Speech at the Guildhall Banquet
London, 9th April 2014
Your Royal Highnesses:
Lord Mayor:
Tánaiste:
Excellencies:
Ladies and Gentlemen
Mar Uachtarán na Éireann, as President of Ireland, I am deeply honoured and greatly pleased to be here with you tonight in celebration of what is the first State Visit by a President of Ireland to the United Kingdom.
I am of course conscious of the particular role that the Guildhall has played in Irish history. It was here, in 1609, that the Irish Society was conceived, during a meeting at which representatives from the livery companies of London considered undertaking a plantation in Ulster, on lands recently seized from Gaelic chieftains, and the construction of the first planned city in Ireland, on the Western bank of river Foyle.
Over the intervening centuries the people of Derry/Londonderry have lived through many of the most tragic and contentious events of our shared history.
It was one of the great joys of my Presidency, then, to visit Derry last year as we celebrated together the creativity of the people of that great city during its tenure as UK City of Culture.
That event in Derry/Londonderry stands as a symbol of the profound transformation of the relationship between our countries – from colonisation and conflict to partnership and friendship – and they are a symbol of our shared future together.
The intertwined histories of Ireland and Britain have indeed known great turbulence, but we meet at a time when the relationship between us has never been more friendly or respectful. The vibrancy of this relationship now irrigates every aspect of our societies. Tonight, it is perhaps appropriate to recall and emphasise the social, cultural and economic currents in that relationship, which flow so evenly and naturally now that we may underestimate their significance.
Today the UK and Ireland trade as equal partners within the wider European Single Market. As the Lord Mayor has indicated, our countries share over €1 billion in trade every week. The UK is Ireland’s largest export market, and Ireland is the fifth largest export market for the UK.
We trade with each other, and we also spend time with each other. Two out of every five visitors to Ireland last year came from Britain; some returning to their communities, others seeking roots or reviving a connection.
This reminds us that the relationship of peoples is not reducible to what is calculable in any commercial sense. Rather, it is the product of a multi-layered history that is inter-generational.
Our connections with each other are complex and have been influenced by factors of history and economics. During the 1950s, around half a million Irish men and women made the journey across the Irish Sea. These immigrants made such an important contribution to the reconstruction of Britain after the war – building new roads, working in factories and hospitals, tilling fields. Their children and grandchildren now populate all sectors of British life – proud to be British, and equally proud of the Irishness of their roots. Even in our globalised and mobile world, such level of interconnectedness is rare in its depth and the richness of what is shared.
There are numerous areas in which even closer cooperation between the United Kingdom and Ireland can yield mutually beneficial fruit, including construction, the financial services, research and development, tourism, and, most of all perhaps, the creative industries, the agri-food industry, and the energy sector. The first joint UK-Ireland trade mission to Singapore is but one recent example of our ability to identify the common challenges and opportunities facing our two islands. May I say how delighted I am at the Lord Mayor’s announcement of the establishment of the City of London Corporation’s scholarship in Anglo-Irish Literature. This scholarship will add one more thread to the canvas of our common endeavours.
The close, multi-stranded working relationship which we have built together is a great resource, one of immense value to our shared future.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The institution of which you are a part, and these surroundings we now enjoy, signify for us something quite profound: that while an enduring institution is an achievement in itself, it also must change to address new challenges.
Our global world now is an interdependent existence. Our world, so connected by intricate, and often unaccountable, financial logics, is one where a tremble in one corner of the globe can trigger a financial earthquake in another, leading to consequences not envisaged by their authors or sources in either the developed or developing world.
In Ireland, we have our own direct experience of this. As a small and open economy, we were hit simultaneously by the global financial crisis, over which we had but little control, and by one of its derivatives – the destructive fallout from the collapse of a domestic construction and banking bubble.
We have made progress in addressing these great challenges.
Our exports have come back to levels significantly higher than their pre-crisis peak. We have returned to a modest but real growth, and are winning back the trust of our people and of investors; a point not unnoticed by that ‘panopticon’ of the contemporary financial world – the rating agencies. Most importantly, we have gone from losing 1,600 jobs a week during the peak of the crisis to now creating 1,200 jobs a week.
Ireland’s innovative companies are meeting needs across the world – from visitor access software in the Houses of Parliament, here in London, to customer information on the Paris metro, to medical devices that enable blood-free surgery in cardiac centres around the globe. Another Irish groundbreaking initiative is ‘Origin Green’, which is making Ireland one of the most verifiably sustainable places in the world to produce food.
Our human resources are a magnet for investment. Ireland, with the youngest population in the European Union, has the highest percentage of graduates among its population of any country in the Union. Many of these highly qualified graduates are working in Britain and developing skills which, we hope, they will apply in the future in Ireland. I am especially conscious here of the prominent role that is being played by so many Irish academics and researchers within the British university system. We are committed in Ireland to investment in education and research and this is yet another area where there are great benefits to collaboration between us.
In responding to our recent economic crisis, Ireland received significant support from our partners in Europe and, on a bilateral basis, from our friends here in the United Kingdom, for which we are deeply grateful.
But it is the ordinary people of Ireland, and generations yet to come, who have borne and continue to bear the cost of the painful decisions that have been taken, aimed at stabilising the public finances and reducing the astounding levels of public debt incurred from rescuing our banks.
In the end, it is how our respective peoples experience the results of our action or inaction that is the test of the quality of our decisions.
The test will always be a human impact one. As Seamus Heaney reminded us last year, not long before his passing:
“we are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon.”
The human cost of the financial crisis has been enormous.
While unemployment is receding in Ireland, it remains too high and the emigration of our young people is a challenge to our future prosperity. It is clear to us in Ireland that providing opportunity for our young people, and harnessing their talents, will be the true measure of our recovery.
Beyond any specificity of the Irish or British versions of the crisis, however, the scale of what we have experienced in recent years calls for a much more fundamental analysis of the nature of our contemporary economic system. When the financial and technological forces that hold sway are unaccountable and seem more powerful than Governments, it poses the question as to who is responsible for their consequences.
These are profound issues which require a rich public discourse that seeks to find and craft a sustainable and ethical relationship between economy and society. We need an approach that embraces the totality of the work of such as the great Adam Smith. Yes, we may be familiar with the author of the utilitarian Wealth of Nations; but we also need the so much more ethically minded author of Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Our need is for a dialogue that is pluralist, and capable of engaging with the wide range of models that our intellectual life makes possible. It is such a dialogue that I am seeking to promote in Ireland, and know that such a debate is also taking place in Britain.
The City of London has, throughout history, been a crucible for new ideas in social and economic theory. No one understands better than you that economies and societies best flourish in a climate of intellectual openness, where orthodoxies and dominant models are constantly interrogated.
In the wake of a banking crisis, it is within our power to envisage new models of possibility – ones where tradition and innovation can enrich each other; where trust and diversity can coexist; and where a sustainable and competitive economy can be based on truly ethical foundations.
Ireland and Britain may be just two countries where such a dialogue is under way. We both recognise, and celebrate, boundless possibilities. When we reflect on the political changes we have witnessed in Northern Ireland, and their benign impact on the wider British-Irish relationship, we have seen in one generation the unimaginable becoming reality. In such an enabling atmosphere of transformational possibility, we are well capable of having this conversation about solutions to the great challenges facing our respective economies and societies.
May I offer, once again, my sincere appreciation for your welcome tonight, and for your attention. In modest exchange, let me offer something that, coming from the President of Ireland, might seem transformational. As a follower of the beautiful game, I look ahead two months to Brazil and say that if Ireland cannot be at the World Cup Finals, then I will raise a glass to England to go all the way.
And just in case there are some in the audience not prepared to go quite that far, then I will ask all of you to join me in this toast:
- to the gracious Lord Mayor;
- to this great city of London;
- to this great nation of Britain;
- and to the great friendship between our two peoples.