Missionaries return to a changed Ireland and they come back with different experiences. The contributions that returning missionaries make in Ireland, particularly among the new migrant groups, refugees and asylum seekers, should be considered. Various centres were established by different missionary organisations. For example, the Spiritans have a centre for refugees in Phibsboro, the Vincentians have established a centre and the Migrant Rights Centre was established in Beresford Place in Dublin. Cois Tine was established in Cork. It is a centre for refugees and asylum seekers and was awarded a memorial award on behalf of the Anti-Poverty Resource Network to recognise its care of and dedication to the welfare of many of the non-nationals in Cork.
Many missionaries work with NGOs when they return and share their experience and skills in respect of HIV-AIDS. Many returned missionaries work at Merchant's Key and Ruhama. We have members in the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland and the working support group of Dóchas.
Our mission alive desk deals with many of the activities of returned missionaries. Through awareness and education programmes in schools and parishes, the desk aims to build bridges and reach out and embrace people of different cultures, languages and religions. It aims to create bridges of friendship among people in villages, towns and cities.
It is not easy to return to Ireland when one has lived for many years overseas. I work at the transition desk, which deals with the many missionaries who worked for long periods overseas in difficult circumstances which obliged them to deal with war, threats of violence and war, extreme poverty and the HIV-AIDS pandemic. Many of our members are burnt out, suffer from compassion fatigue and are not too well when they return home. As a number of missionaries have seen friends dying of AIDS, which afflicts us too, returning to Ireland can be very difficult. People also return, in terms of society and the church, to a very changed Ireland. Some time is needed for reorientation, retraining and education before we can settle back into the Irish scene.
I divide the returned missionaries with whom I come into contact into three groups. The first is the middle-aged group, namely, those aged 45 to 65. They are professional people — many are doctors, nurses and teachers — who need updating and retraining before settling back down. The next group is made up of the active retired. Thanks to social welfare schemes, these people do not have to worry about pensions but they become quite involved in the areas to which I referred earlier, such as the Merchants Quay project, and share their skills. The final group comprises the elderly, who need support and care.
We are currently carrying out research in the Irish Missionary Union, IMU, to obtain a true profile of missionaries returning to Ireland, what the congregations do in terms of making people aware, before they return, of changes that have occurred here and the assistance available to them on returning. We want to see how we can best respond to our members and then establish further programmes. We currently run a number of workshops to enable people to settle in. These explore transition, or what I term "reverse mission". They consider people's values and skills and match them with the needs of society. We give the participants ongoing support and individual guidance. As I mentioned previously, many of them work in war situations. We also run a number of workshops dealing with stress and trauma in the life situations in which we work.
We work with groups such as Comhlámh. In September we will be organising a five-day workshop to deal with critical instance stress management. We work with the Irish Council of Churches, with which we had a study day last November. We face the same issues as those faced by the various other churches in Ireland. We also work with local members of the Church of Ireland.
Our dream is to have an ecumenical missionary centre for the island of Ireland. We have met in Belfast and would like a centre for all of Ireland — to cater for missionary and development workers — a place to which people can return, where they will have the space to debrief, where physical and psychological assessments can be carried out, where re-orientation and retraining can take place and where development and education programmes can be provided. This would allow us to share our experiences with the people of Ireland.