A moment from my time living in a Middle Eastern country comes back to me as I write.

We’re sitting in our car, our bellies full up with food served to us by the dark-skinned waiting staff of the private British Club in Abu Dhabi.

The evening wind is hot beyond our car windows, the giant mango-coloured sun beginning to set on a horizon of pylons and skyscrapers.

We have sleepy songs playing for our three small children and the air conditioning cools their sun-bright skin as they drift to sleep in their expensive car seats.

Soon, we’ll arrive back to our apartment, paid for by The British School Al Khubairat. We’ll carry the children to their beds and crack open a bottle of white from the fridge.

It is a Thursday, the night before the Islamic day of rest and the start of our weekend.

Joining the motorway, we pull up alongside a labourer bus, uncomfortably close. I don’t want to look and then I do.

The windows are open and the hot night air stirs the short curtains inside. The bus looks old-fashioned, a relic from the early creation of the UAE in the 1970s.

The men’s exhausted heads flop against open frames. I know where they’re going, all of them, young and old, but never too old, dressed in the same orange and green jumpsuits, white fabric wrapped about their heads.

They’re going into the desert to sleep in squalid rooms.

In the UAE, they are like animals, one step up from the burdensome stray cats, not men at all really.

Expat women complain about how they stare at them in playgrounds. They are meant to be unseen and unseeing, until Ramadan, when they line up outside palace gates, grateful for people’s mercy, grateful for the school children in ex-pat schools who put on fundraisers, give generously.

I was uncomfortable living in the UAE — of course I was — but I don’t regret seeing those faces and learning more about their world.

Nor do I regret talking about injustice with an Iraqi woman who lived there, who just couldn’t see what I saw.

“But we are helping them, giving them work,” she told me, and believed it to be true.

Feeling judged

Meanwhile, some people in Ireland judge me for having ever lived there, for having supported injustice.

I say nothing, envy their ability to shut it off, to simply not see it, and to judge me for my supposed involvement.

The truth is that I now understand the depth and breadth of injustice in a way that I wouldn’t if I hadn’t lived there.

I understand how power works, how it depends on our ignorance and how it thrives on keeping the average person distracted.

Not looking and not seeing doesn’t mean cruelty doesn’t exist. In truth, not looking makes it more likely to persist.

The UAE is an ugly country in many ways. Did my living there change that? Not in the least.

But my not living there wouldn’t have changed anything either. That’s the uncomfortable truth we must accept.

We must live in that discomfort and hope that through seeing the reality, inviting it into our sitting rooms, talking about it, writing about it, we might collectively manage to change the ways of the most powerful in our shared global reality.

Because such dark injustices are not the fault of an average individual. It is the fault of the biggest players, the biggest companies, and the biggest governments.

We all belong to one unjust system and the sooner we all realise that, come to see it and know it together, the sooner we might demand change.

If anything ‘sportswashing’ is a good opportunity to learn how deeply involved Ireland is with Saudi Arabia.

Irish exports to Arab countries like Saudi, Bahrain, and the UAE continue to rise, amounting to €2.2bn in the first nine months of 2022.

Growing market

It is a growing market. The North African and Middle Eastern region boasts a population of more than 444m people. It is forecast to exceed 500m or 6% of the global population by 2028.

Saudi also happens to be the largest importer of Irish goods in the region. We don’t hear about it. But it doesn’t mean it is not happening.

Irish engineering groups have a strong base in the region. The Irish medtech industry is giant. In 2020, despite covid, the value of Irish exports to UAE and Saudi was approximately €320m.

As far as I’m concerned golfers and soccer players should carry on as before. But everyone watching should know and remind themselves every time they watch, where our county’s money is coming from.

The money being pumped into sport is no different to the money buoying our economy, lining our pockets and filling our tanks. It is all dirty and uncomfortable.

We are all part of a horribly unjust world and individually, we don’t have the power to change it.

The only thing we can do is commit to looking at it, really seeing it. In time we might get closer to little acts of rebellion, like Roy Keane’s desire for players to wear rainbows on their jerseys.

We must play the game to change it. In this sense, individuals who boycotted the World Cup in Qatar made a laudable move but not a meaningful one.

Because the tournament still happened and the crowds still went and the labourers still died in broiling heat trying to feed their families.

Switching off the television is too easy a fix. It doesn’t make the injustice go away. It is far more powerful to sit in our discomfort, to feel it and understand what it really means.

We should also figure out who is really behind it. It’s not you or me or the individual watching Man City on a Saturday. It’s the big dogs, the fat cats, the princes and the business tycoons. And they are masters at covering their tracks.

After all, it was the second largest non-state-owned oil company, BP, that invented the idea of the carbon footprint. BP hired a public relations firm to distract us because if we are busy blaming one another we won’t see the truth, that their company, boasting 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, is the true villain.

Man City recently won the elusive treble, backed by Abu Dhabi money. Saudi Arabia has permanently established itself in the world of golf through the LIV and PGA merger.

It will take a lot of feeling uncomfortable for us to see that this is just the reality of the world being played out on our screens. Turning away from it achieves nothing.

We must look at it head-on, feel our disgust and discomfort and maybe, together, encourage the most powerful people in the world to do better.