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The President of Ireland since 2011, when he was elected by a final tally of almost 57% of the votes, Michael D. Higgins has used his time in office to set out a vision of what he calls ‘an ethical Republic’.
In a series of remarkable and urgent speeches, which are anything but the bland commentaries of a ceremonial head of state, Michael D. Higgins has entreated his fellow citizens to consider what makes the good life. He has asked how human rights, an active and empowered citizenry, women’s equality and the right to health and a life free of corrosive anxiety might be achieved. He has highlighted the plight of refugees. And he has criticized the ways in which work is becoming dehumanized, in a process that treats people as mere means to the creation of a more efficient market society.
This book collects some of Higgins’s most striking and thoughtful interventions in a great variety of settings, from workplaces and universities to the glittering environs of Windsor Castle, where he was the first Irish President to be welcomed by a British monarch.
Cover
Welcome Page
About When Ideas Matter
Preface
Introduction
PRELUDE
Inaugural Speech
A Toast
St Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry
MIGRATION, DIASPORA AND THE FAMINE
Liverpool and Its Irish Migrants
Of Migrants and Memory
Reflecting on the Gorta Mór:The Great Famine of Ireland
CULTURE
Patrick Kavanagh and the Migratory Experience
Remembering and Imagining Irishness
John Hewitt Summer School
Culture and Transformation
TOWARDS AN ETHICAL FOREIGN POLICY
Of Memory and Testimony
Remembering Kader Asmal
The Future of Diplomacy in Conditions of Global Change
To Members of the 47th Infantry Group, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
Preparing for the Global Humanitarian Summit
On Receiving an Award from the Republic of Chile
DEFENDING AND RENEWING DEMOCRACY
The Future of Parliaments
The Challenge of Human Rights for Contemporary Law, Politics and Economics
The Human Rights Discourse: Its Importance and Its Challenges
Defining Europe in the Year of the European Citizen
RENEWING ECONOMICS: TOWARDS A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY
Public Intellectuals and the Universities
The Future of Work
An Adequate Economic Discourse for the Europe of our Grandchildren
Drawing Water from the Same Well
The Irish Launch of the European Year of Development
Recovering Possibilities
The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative National Seminar
The European Union
REMEMBERING THE PAST: COMMEMORATION AND FORGIVENESS
Remembering the 1913 Lockout
At a Symposium Entitled ‘Remembering 1916’
Address at an Ecumenical Service to Commemorate the Children Who Died During the Easter Rising
To the Relatives of Those Who Participated in the Easter Rising
The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation
At the Dedication of the Cross of Sacrifice
Of Myth-Making and Ethical Remembering
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Index
About Michael D. Higgins
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
It was in response to interest and requests from a number of members of the public, some of whom had either attended, or read about, some of my public addresses, and had asked where they might be found, that I agreed to the suggestion that publication of a selection of speeches might be worthwhile.
Those chosen are selected from a very much larger number that I have delivered since my inauguration as President of Ireland, on November 11th 2011. They were chosen by the editors of this volume to whom I am grateful.
For their assistance in preparation of those speeches chosen, may I thank those staff who worked within the Áras, and others from outside, who have contributed by suggestion, draft, amendment and, above all, with the challenging task of interpreting my handwriting. For all of my speeches, those included here and others, I of course take full and sole responsibility.
In doing so I want to say just a word about the speeches which have been chosen by the editors. If you sense a concern with the intellectual and social crisis, you are correct. Simply recognising the challenges of the deep changes of our times is, I believe, insufficient. We need to create the capacity to understand, critique and offer options and alternatives to those changes, ones that will sustain and deepen democracy. It is important to sustain, claim or defend a space of discourse that allows for this, and draw such shared conclusions from that understanding that it will be emancipatory for humanity.
My journey to being President of Ireland has been a long, complex and informative experience. Given the background that I brought to my present position I regard it as a further privilege that I had the opportunity to deliver these speeches. Words are a great gift. They are all the power that some people, and often even entire peoples and classes have. To be given the opportunity to offer a critique of current circumstances, with their threats and their possibilities, is a great privilege. I am grateful for that privilege and I respect it. Words matter.
Soon after my inauguration, I said that I would seek to make my tenure a Presidency of ideas. In truth what I have written I would have sought to write, irrespective of circumstance. What the speeches contain are just my response to current circumstances, no more than that, and they are offered, in humility, as invitations to a shared discourse and debate.
For some who live and struggle in an unequal world, ideas and words are all they have at their disposal. Their ideas express their common humanity, their aspirations for what is fair, just, and emancipatory. They constitute what is, for them, the realm of hope.
In the course of preparing and delivering some of the speeches which follow I have often found myself thinking in this year of commemoration – 2016 – of those who dreamed of and struggled for Irish Independence a century ago, among them my father, John Higgins.
During this year I have often thought of his hard life, his illness and his death, accompanied by a fall into poverty, an experience shared by so many former participants in the birth of the State of which I now have the honour to be President.
For such people social security and health care were far from sufficient, in their ageing years, in the Republic for which they gave so much of the energy of their young lives. I think too of my mother who shared his views with a quiet fortitude and my sisters who emigrated when they were twenty years old, and my brother who kept his courage in challenging circumstances. So much has been achieved in modern Ireland but our fully inclusive, equal version of a republic is very much an unfinished task.
My own family, Sabina, Alice Mary, Michael, John and Daniel have shared all the public life that has led up to the position I now fill. The discussion of public affairs and public rhetoric has been central to their experience of our lives together. We have had great friends, allies, comrades. To them all I dedicate this book.
I have come to regard the ethics of friendship as the beautiful, most enduring prospect that remains available to this and coming generations. Discussing, debating, making the case for change, is best achieved within the ethics of friendship. To all those who welcomed me to their causes, I am so grateful.
I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of my agent Jonathan Williams, my editor Neil Belton and his skilful and patient colleagues Georgina Blackwell, Clémence Jacquinet, Simon Hess and Declan Heeney. I am also grateful to Declan Kiberd for his friendship and advice. For use of their work may I thank artists Brian Bourke and Ger Sweeney.
I hope that you find what follows of interest and continue the debate on the issues they raise.
There is so much more to be said, so much more reflection to be made, for a world not merely made better than before, but built on a freedom that will release the joy of a shared life on our fragile planet.
Beir beannacht
MICHAEL D. HIGGINS
The opportunity to write an introduction to a new edition of When Ideas Matter enables me to reflect, not just on events since its publication, but also allows me to assess how the observations made in the speeches have been confirmed or contradicted, or whether they need to be revised. On re-reading the substance of what I wrote, I would not fundamentally change the message, the appeal contained therein. However, the fragmentation in thought and policy that I addressed, the absence of connection in our present circumstances between philosophical work, moral concern and the emancipatory potential of the social sciences, has only deepened.
The pages that follow thus continue to embody my hopes and anxieties, my sense of intellectual disappointment at the situation in which we find ourselves, as well as my recognition of the real achievements in matters of peace-making and progress, however slow, towards equality. These concerns are reflected in the different papers I have delivered since I was inaugurated as President of Ireland on the 11th of November 2011. This new introduction also gives me the opportunity to reflect on the response I have had to these papers, delivered to public audiences who were invited to become part of a wider debate about a discourse adequate to our times, including a critical reorientation of the language of politics and economics. In this paperback publication, my invitation is repeated.
I have a sense from the responses I have received, even if they are expressed in a myriad of different ways, of a sense of bewilderment and confusion about the changes that are so profoundly affecting the world, and of a yearning for authenticity. Among members of the public who have held on, however tenuously, to the possibility of a political discourse emerging that is informed, open-minded, courteously critical, that speaks of change that might be delivered within a participatory democracy, there is widespread disappointment. There is also fear that in the absence of clear alternatives, extremism will take hold of politics. More than that, there is deep concern at the corruption of thought that is revealed in the throwing off of opinions, couched often in words that are used without the slightest consideration as to where, and on whom they might fall and with what consequence. There is, so many people have expressed to me, an impatience with complexity, a degraded rhetoric that offers extreme opinions, ignoring context and which abuses the exciting freedoms that new communication technology makes possible.
There have, however, been some positive developments since the first publication of When Ideas Matter. The participation of young people in the most recent General Election in the United Kingdom reverses a trend and is a development surely to be welcomed. I believe that the participation of the young in politics is based not in a single issue such as access to education, but rather represents a search for life-giving policy options across a whole range of concerns. For the sake of the future, I would like to be right.
Co-existing with such a benign development, and it is a matter of public concern, is what is widely perceived to be a resistance to reform of any radical kind in an institutional sense. There is a perception on the street of atrophy in institutional practice and language, an atrophy that seems to privilege the continuation of policies that are failing and inadequate, an atrophy that will allow only such a modicum of reform, if it is to be allowed at all, as can be contained within the paradigm of what is assumed to be an inevitable, unchangeable form of economy and society.
Such a view, a prevailing myth of recent decades, and one that is often actively hostile to any critique, has a near medieval ring to it, the ring of absolute intellectual certainty. In When Ideas Matter, I seek to make the case for locating economics within culture, an insight I took from Michael Volkerling’s debate with David Throsby towards the end of the nineties in Australia.*1 That exchange between Michael Volkerling and Australia’s leading cultural economist concerned Throsby’s view that economics and culture came from irreconcilable epistemologies – with economics being inherently individualistic and culture collectivist, a view that was challenged by Volkerling. He drew on writers such as Johan Galtung, who had suggested that economics of a neo-liberal kind was so narrow in its assumptions that it should be called ‘capitalistics’ in its privileging of one particular form of economy. Volkerling argued for an approach that he called socio-economics, which would see economics restored to a holistic form of scholarship assisted by cultural theory to make a paradigm shift, as there had been in such areas as social psychology in theories of multiple intelligence, and asked why should economic theory and economic policy-formation be different?
It will be clear that I agree with Michael Volkerling – that economics must be relocated within its cultural origins. I also believe that the history of economic thought indicates the value of the holistic approach which he advocated, and for which I argue.
As to why these speeches took the form they did: when I came to the Presidency I brought my books with me and they are still expanding, colonizing my study and this explains what you have to excuse, that I rarely prepared for a speech from scratch. My speeches reflect my reading, past and present, and thus there are assumptions in my approach which can and maybe should be contested.
If there is an urgency to what I say it is because in intellectual writing in general, I sense a continuation of the abandonment of structural theory – the idea that societies can be understood as interacting, mutually dependent parts rather than as collections of atomised individuals –,and for that we have paid a high price. Structural theoretical approaches were, I quickly concede, often over-deterministic, and were flawed for that reason. Yet a structural approach to the changes in the forms of capital that have emerged in a financialised global economy, is surely of value if we are to imagine and devise new forms of connection between economy, ethics, ecology and social cohesion.
I believe that it would not be unfair to suggest that an intellectual collapse into post-modernism, an ideological fashion that saw all social theories as coercive ‘grand narratives’, and preferred to concentrate on what was microscopic and worthy of rescue from the flux of insignificance, became not a new approach but a substitute for structural analysis of any kind. It meant not only the loss of a capacity for critical social thinking, but too easily and negatively fitted into the hegemony of individualism in public discourse, and facilitated the discarding of ideas of collective responsibility. The price paid has been allowing a free run to policies that are unaccountable, and frequently destructive, in the lives of people and to the environment.
The themes in some of the papers that follow flow from consultation with young people in ‘Being Young and Irish’ – the first of my Presidential initiatives, and also from my second general consultation which was titled ‘The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative’. Some of the papers were prepared for my early visits to participating third level institutions and meetings of civil society groups. Their structure reflects the setting in which they were delivered. The role of public intellectuals, the importance of philosophy, of pluralist scholarship, of a responsible and inclusive political economy, are recurring themes.
There are a number of papers on the ethics of memory. I was assuming office as Ireland entered a period of significant commemorations of events preceding the Rising of 1916, such as the Dublin Lockout and the outbreak of the First World War. The commemorations will run on through the centenaries of the Irish election of 1918, which produced across most of the country a massive majority for independence, the response to that electoral revolution, the War of Independence, and the Civil War of 1922-23. These latter anniversaries will, for obvious reasons, be the most challenging commemorations in terms of the form they take.
I continue to work on the challenges of dealing with remembering, forgetting, forgiving and imagining. I do not have a finished view on the ethics of memory or the act of remembering, but my papers on this theme in this book draw on the work of philosophers Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. I sought to locate these issues of the ethics of memory in the practical tasks of reconciliation in my addresses at Glencree in Co. Wicklow, and Corrymeela in Co. Antrim.
The themes I discuss are not discrete from each other. I mention, for example, how the poet John Hewitt addressed, in his life and work, questions of Ulster, regionalism, Europe and critical discourse about society.
On re-reading my work, I find myself returning to a quality I noted in my time as an academic – the imaginative capacity of the poetic insight, and its ability to eschew any dualism of mind and heart. Is it an excess of rationalism that has become irrational, that leads in some scholarship in the social sciences to the assumption that only what is measurable is valuable, that understanding must involve the quenching of the music of the heart, the loss of intuitive insight?
It is because of the power of the poetic instinct that I have found myself quoting, on many occasions, Michael Longley’s magnificent poem ‘Ceasefire’. To hear Michael read it is a spine-chilling but elevating experience.
I wrote on Patrick Kavanagh through the prism of what I felt to be the significance of his life as a migrant. ‘Transience’ is an illuminating and undervalued concept in the social sciences. My interest in migration comes from personal and family experience. It also reflects a debt I owe to brilliant theorists on migration while I was at Manchester University at the end of the Sixties and early Seventies, scholars such as J. Clyde Mitchell and Valdo Pons. I offer the discussion of the Irish experience of migration also as a sensitising gesture reminding us of our contemporary responsibilities as refugees flee broken states and intractable wars, and seek a compassionate response from Western states.
I am conscious as I write this new introduction of the global failure to understand the phenomenon that is migration, and the need that there is to criticise, and indeed expose, some of the myths that serve as propaganda for the purveyors of fear and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Our densely-peopled planet is so much more migratory than sedentary. An adequate scholarship surely has to be able to accommodate what is transitory. The future movements of people need to be understood by using a pluralist scholarship. The demographic projections are clear. Between now and 2050, 50 per cent of the population increase on current trends will take place in eight countries, six of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. The African Continent will contain 40 per cent of the young people of the planet, 24 per cent of the total population. This gives urgency to the need to translate words into deeds, to meet the commitments of 2015 in Paris on Climate Change, and New York on Sustainable Development, to turn aspirations into real achievements, to be open to acceptance of the fact that new models, appropriate to different cultural settings but equipped with the capacity to achieve human rights, are urgently necessary.
The speeches gathered here also contain my addresses to the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and deal with such topics as the future of parliamentary democracy. They were composed at a time when what had already been spoken of as ‘a democratic deficit’ in an institutional sense was turning into a loss of trust in parliament itself, due to the imposition of a poorly justified austerity.
I spoke frequently of the urgency of reconnecting with the European Street. You may find in the speeches also a critique of the failure to assess, monitor, or modify the application of austerity measures in terms of their effects on basic human rights, a blind failure to assess the consequences of subjecting citizens to the demands of a supposedly unavoidable set of fiscal imperatives whose necessity was asserted as though it was near-constitutional, but which I could not find accountable or transparent.
Making sense of, and interpreting aggregated discontent, is challenging to parliamentary politicians and indeed to the media. As I write, the term ‘populism’ is in frequent use, particularly in the period following the Presidential Election in the USA, and the Brexit referendum and General Election in the United Kingdom. Use of this term ‘populism’ strikes me as just a little lazy. When we speak of populism do we speak of a clientelist populism, a populism that abuses collective sentiment, or do we refer to a populist shared sentiment that is brought to bear on specific and more systematic injustices? In my speech ‘Recovering Possibilities’ at the launch of the Centre for the study of the moral foundations of economy and society, I refer to E.P. Thompson’s critique of the term in relation to the eighteenth century food riots in England. Populism was, of course, in its time a term applied to the introduction of the New Deal in the United States. It was frequently used as a term in support of the universalism of the British National Health Service, and of public housing initiatives. As a term, it can be used benignly as well as in a malignant way. We should never forget, however, how it served as a setting for the hatred, exclusion and genocide of the twentieth century.
How can moral sentiments be brought to bear on policy? When I gave speeches to parliaments, I was conscious of the leeching of decision-making from parliaments, of a democratic deficit that had the possibility of becoming a crisis of legitimacy for the very institutions of democracy. I was amazed at the narrow theoretical basis, the self-limiting scholarship that was not only serving failed policies, but was blocking alternatives and was so inimical to the paradigm shift which our times desperately needed.
These are concerns that are reflected in recent writing from scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Henning Meyer about how a disastrous outcome to this crisis can be avoided.
What is too easily called ‘populism’ is to a considerable degree an accumulation of discontents, feelings of exclusion, and disappointed expectations. Yes, it has a malignant component and capacity, but these need not be allowed to become dominant, and become available to predators on the uninformed, the righteously angry and the vulnerable. All of the disconnection can be mended, the exclusion ended, but it requires change at every level – political, intellectual, institutional – and at the level of rhetoric and language itself.
Ideas, and the courage to express them, to envisage their consequences, do matter. When I gave speeches on the role of public intellectuals at such venues as the London School of Economics or the Sorbonne, I was conscious of the emancipatory history of these institutions in the past as contributors to policy. I sought to encourage an invocation of that legacy, which I sensed was being neglected in our time in favour of an excessively neo-utilitarian ideology. Now in my seventies, I regularly feel the need to acknowledge, again and again, the debt we all still owe to to the life and work of such public intellectuals as Richard Titmuss and Anthony Atkinson.
My contributions are modest. I hope you will read them as invitations to a conversation in our troubled times – a conversation that will encourage participation and action – towards delivering the society we aspire to live in with dignity, in solidarity with our fellow citizens and in recovered harmony with nature. If there ever was a time for seeking to link our moral instincts to language, to action, to shared new beginnings, it is now. What is seeking to be born must be allowed to emerge in scholarship, politics and institutional practice.
Finally, a word on my motivation for the reflective speeches contained in this book. As a directly elected Head of State, I felt when I took office I should draw on my experience, on whatever gifts, whatever knowledge I may have had or acquired, to engage with deep issues of the connection between society, economy, ecology and social cohesion. Doing this involved going beyond the pressing issues of the day with which Parliaments are engaged. The discourse I sought was an attempt to give meaning to a promise I made at my inauguration, to make my presidency a presidency of ideas.
My efforts continue. A recent speech to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Biennial Conference in Belfast forms my Afterword. From that you may reasonably conclude that the intellectual turbulence of our age continues. It is not a time to opt for the comfort of quietude or even silence. I have referred to society as being at its best when it sees itself as a community of vulnerabilities as well as strengths. For any weaknesses of the texts, and my own vulnerabilities revealed, I take full responsibility.
*1 Volkerling, Michael (2000). “The Necessity of Utopia: Lessons from the Culture of Economics”, International Journal of Cultural Policy. Routledge.
11 NOVEMBER 2011
CITIZENS OF IRELAND, you have chosen me to be your ninth President, to represent you at home and abroad, and to serve as a symbol of an Irishness of which we can all be proud, and which together we must forge anew.
I enter the ninth Presidency with a sense of humility, but also with confidence in the great capacity of our people not only to transcend present difficulties but to realize all of the wonderful possibilities that await us in the years ahead.
I wish to acknowledge the immense contribution of those who have previously served in this office, particularly the two great women who immediately preceded me. They have developed our consciousness of human rights, of inclusion, and the important task of deepening and sustaining peace within and between communities in every part of our island. It is work I will endeavour to continue and to build upon.
As your President, I am grateful for the extent of the support, the strong mandate, you have given me. I also realize the challenges that I face, that we face together, in closing a chapter of our history that has left us fragile as an economy and wounded as a society, with unacceptable levels of unemployment, mortgage insecurity, collapsing property values and many broken expectations. During my campaign for the Presidency, I encountered that pain, particularly among the most vulnerable of our people.
However, I also recognize the will of our people to move beyond anger, frustration or cynicism and to draw on our shared strengths. To close the chapter on that which has failed, that which was not the best version of ourselves as a people, and open a new chapter based on a different version of our Irishness will require a change in our political thinking, in our view of the public world, in our institutions, and, most difficult of all, in our consciousness.
In making that transformation, it is necessary to work together for a different set of values that will enable us to build a sustainable economy and a society which is ethical and inclusive; a society and a state that will restore trust at home and act as a worthy symbol of Irishness abroad, inviting relationships of respect and co-operation across the world.
We must seek to build together an active citizenship, one based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity. A confident people is our hope, a people at ease with itself, a people that grasps the deep meaning of the proverb ní neart go cur le chéile – our strength lies in our common weal.
Sin iad mór-théamaí na hUachtaránachta atá curtha romham agam, agus mé lán-dóchasach go bhfuilimid ar tháirseach ré nua d’Éirinn agus d’Éireannaigh, sa bhaile agus i gcéin. Ré nua ina mbeidh bunluacha na cothroime agus an chirt, agus spiorad na cruthaíochta, faoi bhláth: poblacht, a mbeidh Éireannaigh de gach aicme agus traidisiún bródúil aisti.
(Those are the major themes of the Presidency set before us; and I am fully confident that we are on the brink of a new age for Ireland and for Irish people, at home and abroad. An age in which the values of equality and rights, and a spirit of creativity, will all flourish; and a Republic of which all Irish people of all classes and traditions will be proud.)
My Presidency will aim to be one that recognizes and builds on the many positive initiatives already under way in communities, in the economy, and in individual and collective efforts throughout our land. It will seek to encourage investment and job creation, innovation and original thinking.
I will seek to make this a Presidency of ideas. It will aspire to turn the best ideas into living realities for all of our people, realizing our limitless possibilities – ár feidireachtaí gan teorainn.
In implementing the mandate you have given me, I will seek to achieve an inclusive citizenship where all can participate and everyone is treated with respect. I will make it a priority to visit and to support the participation of the most excluded in our society, including those in institutional care.
I will champion creative communities who are bringing about positive change at local level by giving recognition to their achievements on the national stage. I believe that when we encourage the seedbed of creativity in our communities and ensure that each child and adult has the opportunity for creative expression, we also lay the groundwork for sustainable employment in creative industries and enrich our social, cultural and economic development.
In promoting inclusion and creativity, I will be inviting citizens of all ages to make their own imaginative and practical contribution to the shaping of our shared future. Active citizenship requires the will and the opportunity to participate in every way – to be the arrow, not the target.
Next year Bunreacht na hÉireann is seventy-five years old and a Constitutional Convention is planned by the Government. As President, I encourage citizens at home and abroad to engage with this important review as an opportunity to reflect on where we have come from and on how we might see ourselves in the future.
During my Presidency, I also intend to hold a number of seminars which will explore themes important to our shared life that are separate from and wider than legislative demands, themes such as the restoration of trust in our institutions, the ethical connection between our economy and society, and the future of a Europe built on peace, social solidarity and sustainability.
The first of these seminars will focus on being young in Ireland. It will address issues of education, employment, emigration and mental health. I hope also that the seminars during the next seven years might also address more global issues, stressing the importance of the ethical connection between politics, the economy and society.
I recognize that our long struggle for freedom has produced a people who believe in the right of the individual mind to see the world in its own way, and indeed that independence of mind has given Ireland many distinguished writers, artists and scientists, who are often insufficiently celebrated.
However, in more recent years we saw the rise of a different kind of individualism – closer to an egotism based on purely material considerations – that tended to value the worth of a person in terms of the accumulation of wealth rather than their fundamental dignity. That was our loss – the source, in part, of our present difficulties. Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognizes that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured by monetary success.
Our successes, after all, in the eyes of the world have been in the cultural and spiritual areas – in our humanitarian, peace-building and human rights work, in our literature, art, drama and song – and in how that drama and song have helped us cope with adversity, soothed the very pain they describe so well, and opened the space for new possibilities.
James Connolly said: ‘Ireland without her people means nothing to me.’ Connolly took pride in the past but, of course, felt that those who excessively worshipped that past were seeking to escape from the challenge of the present. He believed that Ireland was a work in progress, a country still to be fully imagined and invented – and that the future was exhilarating precisely in the sense that it was not fully knowable.
A decade of commemorations lies ahead – a decade that will require us to honestly explore and reflect on key episodes in our modern history; that will require us to draw on memory in a way that will enable us not only to be sensitive to differing and incomplete versions of that history, but also to remain open to reconciliation and the acceptance of different versions of memory.
A common shared future built on the spirit of co-operation and real participation in every aspect of the public world is achievable. In our rich heritage some of our best moments have been those that turned towards the future and a sense of what might be possible. That imagination of a better time to come brought us our independence. It is what has enabled us to overcome adversity and it is what will enable us to transcend our present difficulties and celebrate the real Republic that is ours for the making.
Every age, after all, must have its own Aisling and dream of a better, kinder, happier world.
Ní díomas ach dóchas a bheidh ag teastáil uainn ins na blianta dúshlánacha atá amach romhainn. Dóchas as ár n-oighreacht shaibhir, as ár ndúchas iolrach; dóchas as ár n-acmhainn samhlaíochta agus cruthaíochta; as an daonnacht choiteann a fáisceadh as stair chasta ár muintire i ngach cúinne d’Éirinn.
(It’s not chauvinism but hope which will be necessary in the challenging years before us. Hope in our rich heritage, in our plural culture; hope in our capacity for imagination and creativity; in the common humanity generated from the complex history of our people in every corner of Ireland.)
It is my wish to be a President for all of the Irish, at home and abroad. We Irish have been a diasporic people for a great part of our history. The circumstances that have impelled and continue to force many citizens to seek a better life elsewhere are not ordained by some mysterious hand of fate. They challenge our capacity to create a sustainable economy and an inspiring model of the good society. We, in our time, must address the circumstances that cause involuntary emigration, and resolve that in the years ahead we will strive with all our energy and intellect, with mind and heart to create an Ireland which our young people do not feel they have to leave and to which our emigrants, or their children, may wish to return to work and live in dignity and prosperity. I invite all of the Irish, wherever they may be across the world, to become involved with us in that task of remaking our economy and society.
Agus, ár muintir atá lonnaithe i dtíortha ar fuaid an domhain mhóir, bíodh a gcás, a gcearta agus a ngaiscí siúd ar ár n-aire againn. Tá rian a saothair agus a ndíograis fágtha acu ar gach tír inar lonnaigh siad: ar an gcultúr polaitíochta agus creidimh, sna réimsí oideachais agus sláinte, san eolaíocht, san saol gnó agus sna h-ealaíona ar fad: agus i ngluaiseachtaí éagsúla ar son chearta daonna agus dínit an duine. Ní suarach iad na gaiscí seo mar thaisce inspioráide dúinne sa bhaile.
(And, may the plight, the rights and the achievements of our people living in countries across the wide world remain in our care. The fruits of their work and dedication have been left by them in every country where they resided: in culture, politics and faith, in areas of education and health, in science, business and in all of the arts; and in the various movements for human rights and for the dignity of the person. These are not inconsiderable achievements to inspire us here at home.)
Let these, then, be our shared hopes, our common purposes, as we face the future. We Irish are a creative, resourceful, talented people, with a firm sense of common decency and justice. Let us address the next seven years with hope and courage as we work together to build the future for our country.
Muintir na hÉireann, ar aghaidh linn le chéile leis an dóchas agus an misneach sin a bhí is ba choir a bheith i gcónaí in ár gcroí.
8 APRIL 2014
AShoilse Banríon, A MHÓRGACHT RÍOGA:
YOUR MAJESTY, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS:
Thank you for your kind and generous welcome and for the warm hospitality you have extended to me, to Sabina and to our delegation.
That welcome is very deeply felt and appreciated by me, and by the people of Ireland, whom I represent. However long it may have taken, Your Majesty, I can assure you that this first State Visit of a President of Ireland to the United Kingdom is a very visible sign of the warmth and maturity of the relationship between our two countries. It is something to be truly welcomed and celebrated.
YOUR MAJESTY:
You famously used some words of Irish during your State Visit to Ireland. Today I would also like to turn again to the oral tradition of our ancient language, and to quote a seanfhocal, or wise saying, often applied to the mutuality of relationships. It observes simply: ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd.
Because scáth literally means shadow, this phrase is sometimes translated as ‘we live in the shadow of each other’. However, there is a more open and more accommodating meaning. Scáth also means shelter.
The word embodies the simple truth that physical proximity makes mutual influence and interaction almost inevitable. But more importantly, I believe, it implies the opportunity, even the obligation, for reciprocal hospitality and generosity – the kind of generosity reflected in your words this evening when you encouraged us to embrace the best version of each other.
Ireland and Britain live in both the shadow and in the shelter of one another, and so it has been since the dawn of history. Through conquest and resistance, we have cast shadows on each other, but we have also gained strength from one another as neighbours and, most especially, from the contribution of those who have travelled over the centuries between our islands, and particularly in recent decades.
The contribution of Irish men and Irish women to life in Britain, which Your Majesty has acknowledged with such grace, is indeed extensive and lends itself to no simple description. It runs from building canals, roads and bridges in previous decades to running major companies in the present, all the while lending Irish personality and imagination to the English language and its literature.
Like so many of our compatriots, Sabina and I feel very much at home when visiting Britain, which should be the case with our nearest neighbour and our close friend. Tonight we celebrate the deeply personal, neighbourly connection which is embodied in the hundreds of thousands of Irish and British people who have found shelter on each other’s shores.
YOUR MAJESTY:
When we are fortunate, history evolves into greater mutual understanding between peoples. The welcome that is so naturally afforded to British visitors in Ireland today was, I think, wholeheartedly expressed on the occasion of your State Visit in 2011. Your gracious and genuine curiosity, your evident delight in that visit, including its equine dimension, made it very easy for us to express to you and, through you to the British people, the warmth of neighbourly feelings. It laid the basis for an authentic and ethical hospitality between our two countries.
Admirably, you chose not to shy away from the shadows of the past, recognizing that they cannot be ignored when we consider the relationship between our islands. We valued your apt and carefully considered words when you addressed some of the painful moments of our mutual history, and we were moved by your gestures of respect at sites of national historical significance in Ireland.
These memorable moments and these moving words merit our appreciation and, even more, our reciprocity. While the past must be respectfully recognized, it must not imperil the potential of the present or the possibilities of the future – ar féidireachtaí gan teorainn – our endless possibilities of working together.
This present occasion, which completes a circle begun by your historic visit three years ago, marks the welcome transformation in relations between our countries – a transformation that has been considerably helped by the advancement of peace in Northern Ireland.
We owe a great debt to all of those who had the courage to work towards, and make manifest, that peace. I wish to acknowledge here the remarkable contributions of my predecessors Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. I am especially pleased that former President McAleese, and her husband Martin, are here with us this evening.
We must, however, never set aside or forget those who died, were bereaved, or injured, during a tragic conflict. As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote, to be forgotten is to die twice. We owe a duty to all those who lost their lives, the duty to build together in peace; it is the only restitution, the only enduring justice we can offer them.
We share, also, the imperative to be unwavering in our support of the people of Northern Ireland as we journey together towards the shelter and security of true reconciliation. We celebrate what has been achieved but we must also constantly renew our commitment to a process that requires vigilance and care.
YOUR MAJESTY:
We have moved on from a past where our relations were often troubled, to a present where – as you have said – Ireland and the United Kingdom meet each other in mutual respect, close partnership and sincere friendship. That friendship is informed by the many matters of mutual interest in which we work together and support one another.
In recent times we have seen our two Governments working ever more closely together in the European Union and in the United Nations. We have seen deepening partnership in the area of trade, but also in development aid where we share a common commitment to tackling hunger and improving nutrition.
The future we each desire, and seek to work towards, is one where Ireland and the United Kingdom stand together to seek common opportunities and to face common global challenges as partners and friends.
YOUR MAJESTY:
Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd. The shadow of the past has become the shelter of the present. While we grieve together for lost lives, we will not let any painful aspect of our shared history deflect us from crafting a future that offers hope and opportunity for the British and Irish people.
We again thank you for the hospitality that allows us, on this most joyous occasion, to celebrate the bonds of mutual understanding between our two peoples, and the warm, enduring friendship on which we have so happily embarked.
I therefore invite you, distinguished guests, to stand and join me in a toast:
To the health and happiness of Her Majesty and
His Royal Highness, and the people of the United Kingdom;
To a creative co-operation and a sustainable partnership
between our countries and our peoples; and
To valued neighbours whose friendship we truly cherish.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.
State Visit to Britain, 2014
11 APRIL 2014
I AM DELIGHTED TO bring a memorable State Visit to a close in a city with so many Irish connections, and in a place that enjoys such great renown as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.
I have had a very long personal association with Britain, and have been visiting the country for over fifty years. I first came as a university student seeking work during the college holidays. My two sisters emigrated to England at the age of twenty, and worked for British Rail at Central Station and Victoria Station in Manchester. They both married in Manchester, one to a railwayman from Oldham whose family had worked on the railway for generations. My sister and her family still live there. My other sister married an Irishman from Mayo, whose family – with one exception – all lived in England.
When I came as a postgraduate student to Manchester University in 1968, and stayed with my sister in Corby Street near Belle Vue, I regularly moved between the two worlds of an Irish construction worker’s family in Manchester and the realm of British academia. My field of research was apt – migration.
Over the years I have come here to stay in touch with my siblings and their families; to visit Irish community centres; to maintain fraternal contacts in the labour movement; and, as a parliamentarian, to advance inter-parliamentary links with my colleagues in Westminster. During all this time, including the decades of the 1970s and 1980s when the conflict in Northern Ireland cast a dark shadow over British–Irish relations, I was always impressed by the resilience of the Irish community in Britain.
In the 1960s, in Manchester and across Britain, monuments to the labour of Irish workers could be seen in the cities and throughout the countryside, especially the motorways but also on the building sites where Irish tradesmen and labourers were often the backbone of the workforce. The phrase ‘the men who built Britain’ was more than an idle boast. It was a statement of pride in the reputation for industry and capacity for hard work earned by our people.
There are other sectors of the economy, too numerous to list here but including agriculture, teaching and nursing, where routes of labour migration were carved especially deeply. Indeed, it was a great privilege for me this week to see the continuing contribution of Irish nurses and doctors to British medicine during my visit to University College Hospital in London.
During the 1950s, around half a million Irish men and women made the journey to Britain, my sisters among them. When we think of the circumstances in which these earlier generations of Irish emigrants moved to Britain, it is a joy to note that there is virtually no aspect of British civic or political life that has not been enriched by contributions from the Irish community. That success is due in no small part to the determination and character of those who settled here in more difficult times.
Today the Irish community has become one of the most dynamic in Britain. In my speech at the Guildhall in London earlier this week, I pointed to the contribution now being made, by our many highly skilled graduates, to British industry, to the professions, in commerce and in education. For this generation, migration is often temporary, or may even take the form of commuting, and many of these young people will return to Ireland enriched by the experience and education they gained here.
In marking the successes and achievements of those Irish men and women who have made those journeys and built new lives in Britain we must also, of course, recognize that for some of our people migration from Ireland was painful and traumatic. Many left difficult circumstances behind and some found hard lives in their new home. The story of the Irish in Britain has many dimensions, but as President of Ireland I am immensely proud today to bear witness to your continuing centrality in our national identity.
Of course British people too made the journey in the opposite direction, to Ireland – some for reasons of employment; others for reasons of family or romantic attachment; and others again because they just felt an affinity for the smaller island.
Since the time of Saints Patrick and Colmcille, there have been countless journeys in both directions across the Irish Sea. This afternoon, I would like to recall just two that have direct relevance to Coventry.
In September 1950 a young poet, born and raised in Coventry, moved to Belfast to take up a new job as Librarian at Queen’s University. He was, by any definition, a migrant. His name was Philip Larkin, and over the next five years in Belfast he wrote some of the finest poetry of his career. Later, drawing on a migrant’s sensibility, he described his family home. It is one of the most beautiful evocations of the memory of an emptied house:
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left.
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
As if to win them back.
So, while we rightly celebrate the legacy of the contribution of Irish emigrants to this country, we should not forget the terrible human cost exacted by this aspect of our history on our own people, the leaving and the left, and the emptied landscape of possibility.
Two years after Philip Larkin returned to England, another poet left his native Belfast to take up a job as Director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum here in Coventry. John Hewitt would call this city his home for the next fifteen years and would memorably capture Coventry’s great generous spirit as it rebuilt itself after the Blitz:
...this eager city,
the tolerance that laced its blatant roar,
its famous steeples and its web of girders
as image of the state hope argued for
Transience is the circumstance at the heart of these great poets’‘’