1. Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist who has spent over twenty years working in humanitarian and social justice contexts in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and with refugee communities in Europe.
Caoimhe Butterly is a peace activist who has worked with people with AIDS in Zimbabwe, the homeless in New York, and with Zapatistas in Mexico as well as more recently in the Middle East and Haiti.
Caoimhe Butterly spent 16 days inside the compound where Yasser Arafat was besieged in Ramallah.
Caoimhe Butterly was named by Time magazine as one of their Europeans of the Year in 2003 and in 2016 won the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Human Rights Film award for her coverage of the refugee crisis.
Caoimhe Butterly was born in Dublin to a family therapist.
Caoimhe Butterly's father's work as a United Nations economist moved the family from Ireland to Zimbabwe when she was a young child.
Caoimhe Butterly grew up in Canada, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe due to her father's work with the United Nations.
Caoimhe Butterly spent time working in the New York Catholic Worker Movement, then moved to Latin America where she spent three years living with indigenous communities in Guatemala and in Chiapas, Mexico.
Caoimhe Butterly lived in Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank for a year.
Caoimhe Butterly has visited Iraq on numerous occasions, she visited Lebanon, where she protested British prime minister Tony Blair's visit to the country after he allowed US bomb shipments to be sent to Israel via Britain during the 2006 Lebanon War.
Caoimhe Butterly was brought up in a culture of liberation theology, which, she says, "deeply inspired" her to engage in human rights work She spent time working as a volunteer in AIDS hospices in Zimbabwe as a teenager.
Caoimhe Butterly later worked with refugees and internally displaced communities in the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq and Lebanon, which included work as a volunteer EMT with ambulance services.
Caoimhe Butterly was arrested while trying to block the runway.
Caoimhe Butterly was later wounded during a military incursion into Jenin refugee camp.
Caoimhe Butterly had been trying to lead a group of Palestinian children to safety.
Caoimhe Butterly was initially a signatory to the Pitstop Ploughshares action that disabled a US warplane at Shannon in February 2003, but decided ultimately not to participate out of a desire to travel to Iraq in solidarity with civilians there.
At a 2003 Belfast summit between US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Butterly was arrested and dragged away by her hair for smearing red jam on the riot shields of two policemen.
Caoimhe Butterly interrupted Blair's press conference with the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, accusing Blair of complicity in the recent Israeli bombardment of Lebanon.
Caoimhe Butterly held a banner saying "Boycott Israeli apartheid" in front of live TV cameras, until security guards holding her by arms and legs carried her out.
Caoimhe Butterly was aboard a flotilla bringing relief supplies to Gaza during the Gaza flotilla raid on 31 May 2010.
Caoimhe Butterly later returned to third level education in her early 30s, completing Masters in Development Studies and in Systemic Pschotherapy.
Caoimhe Butterly is based in Dublin, though continues to work with trauma-informed psycho-social support programmes and Search and Rescue response with refugees in Greece, Calais, Italy, Lebanon and the Central Mediterranean.