The Irish are coming....to Nicaragua

Helping hand: a Sandinista picks coffee with a farm worker in 1986. Photograph: Cindy Karp/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

The Irish Times is running a series on the Irish who traveled to Nicaragua during the 1980s to support the Sandinistas revolution. Here's an excerpt from The coffee-picking Irish.

The Irish brigades had one unexpected advantage over the others, says Circles Robinson. “The idea of there being a war wasn’t so strange to the Irish, and this made it easier for them to adapt. Those [Irish] brigades stood out as not being very demanding. They were satisfied with the conditions and with doing their best.”

There seems to be a consensus among those who dealt with them that the true value of the Irish effort lay outside coffee picking. Thomson says brigadistas went home with a much deeper commitment to Nicaragua.

“The idea was they would go back and work much better within solidarity than they had done before. Maybe they came only out of interest, but when they went back a lot of them worked for quite a while in solidarity.”

 And here is another piece with individual stories of those who traveled to Central America with ‘What I learned was personal, not political.’ Here's one story from Gerry McGrath, Dublin-based solicitor, who traveled to Nicaragua in 1989.

“What I learned was personal, not political: live in a hut with 30 people for a month and learn to be tolerant or you will explode. I didn’t find it particularly difficult, [as I was] very fit and healthy. There was a lot of gunfire at night, which was worrying if you dwelt on it. “I think the revolution was waning by that stage: people were weary of war. Our contribution [was] marginal. We contributed a lot to the people of the small UPE [state production unit] where we worked, but then we went off and left them. “I don’t know what propaganda value the Sandinista government got from us. It was harder for the US to bomb the place when we were there.”

The successful efforts of the brigadistas shouldn't be measured in the amount of coffee picked. They trips were more designed to promote global solidarity with individual Nicaraguans and the Sandinista revolution. They also had the added benefit of making it less likely that the Contras would bomb the cooperatives on which they were working.