Eamonn is walking 5500 km barefoot from Turkey to Ireland—and fundraising for us!

Read our interview with Eamonn to learn about this truly remarkable challenge he’s undertaking.

It’s not everyday that you come across someone walking the length of an entire continent—that too completely barefoot—whilst also channeling such a challenge into a fundraising campaign for charities. And yet, Eamonn Keaveney likes to emphasise there wasn’t this eureka moment that inspired this decision of his to walk over 5500 km from Turkey to Ireland. 

On an overcast morning in Istanbul on March 4th, Eamonn set forth on this journey, through which he also wishes to break the world record for the longest barefoot walk ever. “I get asked this (why he decided to undertake this feat) a lot and I simultaneously have no real, specific answer for this—and also like a really long answer…It’s an accumulation of a lot of many small things basically; a lot of different things coming together and eventually evolving into this one big idea,” the 32-year-old Mayo native tells over a video call, a week before he embarked on the walk from Istanbul to his home in Claremorris.

Walking barefoot is something Eamonn has always had a penchant for, right from his college days—“I’ve no real explanation for that,” he adds with a laugh. 

Eamonn is no stranger to long-distance barefoot walks—or the breaking of Guinness World Records for that matter. In 2016, he completed the world’s longest barefoot journey, spanning over 2000 km in Ireland (which also means he’ll essentially be breaking his own record with the current walk across Europe!). He followed this up two years later by climbing 10 mountains across Ireland barefoot in 10 days. Later, in 2023, he unicycled From Mizen Head, the southernmost point of Ireland, to Malin Head, the northernmost, breaking the record for the fastest crossing of Ireland by unicycle. 

And once Eamonn completed these challenges, the idea that he would one day want to do a bigger walk, possibly extending beyond Ireland, started developing in the back of his mind. ‘Walking around the country is great, but what about crossing a continent?’ he thought to himself. This idea further took shape later during a conversation with his housemate about continents and borders. “It hit me then that if you walked from the Bosphorus Canal in Istanbul to Ireland, you would have walked across Europe and I was immediately like ‘this, is it, that's the idea—that’s the walk!’. That's the long and short of it, basically,” he sums up. 

This long, barefoot walk across Europe is also equal parts impactful, which is why our conversation steered towards the fundraising aspect of it.

The nature of these things is that I’ve these personal challenges that appeal to me and are things that I want to do. But then when you're doing something like that, it also gives you an opportunity to raise money for a good cause and to give a platform to such a cause. 

 

Having previously raised money for Pieta House and Dublin Simon Community through his walks in Ireland, this time, Eamonn was keen on finding different charities to fundraise for. With the environmental crisis being an issue that he feels strongly about, he started looking up environmental organisations in Ireland—eventually deciding on Friends of the Earth as one of the two charities he’d raise funds for. 

“One of the things that really appeals to me about the work you do at Friends of the Earth is that it is both local and global in scale. You are part of a global grassroots environmental network consisting of over 70 members—I think that’s really amazing,” Eamonn says. The deep connections between climate issues, the injustices of late-stage capitalism, and social justice—the intersectionality of it all—really struck a chord with Eamonn.

I was really impressed with your data centres campaign because that’s a really good example of things intersecting essentially,” he says.

Because we've got these data centres that are expected to use like 30% of the electricity in a few years, which is ludicrous! And for what—what are these data centres for? Are they going to take up 30% of our electricity to store and process data for the sake of targeted ads? For making some rich people slightly richer basically? And this is while we're not meeting our own climate targets and aren’t investing in renewables enough, and while regular people aren’t having energy security. But we'll have 30 percent of our electricity going to data centres which is just absolutely ludicrous—and I think it's a good example of that kind of intersection of late stage capitalism and climate change.

“Which is one of the things that I'm really impressed by Friends of the Earth as well—that you’re taking an intersectional, holistic approach where climate action and social justice intertwine. That’s ultimately what it (the climate movement) is all about, and I think that is the path forward in the climate movement too,” Eamonn says. He also deeply believes in the importance of campaigning in driving change and also enabling people to make informed choices and decisions. 

Is there any change in the climate movement he’d like to see—something that he hopes the donations he is garnering for Friends of the Earth would help towards?

Awareness is kind of the major thing in terms of giving people the ability to make more informed choices about what they're doing. The data centre issue keeps coming back to me because I feel it really encapsulates this thinking of ‘let's make things worse for everyone so that a select number of people can become slightly wealthier’ that is core to the climate crisis. And it's like we're going to basically rob energy from normal people, increase our emissions and fail to meet our targets, while making the wealthy wealthier.

“I think it's really cool that you guys are raising awareness and campaigning on that issue,” he concludes with a smile. 

Biodiversity in Ireland is another issue that Eamonn identified.

There's this famous statistic about how our tree cover here is worse than Spain, and Spain is basically a treeless landscape. And then all we have are these horrible conifer plantations basically where absolutely nothing lives. And this is another one of the ways of how things are all interconnected. Obviously, those plantations are there because they grow very quickly, so that they make money…the profit incentive is the main thing. The purpose of them is not to capture carbon or to create natural environments for things to live in.

Eamonn pretty much captures many of our ethos at Friends of the Earth where we work on building the movement power needed to hold governments and corporations accountable—to bring about the system change needed for a just world where people and nature thrive. We pile pressure on the Government to implement faster and fairer climate action, wherein people are prioritised—as opposed to profits.

In addition to campaign strategy, we specialise in activism, education, public debate, and policy change, with social justice being the common thread entwining it all. We are committed to a process of consistently learning and unlearning about the systems of power and oppression that influence our lives and the world around us. We believe that we need to understand systems in order to effectively change them. 

As our conversation draws to an end, I ask Eamonn if he plans to have climate conversations with the people he encounters during the walk, especially as such conversations were what had stayed with him the most from his previous walks. During his previous walks, where he raised money for the suicide prevention charity Pieta House, he had the opportunity to discuss mental health with the people he encountered. “It kind of opened my eyes because I had all these conversations with people about those they had lost to suicide. I better understood the effects that suicide has like on people and their communities after the walk than I did before,” he recounts.

“It (climate conversations) is something that will come up as I go along because I'll be on the road for 8-9 months, and we're obviously seeing more extreme weather events as a result of climate change. So that'll be kind of a focal point as such extreme weather events are also the things you can see in real time as the impact of climate change. Such weather events will probably be something I encounter as I go along, and that'll be another reason to discuss climate with people I meet,” he says. 

Despite the challenges this long (and undoubtedly) arduous walk will throw up—or perhaps because of it, as he’s obviously an adventure-seeker through and through—Eamonn remains excited and hopeful. “I’m expecting there to be, you know, some pain and discomfort along the way, but I’m looking forward to having a good time. It has been a long time coming and I'm excited. It's a big project and I really like both the causes as well (climate and mental health). So, it's meaningful too…I’m going to give it a go basically!” he concludes. 

Interview by Nandana James

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A big thank you to Eamonn from everyone at Friends of the Earth for choosing us as one of the charities you're fundraising for! Your support goes a long way in strengthening our work.