Felicity's story: The Resting Place of the Moon

Author Felicity Heathcote and her husband Dr Niall Holohan.

When clinical psychologist Felicity Heathcote began to write her book The Resting Place of the Moon in the early 2000s, writes Brian Byrne, she recalled reading one in Teheran, where she and her diplomat husband Niall Holohan were living in the years following the Khomeini revolution. "Everywhere was closed down, and I would go down to a bookshop and sit on the floor with all these dusty old books, reading Iranian philosophers. One was The Conference of the Birds by a Sufi philosopher called Attar, and I just loved that idea that thousands of birds had set off to find the mythical King of the Birds, the Simorgh. When they found him, there were only 30 of the original thousands left."

Subsequently writing The Resting Place of the Moon was an attempt to highlight the woes of the Palestinian people, which Felicity had observed during her husband's posting as Ireland's representative to the Palestinian Authority from 2002. During that time, she and her daughter Clare worked with UN agencies, among other things training local psychologists to help people deal with the mental difficulties brought by the continuing conflicts. "It was very difficult because people outside really weren't listening then. There seemed very little interest, and I thought that if the world knew the story they would do something. Of course, that doesn't happen."

In The Resting Place of the Moon there's a new Conference of Birds, where the avians bring from different areas of the Holy Land the stories of tragedy, brutality and, occasionally, inspiration and hope. Key characters are the mythical Hoopoe bird and an African Grey parrot called Einstein, actually a real parrot which Felicity had owned for many years, with a large vocabulary and the ability to answer and ask questions. "He flew away one day, so I don't have him now. Using the birds to tell the stories was partly because they were not curtailed by checkpoints and what to say. I think it would have been more difficult if I had spoken in my own voice around the stories, somehow this was a softer way of doing it at that time." 

The book was published in 2007 by the poet Seamus Cashman, founder of Wolfhound Press which had published earlier books by Felicity on sports and education psychology, her expertise in which had her as official psychologist to the Irish Olympic teams in Barcelona, Sydney and Athens. The Resting Place of the Moon was very well received, described by Dr Maurice Manning of the Irish Human Rights Commission as 'brilliantly' highlighting the extent to which human rights have been "sidelined by all sides in the Middle East." However, the dreadful saga which it rather gently tried to bring to world attention has continued.

Following the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli people in October last year, and the subsequent brutal campaign of retribution by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu against the people of Gaza, Felicity's book has been updated and reissued. It is currently being sold at various fundraising events organised by Ireland's supporters of the Palestine cause. The author and her husband were speakers at the most recent of these locally, in Kilcullen at the showing of the film Israelism. Two decades on from the time she was writing this book, Israel has carried out bombing campaigns of Gaza eight different times, in response to various degrees of attacks by Hamas. There has been change, but for the worse.

"It’s very upsetting. Every day you think it couldn’t get worse, and every day it does. It’s quite incredible, unbelievable. Every word, every adjective you could use, there are no words to describe it. You know, they’re really trying ethnic cleansing now. Netanyahu has to stop at some point but when he stops he’s gone. And I’m at the stage now, especially with this Iran thing, and the Lebanon and all these other things, I think he would use nuclear weapons if it suited him. I don’t think he cares at all. I don’t think Biden cares much either. He could stop it today. Stop the weapons, stop the war."

As a psychologist, Felicity is keenly aware of the effects of trauma on individuals and on communities. When her daughter Clare was doing a Masters in Human Rights she chose the subject of Palestinian children imprisoned by Israel for throwing stones at tanks, and Felicity went with her on interviews. "We interviewed former prisoners to see how it had affected them, and for the most part they were very inspirational." Felicity also met many Gazans and other Palestinians in the course of the family's time stationed there. "They were so sweet, and they’d give you anything. Of course, a lot of people have suffered trauma. But for the majority, they are so resilient. Even now, on television, you can see children smiling, making kites out of pieces of paper. I think I’d just give up … but they really are amazing. For me, the Palestinian people are inspirational, but not their governments. We know what Hamas has done and there's no way to condone that."

She has published a second book since the events that began last October, A Gaza Diary: Not in a Vacuum, which records a decade of destruction in the enclave. It's hard for her to bring up any optimism about an end to the whole savage cycle. "Netanyahu had two aims this time. To free the hostages, but he's killing his own hostages. And to finish Hamas. But all he has done is made the whole place more unstable, and for the whole world."

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