifies anger more easily than compassion. It is often easier to shout than to listen.
But the vast majority of people across this planet do not long for conflict. They long for peace. They long for safety for their children. They long for dignity in their daily lives. They long for the quiet security of knowing that tomorrow will not bring violence to their door.
And so the question from that song echoes again. "Tell me there’s a heaven. Tell me there’s a reason. Why am I seeing what I do." Perhaps what our wounded world is crying out for right now is something simple yet profound.
We need epic peace instead of epic fury. Hatred and Violence, whether expressed through antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia or any other form of bigotry, poisons communities and corrodes our shared humanity. Every act of hatred diminishes us all.
In a world that feels increasingly fractured, it has never been more important that we stand together against hate in all its forms. We may come from different cultures, traditions and beliefs, but our shared humanity matters far more than anything that separates us.
Ireland itself knows something about the long and painful journey from conflict towards peace. Our own history reminds us how divisions, if left to fester, can scar generations. But it also reminds us that reconciliation, however difficult, is always possible when courage and compassion begin to outweigh bitterness.
Peace is never built overnight. It grows slowly through dialogue, patience and humility. Perhaps that is why the ancient wisdom of scripture still speaks so powerfully today: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Those words are not sentimental. They are a challenge. Because peacemaking requires courage, the courage to resist hatred, the courage to listen deeply, and the courage to recognise the humanity in those we might once have called enemies.
Peace does not begin only in parliaments or peace treaties. It begins in the human heart. Every heart is, in its own quiet way, a small battlefield where anger and compassion struggle for influence. If anger wins there, its consequences ripple outward. But if compassion wins there, something extraordinary begins to happen. A small light appears. And that light spreads. It spreads through families. Through communities. Through nations. Until slowly, almost quietly the darkness begins to lose its hold.
Perhaps that is what the child in that Chris Rea song was really searching for. Not simply proof that heaven exists somewhere beyond the stars. But reassurance that humanity itself has not forgotten how to care for one another.
So as we move through these uncertain times, perhaps each of us might carry a simple but powerful resolve: To be gentler in a harsh world. To be braver in a fearful world. To be peacemakers in a divided world.
Because peace will not suddenly arrive through the decisions of powerful leaders alone. Peace grows when ordinary people in towns and villages, in homes and schools, in conversations and communities, quietly decide that hatred and violence of any kind will not have the final word. And maybe then, someday, when another child asks that haunting question, “Tell me there’s a heaven…,” we will be able to answer not simply with words, but with the evidence of our lives.
Lives that chose compassion. Lives that chose courage. Lives that chose epic peace instead of epic fury.
And perhaps that is where heaven begins, not far away in the clouds, but here on earth, whenever human beings decide that love will always be stronger than hate.