Speech at Graduation Ceremony, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 28 June 2016
A chéimithe,
Is mian liom comhghairdeas ó chroí a dhéanamh libh agus le bhur muintir ar an lá mór seo.
[To all of you the graduates,
May I extend my warmest congratulations on this special day for you and your families.]
Today we are marking, with both solemnity and joy, the closure of crucially formative years in your lives – a time of intellectual discovery, of demanding and rewarding study, of new friendships – and we are also celebrating the opening up for all of you of new horizons full of possibility, of decisions awaiting and aspirations beckoning.
It is my great pleasure to share this very special occasion with you all, and I thank you, Vice Principal Jeffery, for your kind words of introduction, and you, Vice Chancellor O’Shea, for the honour you have bestowed on me by asking me to address this graduation ceremony and by conferring on me the honorary title of Doctor of Laws. I receive it with full consciousness of the honour it constitutes, coming from the great seat of knowledge that the University of Edinburgh is and has been for so many centuries.
Indeed all of you who are graduating today are joining the ranks of such distinguished alumni of this University as Gershom Carmichael, David Hume, Charles Darwin, Sophia Jex-Blake, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Chrystal MacMillan - men and women, who, each in their own field and so often across disciplines, made a huge contribution to universal knowledge and science.
Once described by Tobias Smollett as “a hotbed of genius”, the city of Edinburgh is, of course, one of the cradles of that extraordinary intellectual awakening that was the Scottish Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century – a period of renaissance in so many fields of knowledge, from philosophy to architecture, medicine, geology and history, to name but a few.
My hope for all of you who graduate today is that you will retain, in your outlook on the world, something of that unique balance between reason and sentiment, between science and ethics, that characterised the best of the Scottish Enlightenment in its early form. I hope that you will know to retain, too, throughout your adult life, a willingness to question accepted truths and assumptions.
In a number of my own speeches as President of Ireland, I have sought to challenge some of the assumptions that underpin much of the contemporary public discourse on social and economic life, in particular the accepted wisdom of individual interests and an instrumental form of reason, which I hold to be one of the great intellectual pitfalls of our times.
In doing so, I have found myself going back time and again to the seminal writings of one of the great figures in the Scottish school of philosophy: Adam Smith, who – albeit a graduate of Glasgow! – recalls for us a time when Western political economy was still productively informed by philosophy and ethics.
In the present day, we are too often invited to view the world from the self-interested perspective of calculating utility maximisers under the guise of the necessity of competition – but that is a gross simplification, even a distortion, of Adam Smith’s teachings as expounded in The Wealth of Nations.
We should not forget that The Wealth of Nation, which described the operation of the economy, is deeply connected to Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith taught us that the pursuit of one’s own interests never exhausts one’s capacity for moral sympathy – that is, our capacity to place ourselves in the position of the other, through a combination of emotion and imagination. As Smith wrote,
“Our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe”.
This is a powerful call for all of us today, and more particularly for your generation, to which this new century belongs. This new century is indeed one of pressing global issues, from climate change to large scale migration and displacement – issues that challenge us to exercise our capacity for empathy, to feel for the plight of those we have never met as we do for those with whom we share a city or a country.
The decades that face you will be ones of great change, during which, it is my profound conviction, all our different academic disciplines will be called upon to a great task of boundary crossing and re-integration with ethics – a task for which we can draw inspiration, once again, from the spirit that drove the early days of the Scottish enlightenment.
A consideration of justice, for example, cannot be bounded by any narrow legalism, but must be able to embrace issues of global justice and intergenerational justice, without boundaries of nations or generations. Equally pressing ethical issues face the disciplines of biology, economics, medicine, sociology, informatics and so many others.
This is an exciting time to have graduated. A challenging time, yes, but open to all the energies of mind and heart, propitious to nurturing the bonds of friendship you have forged as a support, as a source of joy and creativity, and to putting the stamp of ethics on all that you do.
If previous generations – including my generation – did not make redundant the instruments of war, or eliminate poverty; if they did not deliver the results of science and technology for the full benefit of all humanity; if they did not safeguard our planet and its resources for those who would follow – none of those failures are inevitable. All of these challenges are available to your generation to redress and to overcome.
Scotland and Ireland are nations who facilitate and value dialogue, nations who wield moral authority rather than a sword, and we are also nations that believe in the power of education and ideas to change the world.
I am proud, for example, of the role that Ireland played last year in facilitating, alongside Kenya, the new agenda for Global Sustainable Development, which the Scottish Parliament was among the first in the world to sign up to. Agreeing these Goals, however, was but a first step. We must now begin the process of implementation and the demanding work of monitoring and evaluating progress. Much of this work will fall to you, the next generation, as you assume your responsibilities at home and abroad.
The gift to you of our times – through your study, through your ethical and critically-aware lives together – is the possibility to make a new world in which all can flourish. I am inspired by the actions that the young people of this university have already taken in their quest to make the world a better place, such as, to mention but one of your many achievements, the free, environmentally sustainable, mobile phone charger which some of you have created for the benefit of refugees in Greece.
The critiques of political disengagement sometimes levelled at young people do not correspond to my experience – not over many decades in public life and certainly not as President of Ireland. Scotland, too, is a country which values its young people, not in the abstract, but in practice, and in power. We saw this in 2014, when sixteen and seventeen-year-olds were given the right to cast their votes – an example of where Scotland has led the world.
Here in Scotland as in Ireland, I see a generation of young people who are not intimidated by the difficulties they face – young people who are looking outwards, willing to use new technologies to forge new connections and develop new solutions to create a better world for all.
A Mhic Léinn [Dear students ],
Graduating, from the root concept graduus, is a step on the road, the commencement, indeed, of a journey. I wish you all intellectual satisfaction, moral courage and good and lasting friendships on that journey.
May a passion for justice and equality be the force that drives you in all of your future endeavours. May you not only acquire and retain passionate ethical consciousness, but also a sense of wonder, of possibilities never fully exhausted.
It is also my hope that Ireland will feature in your future lives and endeavours, and I assure you that our Celtic connection will guarantee the warmest of welcomes to you if it does. And to conclude, may I offer you a blessing in our own ancient Irish language:
Beir Beannacht agus, rath Dé ar bhúr n-iarrachtaí ar son leas agus Fónaimh muintir an Domhain uilig san todchaí.
[Carry with you our blessings in your future endeavours as you strive to make a positive difference to the world we share.]