Speech by President Higgins at a St Patrick’s Day Reception
Áras an Uachtaráin, Monday, 17th March, 2025
Samhlaíocht agus an Náisiún – Imagination and The Nation:
Celebrating the Contribution of Community Arts to Inclusion and Creativity
A cháirde,
Tá áthas orm agus Sabina sibh a fháiltiú anseo inniu ag Áras an Uachtaráin agus muid ag ceiliúradh Lá Fhéile Phádraig – an lá féile dár Naomh pátrún, Pádraig, agus ár Lá Náisiúnta.
[Sabina and I are delighted to welcome you all here today to Áras an Uachtaráin as we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day – the feast day of our patron Saint, Patrick, and our National Day.]
‘Samhlaíocht agus an Náisiún’ [‘Imagination and the Nation’] is part of the initiatives that I have undertaken during my second term as President of Ireland. The aim was to highlight the powerful and transformative role of the arts and creativity in the making of Ireland as a republic and as an idea.
The creative arts have often played an important role in bringing together the many strands of Ireland’s past, present and future, teasing through the tangles of history, taking up hidden threads in our social fabric and weaving new possibilities for the future.
Art allows us to reflect on different lived experiences, past and present, bearing witness, bringing healing, and calling to action. Art is intrinsically inter-generational, allowing for connections and conversations to be forged and renewed in different times and changing circumstances. The arts encourage us to go where the pain of doing things right takes you.
The purpose of today’s reception is to celebrate art, in particular the contribution of the arts at local level as community and personal experience.
I wanted, too, in this my final St. Patrick’s Day mar Uachtarán, to acknowledge and celebrate all the efforts of those involved in grassroots arts movements over the decades.
Sabina and I are pleased to see so many familiar faces here, many of whom have dedicated their lives to working in the field of the arts and culture and, in particular, those who have sought to make the arts an inclusive and welcoming space for all.
May I thank, in particular, Damien McGlynn, Director of CREATE, the national development agency for collaborate arts in social and community contexts, for his assistance with this event today, and in particular for the archive material on the meetings in the North Star Hotel in 1983, and the First National Seminar of CAFÉ on the 27th, 28th and 29th April 1984.
May I say what an honour it is that Ciarán Benson is present with us today and has agreed to give a response to my address. While Ciarán has worked in the fields of social and cultural psychology, philosophy, and especially in psychological aesthetics for many decades, it is perhaps his longstanding involvement with cultural and educational policy in Ireland that many of us here today will be familiar with.
It is now 46 years since that ground-breaking and influential report that we now refer to simply as “The Benson Report” . (1979)
That report was a radical foundational document which examined the position of the arts in Irish education. It revealed what little sense of the role and function of arts and culture, and its value within society or within education, existed at the time in the late 1970s, and it prompted a discussion on the role of education in involving young people in the arts.
The report provided the first blueprint for the arts in Irish education, making over 100 recommendations as to what steps should be taken to give the arts a proper role in the education of the Irish people, many of which have since been implemented.
Underpinning the Benson Report was an abiding belief in the power and value of the arts and creativity to shape individual and societal lives for the better, to foster resonance with each other, and perhaps even find transcendence.
When I think of how we might approach a consideration of valuing the arts, I recall a quotation from Jacques Barzun, one that I know Ciarán Benson also has long liked:
“The arts involve knowledge of the world,
and science knowledge about the world” .
Such knowledge of the world is deeply personal and tied to the person who knows, who experiences, who makes sense of things.
It was Marshall Sahlins who made the important point about the need to distinguish culture from the humanistic and anthropological senses:
“Is “culture” an aspect or a means of “development”, the latter understood as material progress; or is “culture” the end and aim of “development”, the latter understood as the flourishing of human existence in its several forms and as a whole?”
I believe that this is an issue with which Europe continues to neglect at its cost, both in policy and institutional settings.
The inability to make a critique of the unaccountable market represents a moral and intellectual failure that cannot be overstated. A particular consequence is that the cultural space is seen less as an agora of ideas, a set of discourses, a peopled street, a process of discovery, a resonance of the past, an excursion into the realm of the imagination, a manifestation of excellence. The cultural space is, rather, construed as a space to be ransacked in magpie fashion for what glitters, what has consumption value.
The opportunity being lost is one recognition for culture as the repository and source of stories, past and yet to be remembered, by which we regularly strive to become at home in the world, in an endless process of change.
The peopled street, the contemporary urban renewal, is different to the public space we encounter in literature. It is a space of anonymity and risk where, along a spectrum from curiosity to danger, an alternative to the security of home is ventured.
How different such a version is to a set of forecourts for retail, where spending power is essential to experience the renewed urban street, a space in its commodification, more private than public and renewed for commerce rather than citizenship.
The question posed by Marshall Sahlins, to which I refereed earlier, is a choice which cannot be ignored: is the future of culture to be as an integrating force for tolerance of diversity, for the vindication of the freedom of the imagination, for enabling us to be at home in the world, or is it to be an exotic ingredient in a material version of progress defined by consumption and accumulation.
If culture is coming to be defined as commodity within a global market, it is also within an ideology of control. For too long, financial institutions have used their hegemony to set limits to policy in other areas, constantly diminishing the cultural space in which so much radical or innovative thinking is possible.
One result has been a dire impoverishment of social philosophy: we no longer seem to be living in countries but in economies. In the past I have used the concept the “de-peopled economy” for such a development.
Another consequence of the fracturing of intellectual life has been the devaluation of play as creative activity, for a consumer society is so goal-oriented that it has little use for any goal-free activity. Homo economicus, feels justified by its products, required to be suspicious of even reference to Homo sapiens, whereas play is concerned with performance rather than ends, with the quality of action rather than results. Performance is everything.
Hence, the major contradiction of our economic paradigm: that a society based on the negation of the play element presents itself as uniquely able to deliver play, as a form of purchased entertainment, as experience of consumption. Play has thus been placed in the service of something which is not playful at all, being narrowed or even degraded to the level of specialised work.
Such a degradation is only possible in a society which has lost an ancient wisdom which taught that play is the basis of all culture, that everything is learned first by play and that the human is most human when playing. A society that has lost a powerful symmetry with nature and permitted itself to become a receiving space for the adverse consequences of science and technology rather than moulding them in the services if humanity. Once again, I find myself quoting Raymond Williams: “Be the arrow, not the target” .
History tells us that most great advances in knowledge have come from acts of initial dissidence, acts made by someone courageous enough to question the prevailing codes. The act of dissidence, even in the fields of science and technology, can often be rather artistic in nature: a hunch, an instinct, which may take years of work to confirm.
Indeed, the great scientific inventors of our modern world, Copernicus and Kepler, as well as Smith and Keynes, were in the deepest sense artists, and they were productive. Perhaps the brilliance of these contributions was made possible by the fact that a distance had been established between them and the prevailing paradigms of knowledge, the regular experience of artists, of being a community in exile, bore fruit in creative innovation at the heart of science itself.
It is exciting to envisage what a theory of knowledge might have been constructed had we not made a sole reliance on a Western model that emphasised the rational to the exclusion of the aesthetic.
The beauty of explanation as artistic practice rather than its empirical test is something that still survives in some cultures – for example, the Chinese approach to mathematical explanation which can be regarded as a crucial part of the informing philosophy of its culture more generally.
It is possible to speak, therefore, of issues that arise within cultural policy that are of the character of a politics and ethics of memory that affects the definition of identity, that stresses the need for cultural sensitivity. This is of particular importance in the context of current geopolitical realities.
This is a very special gathering – I am delighted that we have present a number of Arts Officers from several of the Local Authorities, North and South, across the island, as well as representatives from CREATE which continues with the important work that was started by the CAFÉ initiative [Creative Activity for Everyone], leading the development of collaborative arts practice by enabling artists and communities to create exceptional art together.
I suggest that the engagement of collaborative arts in distinct, relevant and powerful ways with the urgent social, cultural and political issues of our times has never been more important.
To all of you present, we are so grateful for your vital contribution to the promotion of an inclusive arts and culture.
Artists, here in Ireland and all around the world, have always invited us to look at our world in new and creative ways, to celebrate who we are, to aspire to become a better version of ourselves. Through our art – our music, our dance, our literature, our film, our paintings – we are enabled to connect to our shared past, to celebrate our present as well, and, most important of all, to imagine the emancipatory possibilities for our futures together. Samhlaíocht.
It was John Dewey who argued that the particular value of art is that, in its making, and in its reception, all aspects of ourselves are involved and required – our seeing and hearing, our abilities to feel and allow our emotions to be shaped by what we are encountering, our values, our memories, our capacity to imagine, our abilities to think critically. Art, in other words, involves the most complete and complex kinds of experience that human beings can have or, more accurately, can be part of.
It follows, therefore, that what our culture and our arts give us must never be regarded as something marginal, peripheral, to be enjoyed out of surplus, or having to forgo in times of economic adversity.
Our cultural heritage and practices are at the heart of our national identity, and the spaces for creativity are as important to us as a nation as our physical infrastructure.
The cultural space is always wider and larger than the economic space. Because we live together and depend on each other, we need the arts – our music, our dance, our film, our painting, our poetry – to build bridges among people, to make connections with each other and with nature, and perhaps even to gain transcendence.
From my days as a Local Authority member, to Mayor of Galway, to the first Minister for Arts and Culture, which included being part of the creation of the first ‘Arts Officer’ role at Local Authority level in Galway, one of the first in the country, I have always been a champion of the arts and, in particular, the role that arts and creativity can play in fostering inclusion and participation at the grassroots and local level.
I recall so many worthwhile and creative grassroots initiatives by Helen Bygrove that took place in those early years of the Arts Officer role in Galway County Council – the painting of colourful murals in schools, using unused horse boxes as arts spaces, among so many other great initiatives.
I am delighted that Sandy Fitzgerald is also present with us today. It was he who, in 1984, along with the late Colm Ó Briain, Ciarán Benson and about 10-12 others, were instrumental in setting up the Creative Activity for Everyone, or CAFÉ initiative, to which I have already referred. This initiative sought to position the arts firmly within the values of inclusion, creativity, imagination and active citizenship.
The purpose was to include Travellers, marginalised groups, disability groups, migrants, encourage intergenerational participation, and to confront and challenge the discourse of exclusivity – a mindset that suggested that community arts would depress real creativity, one that we know now to be a fallacy.
Then, too, the importance of local radio in promoting local arts is of immense value. In a world inundated with social media, digital and streaming services, local and community radio remains a powerful unwavering platform from which to promote the arts and emerging talent, offering a stepping stone for artists to reach wider audiences and establish their careers. Local radio plays a vital role in promoting local culture, supporting small businesses, and bringing communities together. At its best it constitutes a profoundly inclusive medium.
I suggest that the arts and culture have never been more necessary than in our contemporary circumstances. The power of the arts to engage, challenge, transform and empower remains immense. By celebrating and encouraging new moments of collective creativity and vision-making – imagining and achieving a more equal republic and a better shared future, we can support wide public engagement, participatory citizenship, promote an inclusive approach to our national commemorations and encourage new acts of vision-making for the century ahead.
A cháirde, this Saint Patrick’s Day, we find ourselves living in testing times where dangerous forces are yielding immense unchecked power. The arts are not immune from such threats. It is precisely because the arts have such social power that rulers of all kinds have approached them warily over the centuries.
The last century was one of the bloodiest ever, and during it we saw many examples of powerful autocratic regimes brutally suppressing great art, and deliberately cultivating propagandist art that promoted the hegemonic ideology.
We in Ireland were not immune from this. As Ciarán Benson has written,
“In an anaemic way we saw this in Ireland with its petty censorship and suspicion of writers in particular”.
The need to protect the making of art from the interference of self-serving powers is now so obvious as we watch with horror global developments, including attempts by the most powerful to control the media, dismantle cultural institutions, and influence artistic output, actions that play into a long history of authoritarians using the arts to pursue insidious agendas. The need for critically informed arts officers, teachers and youth arts workers has thus never been more important.
The more critically informed and alive we are to the possibilities of what it is that artists of all types do, the better it will be for the kind of society that genuinely commits itself to the formation of citizens with minds richly furnished by what the arts can offer.
Arguably a nation that places a high value on the arts and creativity – on words beautifully rendered, or musical phrases distinctively its own – might cast a disproportionately long shadow. I know that Ciarán Benson has suggested that perhaps Ireland may be one such nation .
Then, too, when I look around this room today, I am uplifted by the power of a community that is making a positive contribution to active and creative citizenship, one that demonstrates altruism, inclusion and equality, one that remains such a precious, shared resource for us all.
It is on the performer and the performative that we rely, above all, to encourage the creativity and independence of mind that we need to re-shape the places we inhabit, the dreams that we are re-crafting.
So let us continue to dream. Let us continue to love. Let us continue to encourage. Let us continue to create. For through our creativity, we live and resonate with each other and with nature and perhaps even find an emancipatory transcendence.
Before I conclude, let me thank our entertainers – the Beartla Ó Flatharta Céilí Band who were winners of the Senior Céilí Band Competition at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann 2024. My thanks also to our Civil Defence First-Aiders and all the Áras staff who make today such a special day for everyone present.
Sabina and I hope that you enjoy this afternoon reception here in Áras an Uachtaráin, and we look forward to meeting many of you shortly. We wish you all a happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
Tá súil agam féin agus Saidhbhín go mbainfidh sibh sult as an bhfáiltiú anseo in Áras an Uachtaráin, agus tá súil againn bualadh le roinnt daoibh go luath. Lá Fhéile Pádraig shona daoibh go léir.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh is beir beannacht.
