Ali Hewson
Alison Hewson is an Irish activist and businesswoman. She is married to singer and musician Paul Hewson, known as Bono, from the rock band U2.
Raised in Raheny, she met her future husband at age 12 at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, and married him in 1982. She was awarded a degree in politics and sociology from University College Dublin in 1989. The couple have four children together and live at residences in Ireland, France, and the United States. She has inspired several U2 songs, most famously "Sweetest Thing".
Hewson became involved in anti-nuclear activism in the 1990s. She narrated Black Wind, White Land, a 1993 Irish documentary about the lasting effects of the Chernobyl disaster, and has worked closely with activist Adi Roche. She has been a patron of Chernobyl Children's Project International since 1994 and has participated in a number of aid missions to the high-radiation exclusion zones of Belarus. She has also campaigned against Sellafield, the northern English nuclear facility. In 2002 she helped lead an effort which sent more than a million postcards, urging the site be closed, to Prime Minister Tony Blair and others. Hewson has repeatedly been discussed by tabloid newspapers as a possible candidate for political offices, including President of Ireland; none of these suggestions have come to fruition.
Hewson is the co-founder of two ethical businesses, the EDUN fashion line in 2005, and Nude Skincare products in 2007. The former, intended to promote fair trade with Africa, has struggled to become a viable business. French conglomerate LVMH has made substantial investments into both companies.
Early life
Alison Stewart was born on 23 March 1961, the daughter of Terry and Joy Stewart. She has an older brother, Ian, and nephew, Ross Stewart, who both live in Australia. The Stewart family, who resided in the suburb of Raheny on Dublin's Northside, raised their children as Protestants. Her father was a self-educated electrical worker who, according to Hewson, was "constantly questioning" things. Her mother, who was a housewife, had a secretarial career in mind for her daughter.Stewart studied at Mount Temple Comprehensive School. At the age of twelve, she met Paul Hewson, who was in the year above at the school. He pursued her immediately, but she initially kept her distance, labeling him "an eejit" even though she secretly admired him. In September 1974, Paul's mother Iris died suddenly, leaving him emotionally adrift and in conflict with his father and brother. Soon after, Alison began taking care of Hewson: cleaning his clothes, walking to school with him, and cooking for him. In September 1976, Hewson met the other members of what would become U2; the band members adopted nicknames, and Hewson soon became known as Bono. At around the same time, he and Ali, as she was known, began dating, and soon became a steady couple. It took Stewart a while to enjoy the band's music, as her own tastes ran toward her father's Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole records.
At one point, the pair split up, but soon reunited. The relationship became more serious as she accompanied him in his efforts to break through in the music industry, and by 1979 they were discussing marriage, conditional upon his career becoming established. In the meantime she worked in a motor insurance company and in her father's electrical business.
Marriage and family
Hewson married Bono on 31 August 1982 in a Church of Ireland ceremony at All Saints Church, Raheny. The ceremony combined rituals of both conventional Protestantism and the Shalom Friendship Christian group that Bono and other U2 members had belonged to. In debt to U2's record label, Island Records, the couple could not afford a honeymoon, but Island founder Chris Blackwell gave them use of the Goldeneye estate he owned in Jamaica. Having returned to Ireland, the couple moved to a small mews house in Howth, which they shared with the rest of U2.As the band broke through in popularity with the War Tour in 1983, Ali Hewson did not readily adapt to the new circumstances. After seeing her with the group at a trendy Hollywood nightspot, journalist Ethlie Ann Vare commented that Ali looked "as out of place as a dairymaid in a brothel." Although she had wanted to become a nurse, Hewson gave up on the notion, as the intense schooling required would have been incompatible with the direction that her husband's life had taken. Instead she focused on studying in the social sciences, to give her an ability to understand social policy and make a difference to people, similar to what nursing would have enabled. By Bono's own description, the marriage hit a period of strain in 1986 due to time commitments during the group's recording of The Joshua Tree. Tensions continued in 1987 during the subsequent Joshua Tree Tour.
Hewson received a degree in social science, politics and sociology from University College Dublin in 1989 at age 28, giving birth to the couple's first daughter, Jordan, two weeks before her final exams. Further plans to earn a master's degree in moral and political ethics were put on hold after the birth of their second daughter, Memphis Eve, in 1991. Two sons, Elijah Bob Patricus Guggi Q and John Abraham, were born in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Being effectively a single parent while U2 toured was difficult for Hewson, but she now found Bono helpful even at a distance.
Activism
In late 1985, following U2's participation in Live Aid, Bono and Hewson spent five weeks as aid volunteers in Ajibar during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia. She saw children with no possessions and at risk of death; despite this, to her they appeared more spiritually alive than those in Ireland who had material comforts but seemed spoiled and spiritually unaware, like her own children. In 1986, the couple traveled to strife-torn areas in Nicaragua and El Salvador on a visit organised by Central American Mission Partners.In 1992, Hewson participated in Greenpeace protests against the Sellafield plant for nuclear reprocessing, located across the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England. She was especially set against the under-construction Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant component being opened. She was aboard Greenpeace's MV Solo when it staged a publicity-oriented "raid" wherein the band members landed on the beach at the plant in rubber dinghies, but she said she had not been responsible for that particular protest.
This involvement led her to become interested in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. After a request by activist Adi Roche, she went to blighted, high-radiation exclusion zones in Belarus for three weeks to narrate part of Black Wind, White Land. The 1993 Irish documentary, shown on RTÉ, highlighted the plight of fallout victims of the Chernobyl event. Hot Press magazine wrote that Hewson had "obvious gifts as a presenter, which include a sense of quiet compassion that draws forth the best from the people she talks with." Another reviewer said that the documentary was very effective until she started speaking.
Since 1994, Hewson has been a patron of Chernobyl Children's Project International, an organisation founded and run by Roche that works with children, families, and communities that continue to be affected by Chernobyl. Through the years, Hewson has taken at least ten trips to Belarus. She has organised overland aid convoys and sometimes driven ambulances filled with medical supplies herself; in one case she had to retreat quickly when a fire spread in a village a few miles from Chernobyl. Hewson has made sure her own children met those from Chernobyl with birth deformities and other illnesses, so that they would have a broader appreciation of the world and what to be thankful for. She has said that fundraising for those affected is very difficult, given that many people believe the problems of Chernobyl are all in the past.
She was aware from the outset that her circumstances would make her vulnerable to "ladies who lunch"-style remarks, but said, "People who criticise these women are probably giving in to cynicism, and I think if you get cynical about life, you lose the real meaning of it." In 2007, she became a member of the board of directors for Chernobyl Children's Project International, a role that would give her a voice in the organisation's policy making. In 2009, she staged a public abseil of the 17-storey Elysian Tower in Cork to raise funds for the organisation.
She returned to the Sellafield issue in 2002, noting that while Ireland had no nuclear power plants itself, Belarus had been the most affected region even though Chernobyl was not in it, and that was "exactly what could happen in Ireland if there was an explosion at Sellafield." In addition, she feared the ongoing low-level emissions from Sellafield: "I started to wonder how safe it was for to play on the beach or to swim in the sea or even to eat fish." In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, she also viewed the plant as vulnerable to terrorists.
In April 2002, Hewson was one of the leaders of an effort which delivered over a million postcards demanding that the facility be shut down; recipients included British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles, and Norman Askew, head of British Nuclear Fuels Limited. She personally delivered a giant postcard to Blair at 10 Downing Street. The Shut Sellafield Campaign had its postcards stocked in Superquinn and Dunnes Stores supermarkets, and Hewson publicly engaged Tesco when they refused to do the same. The campaign was backed by celebrities, including Ronan Keating and Samantha Mumba, and Hewson made many newspaper and radio appearances on its behalf. It was the first prolonged exposure Hewson had to the public eye, after two decades of mostly being focused upon maintaining her privacy. Her continued activism also meant that she too would not always be around for the couple's children.
As the postcard effort was reaching its peak, tabloid newspapers speculated that the Labour Party wanted to put Hewson up for the Irish presidential election of 2004, with the Daily Mirror quoting an unnamed party insider as saying, "She's a mother of four but she has always had world issues at heart and she'd make the perfect candidate." Hewson stated that she had not been approached, and that "It's not a serious proposition. It would obviously be a huge honour if I was asked to take on such a huge task, but for one thing I'm not sure I'm qualified, and for another I've got four small kids to bring up first." She also expressed contentment with incumbent President Mary McAleese staying for another term. She jokingly added that she could not see Bono agreeing to live in a smaller house. Hewson received a media mention two years later as a possible Social Democratic and Labour Party candidate in the 2004 European Parliament elections after John Hume had stood down. The notion of her running for Irish president came up again in 2008 in conjunction with the 2011 election. Hewson demurred once more, saying she did not speak the Irish language well enough, this time adding humorously that she could not see her husband being willing to walk behind her at events. The candidate that Labour did put up, Michael D. Higgins, won the post. Notwithstanding this speculation, Hewson generally shies away from political comments in the media.
Hewson has long advocated for a children's museum for Ireland, inspired by a positive experience her daughters had at the Dallas Children's Museum in the mid-1990s. In 2003, plans were announced to build the so-called Exploration Station as part of the proposed Heuston Gate development near the Dublin Heuston railway station. The children-oriented science centre was to be owned by the Irish Children's Museum charitable trust, established in 2006, with Hewson as a member of the board led by Danny O'Hare. Hewson said, "Seeing as we're nearly the last European country in on it, we can learn from children's museums already up and running and expand on them". However, over the next few years the science centre faced significant cost overruns in the planning stages and a possible European Commission investigation into how the Office of Public Works had handled the awarding of the contract for it. The effects of the 2008 financial crisis then put a halt to the entire Heuston Gate project. As of August 2016, the site was finally fixed as between Earlsfort Terrace and the Iveagh Gardens, and as of October 2019, the post of CEO was advertised.
In 2015 Hewson signed an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they serve as the head of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa respectively, which will start to set the priorities in development funding before a main UN summit in September 2015 that will establish new development goals for the generation.