Paul Nicholson SJ

My Dad was a Labour councillor, so I spent hours as a boy delivering election leaflets.  After a full day's work, he'd spend three or four nights a week sitting on council committees, or holding surgeries for the local constituents, or canvassing from door to door.  But I didn't get to vote the first time that Margaret Thatcher got in, because I had been sent on pilgrimage to Loyola.

During one of my noviceship experiments I lived in a hostel in Manchester where thirty men, who would otherwise have been homeless, lived in three rat-infested Victorian terraced houses, amid a waste-land of demolished streets.  When we finally managed to get one of them a council flat, he gave it up after three days to move back to the hostel because he was lonely.

The civil war in El Salvador was at its height while I was studying philosophy in Dublin.  The students organised a solidarity committee.  A Salvadorean woman came to talk to us passionately of the fight for human rights in that impoverished country, and of the faith that sustained their struggle.  Three months later she was killed by the US-sponsored security forces.