This year, to publicise World Day of Prayer for Women's Ordination, BASIC had 100 purple balloons printed with an appropriate message, to hand out to the public in Dublin's O'Connell Street. It was a fun project, and pretty funny in the way it worked out, too.
The message on the balloons was
World Day of Prayer
for
Women's Ordination
25th March
www.basic.ie
With these we had a printed leaflet explaining the significance of the message, and offering a liturgy that supporters could use in their own homes to participate in the event. Also on offer were Sean O'Brien cartoon postcards.
The logistics of the operation proved much more formidable than I had anticipated. The 25th was a Sunday, and the supplier is open Monday to Friday. We were advised that rubber balloons filled with helium will stay up for about 12 to 18 hours at most; so on Friday I collected the empty balloons, a cylinder of helium, and 500 metres of yellow ribbon. Cutting 100 lengths of ribbon and tying a non-slip loop in each took me two hours on Saturday. I began to worry about the time it would take to inflate the balloons and tie them off.
There were four of us available to carry out the project on Sunday. I prepared four loops of wire to hold the balloons. One of us has an apartment in the city centre, and I arrived there at 11 am with all the gear. The two of us got a good working rhythm going, and had everything in the air in an hour and a half. The other two joined us, and we set off for O'Connell Street, towing our balloons. Their yellow on purple made a brave sight in the sunshine.
But nice as the day was, it was breezy. The balloons swirled round and round, and before ever we got to give one away, the ribbons were in a ferocious tangle. It was clear none of us had tried to do this before! A few balloons slid out reasonably easily, others we had to haul out as far as we could and break the ribbon. Some of them ended up with very short ribbons indeed!
Balloons make people smile. Our clientele - mostly children and young people - was in high good humour, and it was all very pleasant. Nowadays the proportion of Irish people among the Sunday crowd in O'Connell Street is fairly low, so our message went out to many cultures as well as to many parts of the city. Most were happy to take a leaflet along with a balloon. We completed our mission shortly after two o'clock, and went off satisfied to the BASIC liturgy in the Regency Hotel.
(Balloons by Balloonman www.balloonman.ie )