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needs. I became an ambassador for Variety Ireland, and when we were in lockdown, I did a campaign, supported by the ESB, to raise money to bring iPads to Direct Provision centres and create computer rooms where kids can do homework. I called the project “Make Education a Superpower” because I want kids to know that they don’t have to let their circumstances define them.’ She has received huge support from the Irish public, marred by some abusive trolling, with comments like “she should have been deported long ago” (on Twitter) and “a black woman doesn’t represent the prototype of Irish women” (Instagram). Uba’s reaction to this is ‘not to give people the satisfaction of engaging with their nastiness. I don’t bother reading online comments. Most people have been really positive, and why focus on negativity when there are much better things I could be doing.’ She applied for a short career break from Galway University Hospital to focus on Miss World – ‘when you’re dealing with patient samples, you need to give 100%; you can’t be distracted. I found I couldn’t do justice to my lab work and to Miss World, so I focussed on the immediate challenge. I’m conscious that in Miss World we are ambassadors for our countries, and I want to show the world that Ireland is evolving and becoming more multicultural and progressive and that Irish women are multi-faceted. I’m what the modern Irish woman looks like.’ Her plan is ‘to go back to work [in the lab] after Miss World’ but she is also ready for her life to take a different turn. She is currently authoring a children’s book ‘about Ireland and the different kinds of kids in Ireland’ and has recorded a number of songs and is taking acting classes. Whatever happens, her advocacy role will continue - she welcomes the new changes in direct provision and for migrants across Ireland: ‘They’re adjusting a lot of things that I wish had been adjusted in my time, like access to college and being able to work. It’s really positive and it came about because we talked about it. If you don’t talk about things, nothing changes.’ I want kids to know that they don’t have to let their circumstances define them The Miss World final is happening in-person in Puerto Rico on 16 March – ‘the day before St Patrick’s Day so I’ll have luck on my side!’ That’s the luck of the Irish, together with well-wishes of Trinity graduates everywhere.
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Dr Kader Asmal Remembering the inspirational academic ‘… always enthusiastic, always engaging, always liberal, and always challenging students to stretch their minds’ South Africa’s bill of rights, which formed the crux of the country’s 1993 Constitution, was drafted on a kitchen table in a house in Foxrock over a wet weekend in 1988 by two South African human rights laywers. Albie Sachs was just out of hospital in Mozambique, having survived a car bomb attack executed by the South African security forces, in which he lost his right arm and the sight in his left eye; Dr Kader Asmal was a lecturer in international law in Trinity and, latterly, Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He had co-founded the Irish Anti-Apartheid League with his wife, Louise, almost a quarter of a century earlier. As the two lawyers worked quickly and rigorously to hammer out the text - with Asmal stepping outside every half hour for a cigarette because Louise didn’t want him smoking inside - they knew the tide was turning in South Africa, but it would be 18 months before they got the news they had been waiting for: Mandela’s release from prison. In Asmal’s words: After two hours in our sitting-room in Foxrock staring at the television, on 9 February, 1990, we finally got to see Mandela. Anti-apartheid committee members crowded into our house, cheered and raised glasses of champagne. Friends, neighbours, and people we hardly knew phoned congratulations and sent bouquets of flowers. A few months later, Asmal returned to South Africa, after a thirty year exile, and was appointed to the ANC’s executive committee. He served as a member of the negotiating team that established the government in 1993 and was Minister for Water and Forestry 1994-1999 and Minister for Education 1999- 2004, before his death in 2011. Asmal’s journey from law lecturer to human rights activist to negotiating the end of apartheid to Minister of Education is one of the most extraordinary of any Trinity academic. It starts with the example of his father, an Indian shopkeeper in KwaZulu- Natal, who brought him up ‘with a deep understanding of freedom and anti-colonialism’. After moving to London in 1960 to study law in the London School of Economics (LSE), he helped found the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement; when he was appointed lecturer in Trinity in 1963, he brought the movement to Ireland. The Trinity Department of Law in the 1960s was small and in common with other Irish universities at the time, it offered no postgraduate courses. The arrival of Asmal was cataclysmic. Yvonne Scannell, now Fellow Emeritus in the Trinity School of Law, recalls: ‘His teaching style was completely different to our other lecturers – much more student-friendly, approachable, and concerned for our wellbeing and our future. I learnt from him that you could be warm towards students, that you didn’t have to maintain barriers - you could show concern and get involved in student activities.’ Scannell recalls in particular his kindness to students in need – ‘he would have students from Africa staying in his house and he also did everything to help Irish students who were experiencing disadvantage’. This was putting into practice his commitment to social justice. As a lecturer, he ‘had not a scintilla of interest in the corporate legal world’, says Scannell, ‘all his aspirations and idealism led towards the international area and towards human rights and labour law. He imbued a sense of social purpose and concern for the underprivileged in his students. For years afterwards, a huge number of us who went on to do postgraduate studies, did it in international law, and that was thanks to Kader.’ The effect on students of his social activism, his informality and his intellectual engagement is attested to across the pages of Trinity Tales (alumni memories through the decades published in four volumes by Lilliput). Fidelma Macken, Supreme Court justice 2005-2012, writes: ‘He had quite a reputation as a firebrand…He was one of the few lecturers who actually spoke to and discussed matters with us, although ‘discuss’ might not be quite the right word for what used to happen. He was so enthusiastic he would lose track of where he was quite readily, but we never minded because whatever topic he veered off on was quite fascinating.’ Journalist and publisher Nick Mulcahy recalls ‘Asmal was always enthusiastic, always engaging, always liberal, and always challenging students to stretch their minds’. Liz O’Donnell, TD Dublin South 1992-2007, remembers ‘his lectures were lively and intensely partisan affairs…notes from his presentation meant little afterwards. It was pure theatre… He was a busy man, which suited me when I was looking for an extension for an essay. Waiting to see him in the corridor outside his office were far more needy and urgent cases, such as people on the run or about to be deported. My piffling request was waved through in a swirl of Rothmans smoke.’
