Postcards from the edge
Ali Hewson's husband, Bono, is one of the most famous men on the planet, but she has always shied away from publicity. So how come she's breaking cover? Martin Wroe finds out
Email
On Friday morning the prime minister, Tony Blair, can expect an uncomfortable message from the people of Ireland. A million postcards are en route to Downing Street, each with the message: "Tony, look me in the eye and tell me I'm safe."
The mail will arrive on the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, when an explosion ripped away the roof of a nuclear reactor in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, causing the world's worst nuclear accident. The postcards - several hundred thousand have also been sent to Prince Charles and Norman Askew, head of British Nuclear Fuels - are the boldest signal yet that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria is making our Irish neighbours feel increasingly unsafe.
Fronting the campaign is a woman for whom celebrity is a way of life, but whose face will be almost entirely unfamiliar to most people on this side of the Irish Sea. Ali Hewson has been married to one of the most famous men on the planet, the U2 singer Bono, for almost 20 years, but has spent most of that time studiously avoiding the limelight. It is a measure of how strongly she feels about the Sellafield issue that she has chosen to come out of her husband's sizeable shadow, and mastermind what may be the first time the population of one country has lobbied en masse the government of another.
"Sellafield has already made the Irish Sea the most radioactive in the world," says Hewson, "and if an accident happens or there is a terrorist attack, depending on which way the wind blows, Dublin, Dundalk, Drogheda, Belfast and vast parts of Ireland would be uninhabitable. For ever."
That may sound a touch apocalyptic, but Hewson, 41, has seen the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe close-up. For the past eight years, as patron of the Irish charity Chernobyl Children's Project, she has been visiting Belarus to work with children affected by Chernobyl. When the accident happened on April 26 1986, vast clouds were released into the atmosphere, exposing people to radioactivity 100 times greater than that from the Hiroshima bomb. Nearly three-quarters of people affected by fallout were not in Ukraine at all, but across the border in Belarus.
"I have seen children born with deformities and dying in orphanages," says Hewson. "Children who have had their thyroid glands removed and will need to take medicine for the rest of their lives - if they can get it. And because radiation does not respect borders, in Ireland we are in the same position as Belarus. We did not ask for this nuclear power base to be built beside us, but we are just as vulnerable as the people of Britain."
There is almost nothing about Ali Hewson that conforms to the stereotype of a rock star's wife. The discreet mother of four met her future husband at Mount Temple secondary in Dublin - the same school where, in 1976, U2's drummer Larry Mullen pinned up a hopeful notice to see if anybody was interested in forming a band. The teenage Bono saw two opportunities and applied for both. He married Alison Stewart a few years later.
While U2 were finding their audience on the road in the first half of the 80s, Hewson had a hunch she would pursue "some kind of humanitarian work". When the Joshua Tree made U2 the most successful band in the world in 1987, she was reading political science at University College Dublin. She gave birth to their first child, a daughter called Jordan, two weeks before her finals. "My timing has never been that great," she says.
A hundred million U2 album sales and another daughter and son later, she had their fourth child, John Abraham, last May; her husband flew back from several months' lobbying US politicians to cancel African debts - a campaign cleverly disguised as U2's latest US tour. But despite 24-hour access to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, Hewson has resolutely failed to inhabit the rock'n'roll cliche. Press cuttings yield up no celebrity trysts, penchants for exotic substances or even a Hello!-style photo-shoot in a vast farmhouse kitchen. Until the last couple of weeks you would have been hard-pressed to find an interview with her, and there is scant mention of her visits with relief agencies to Africa and Central America in the 80s, and to Belarus through the 90s. So why the change now?
It was having children, she says, that compelled her to act on Sellafield. "I started to wonder how safe it was for them to play on the beach or to swim in the sea or even to eat fish."
In 1992 she organised a successful publicity stunt at Sellafield in which U2 donned white anti- radiation suits and masks and stood on drums with contaminated mud from the Irish Sea. A decade on, with Sellafield expanding, she has mobilised an all-star cast, from Ronan Keating and Samantha Mumba to Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup squad, to increase pressure on the UK. She believes that Blair, another parent of four, might just understand. "Over here we respect him for his work with the peace process, but not for standing behind Sellafield. We know he wouldn't put his children at risk and we want him to stop putting ours at risk."
But with her husband now almost as well known as a campaigner on poverty and debt as he is as a rock star, have there been sensitive negotiations in the Hewson household about confusing the message?
"We're both aware of overkill, and with a baby of one year and three others, there could be a better time, to be honest. But this was the right time [for this campaign].
"Our relationship works because we have respect for each other and we are very fortunate in how things have worked out. We allow each other to pursue our goals. I wouldn't want to be married to someone who was not happy with what they were doing with their life and Bono wouldn't either - it works both ways."
The eldest children do have reservations about seeing their mother break cover, she says - having one celebrity parent is complicated enough. "I've had a few notes under the pillow saying, 'I want my mummy back,' but the girls are sanguine and also pretty switched on about environmental issues. They would rather I was doing this than getting involved in the music business."
As if to underline the timing of the campaign, last Thursday it emerged that radioactive contamination has been found leaking into the groundwater under Sellafield from 50-year-old tanks containing untreated nuclear waste. And a recent report claims that the two million gallons of mildly radioactive waste water discharged daily from Sellafield into the Irish Sea are equivalent to a nuclear accident each year.
Hewson believes a person-to-person civil campaign by the people of Ireland can persuade their neighbours to shut their "nuclear dustbin". "The tobacco industry told people for decades there was no health risk," she says.
"Britain is experimenting with our lives and we're not even allowed into the debate. I was in two minds about this role. I think our family probably has enough publicity as it is, and I would prefer to keep a more private life, but in the end I felt I couldn't turn round to my children in 20 years' time and say that I had had an opportunity to do something about Sellafield but didn't."
