BONO getting the Freedom of the City led me to think that if there was a similar honour called the Freedom of the Planet, he should get that also.

Bono is a global figure with local roots in Dublin. From the beginning of his career he proved that he has a sharp awareness of the troubles, sorrows and abuses of our earth; and he has worked very hard to raise the level of consciousness of young and old throughout the world concerning these abuses, sorrows and troubles. There is a light, messianic element in his genius which he uses adroitly and constantly to try to better our world. His songs are not heavily political but they are always deeply humane.

Bono has a marvellous combination of qualities. His resourceful intelligence is both deeply serious and extremely playful. Like his music, like his songs, he holds your attention all the time. He asks questions of people in power, in authority, in influential positions. And he does this, not with hot-faced aggression, but with a calm, probing intensity. Young people witness this calm, probing intelligence, and they learn from it.

I have always thought that Bono would make an excellent teacher. He knows how to make people ask pertinent questions; and he encourages them to enjoy themselves, to have the craic that makes life richer and deeper. Bono himself has a terrific sense of humour. And he is a very kind man.

Seven years ago, a young Italian woman, Tatiana Pais Becher, came to me in Trinity College and said she was eager to do research on the music of U2 and the Irish poetic
tradition. I told her to go to Bono. She did and received from him the kind of help and information that enabled her to write an excellent thesis and to have her research published
as a handsome and erudite book in 1998. Among other things, Miss Becher's book shows what an avid reader of poetry Bono is, and the subtle way in which he has absorbed the work of Yeats, Kavanagh and others.

I have always thought that kindness is one of the highest forms of intelligence because the consequences of one moment of kindness can resonate through a lifetime, or even lifetimes. Therefore, it can create not only better feelings but also more energetic and fruitfulideas. A kind moment can be a seed that flourishes in different ways and for a long time.

Kindness can enter into nearly everything a person does. It is so with Bono. He is a multi-faceted, many-talented man.

I have in my possession an astonishing collection of photographs which Bono took in Ethiopia in 1985 when he and his wife Ali worked there for the month of September.

Their work involved the development of a health and nutrition programme through drama and song. Working with a site electrician, they wrote four one-act plays and songs
for use as the basis of a month-long educational programme. The purpose was to introduce new ideas concerning health, nutrition and basic farm methods made easily understandable through these brief plays, which were performed by relief workers and children.

Bono himself writes, in a brief introduction to this stunning book of photographs:

Ajlbar was high up in the mountains of Wello. At night the winds were so cold they could cut you.

The feeding centre was a tin-can town of wood, wire and corrugated iron. For a second it could have been Belsen but here the barbed wire was to keep people out, not in.

At first as we walked through the camp, we kept our eyes down and were so overpowered by the suffering we saw around us that I couldn't even take my camera out of its case. Weeks later, a different but more lasting impression set in of the beauty and strength of spirit of the Ethiopian people. It was then I started taking photographs, not to deny the waste of human life that was and still is Ethiopia but to make the people and therefore the tragedy more real by bringing their sense of dignity back into the picture.

And that is precisely what Bono achieves in this moving and beautiful book of photographs, entitled A String of Pearls. It is a striking visual testament to the ways in which human
dignity survives suffering and pain.

There are times I sit and look at these astonishing photographs in A String of Pearls. It's another reason to be grateful for Bono, for his bright awareness of darkness, for his goodness of heart and sharpness of mind, for his quick, witty Dublin tongue, for his impish sense of humour and always, of course, for those songs and that music which are born from the qualities I've mentioned.

In Bono's case, music is indeed the food of love, and he feeds a spiritually starved world with energy and delight.

Is it any wonder he deserves the Freedom of the Planet?