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Postcards from the Edge
Ali Hewson's husband, Bono, is one of the most famous men on the planet, but she has always shied away from publicity. So how come she's breaking cover?
The Guardian, April 23, 2002
Martin Wroe
On Friday morning the prime minister, Tony Blair, can expect an uncomfortable message from the people of Ireland. A million postcards are en route to Downing Street, each with the message: "Tony, look me in the eye and tell me I'm safe." The mail will arrive on the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, when an explosion ripped away the roof of a nuclear reactor in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, causing the world's worst nuclear accident. The postcards -- several hundred thousand have also been sent to Prince Charles and Norman Askew, head of British Nuclear Fuels -- are the boldest signal yet that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria is making our Irish neighbours feel increasingly unsafe.
Fronting the campaign is a woman for whom celebrity is a way of life, but whose face will be almost entirely unfamiliar to most people on this side of the Irish Sea. Ali Hewson has been married to one of the most famous men on the planet, the U2 singer Bono, for almost 20 years, but has spent most of that time studiously avoiding the limelight. It is a measure of how strongly she feels about the Sellafield issue that she has chosen to come out of her husband's sizeable shadow, and mastermind what may be the first time the population of one country has lobbied en masse the government of another.
"Sellafield has already made the Irish Sea the most radioactive in the world," says Hewson, "and if an accident happens or there is a terrorist attack, depending on which way the wind blows, Dublin, Dundalk, Drogheda, Belfast and vast parts of Ireland would be uninhabitable. For ever." That may sound a touch apocalyptic, but Hewson, 41, has seen the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe close-up.
For the past eight years, as patron of the Irish charity Chernobyl Children's Project, she has been visiting Belarus to work with children affected by Chernobyl. When the accident happened on April 26 1986, vast clouds were released into the atmosphere, exposing people to radioactivity 100 times greater than that from the Hiroshima bomb. Nearly three-quarters of people affected by fallout were not in Ukraine at all, but across the border in Belarus.
"I have seen children born with deformities and dying in orphanages," says Hewson. "Children who have had their thyroid glands removed and will need to take medicine for the rest of their lives -- if they can get it. And because radiation does not respect borders, in Ireland we are in the same position as Belarus. We did not ask for this nuclear power base to be built beside us, but we are just as vulnerable as the people of Britain."
There is almost nothing about Ali Hewson that conforms to the stereotype of a rock star's wife. The discreet mother of four met her future husband at Mount Temple secondary in Dublin -- the same school where, in 1976, U2's drummer Larry Mullen pin.
Postcards from the Edge
Ali Hewson's husband, Bono, is one of the most famous men on the planet, but she has always shied away from publicity. So how come she's breaking cover?
The Guardian, April 23, 2002
Martin Wroe
On Friday morning the prime minister, Tony Blair, can expect an uncomfortable message from the people of Ireland. A million postcards are en route to Downing Street, each with the message: "Tony, look me in the eye and tell me I'm safe." The mail will arrive on the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, when an explosion ripped away the roof of a nuclear reactor in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, causing the world's worst nuclear accident. The postcards -- several hundred thousand have also been sent to Prince Charles and Norman Askew, head of British Nuclear Fuels -- are the boldest signal yet that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria is making our Irish neighbours feel increasingly unsafe.
Fronting the campaign is a woman for whom celebrity is a way of life, but whose face will be almost entirely unfamiliar to most people on this side of the Irish Sea. Ali Hewson has been married to one of the most famous men on the planet, the U2 singer Bono, for almost 20 years, but has spent most of that time studiously avoiding the limelight. It is a measure of how strongly she feels about the Sellafield issue that she has chosen to come out of her husband's sizeable shadow, and mastermind what may be the first time the population of one country has lobbied en masse the government of another.
"Sellafield has already made the Irish Sea the most radioactive in the world," says Hewson, "and if an accident happens or there is a terrorist attack, depending on which way the wind blows, Dublin, Dundalk, Drogheda, Belfast and vast parts of Ireland would be uninhabitable. For ever." That may sound a touch apocalyptic, but Hewson, 41, has seen the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe close-up.
For the past eight years, as patron of the Irish charity Chernobyl Children's Project, she has been visiting Belarus to work with children affected by Chernobyl. When the accident happened on April 26 1986, vast clouds were released into the atmosphere, exposing people to radioactivity 100 times greater than that from the Hiroshima bomb. Nearly three-quarters of people affected by fallout were not in Ukraine at all, but across the border in Belarus.
"I have seen children born with deformities and dying in orphanages," says Hewson. "Children who have had their thyroid glands removed and will need to take medicine for the rest of their lives -- if they can get it. And because radiation does not respect borders, in Ireland we are in the same position as Belarus. We did not ask for this nuclear power base to be built beside us, but we are just as vulnerable as the people of Britain."
There is almost nothing about Ali Hewson that conforms to the stereotype of a rock star's wife. The discreet mother of four met her future husband at Mount Temple secondary in Dublin -- the same school where, in 1976, U2's drummer Larry Mullen pin.
