UNITED NATIONS, July 3 (APP):Highlighting political turmoil around the world, Irish rock star has warned that an international order based on shared values and rules was “facing the greatest test in its 70-year history”.
Speaking at an event launching Ireland’s candidacy for a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2021-22, Bono said.”We live in a time when institutions as vital to human progress as the United Nations are under attack.”
He added that the existence of the European Union (EU), the group of G7 (industrialized nations), NATO and the WTO (World Trade Organization) were also being threatened.
While Bono did not name any countries responsible for threatening global institutions, his words appeared clearly aimed at US President Donald Trump, who has criticized the EU and NATO. The American leader has also pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, which the Dublin-born singer cited, and taken aim at the World Trade Organization with new US tariffs, an institution Bono said, was also under threat.
In endorsing Ireland’s candidacy, Bono said the choice was not about a seat on the Security Council, but about the UN as a whole.
“It’s about its future and indeed whether it has one, whether its values still matter – and they better; whether peace is still possible and who will speak for those normal ideas when the heat is on,” he said.
Bono, who was addressing a large gathering of UN ambassadors and UN officials on a sweltering evening at a UN lawn, said that “standing here, in that heat, the heat of a moment suffused with possibility and peril,” the UN needed “storytellers” because words mattered and that one word mattered in particular.
“The word is compromise because that’s how you achieve peace and compromise is a word that the Irish people understand very, very well, It is part of our story, our recent story, and we are storytellers,” he said.
“So your honourable peace activists, if you need some storytellers to describe what’s really important about this place… let us tell the story.”
He urged the UN to “all become storytellers of a future we want to share” and that the story needed to be told “with imagination and passion and conviction.”
“We are storytellers but this is the best story ever,” he said of the UN.
Ireland faces stiff competition for the council seat from Canada and Norway, two countries with formidable records at the UN, if it is secure the required 129 votes out of 193 if it is win a seat.
