Anam Cara

ABSENCE

“While we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?”

I produced “The Open Mind” for RTÉ Radio from 1989 to 2002. Each year we featured “The Open Mind Guest Lecture”—a talk given before an invited audience in the Radio Centre, RTÉ, by a guest speaker. Speakers over the years included Gordon Wilson, Michael D. Higgins, Erskine Childers, John Hume, Anne Fine and George Mitchell. The subjects varied from Northern Ireland to children’s books. In 1997, I invited John to give the lecture and he chose as his topic—“Towards a Philosophy of Absence.”