CONCERT AND RECEPTION HOSTED BY AMBASSADOR AND DR GRENFELL MCDONAGH RENAISSANCE HOTEL, MOSCOW
CONCERT AND RECEPTION HOSTED BY AMBASSADOR AND DR GRENFELL MCDONAGH RENAISSANCE HOTEL, MOSCOW WEDNESDAY, 8TH SEPTEMBER, 2010
Good evening.
I’m truly delighted to be here with you this evening as the first President of Ireland to visit the Russian Federation. Of course no Irish President ever has the privilege of being the first Irish person to arrive on foreign shores for we are an emigrating people but we also send our music all around the world. I hope you have enjoyed the traditional Irish music and dance as much as Russia enjoyed U2 just a few weeks ago. Even when we cannot speak each others language, we can love each others music and dance and a big thank you to Dúchas for their magnificent performance and the shared memory it creates for those of us privileged to be here to enjoy it. In the Irish language: go raibh míle maith agaibh and in Russian: я хочу сказать большое спасибо исполнителям A big thank you to the musicians.
Next let me thank our hosts this evening Ambassador Mc Donagh and Dr. Grenfell McDonagh. Our diplomatic links create an obvious and important bridge between Ireland and Russia but those links are in the scheme of things reasonably recent in origin. Yet the ties between our two peoples stretch back over many, many years. Almost a century ago a Russian poet, Zinaida Gippius, wrote the lines:
“Ireland, the ocean-washed,
Land I have never seen!
How are your misty waves
So fused with our bright landscape?”
If you visit Mullingar Cathedral in the heart of Ireland you will see there the beautiful work of Russian mosaic artist Boris Anrep and if you look closely at the face he created of St. Anne you will see the striking resemblance to his one time love, Anna Akhmatova.
Dublin’s recent nomination as a UNESCO City of Literature underlines the Irish love of literature, music, dance, theatre and the richness of our literary heritage but woven into that heritage is a deep admiration for Russia’s towering literary tradition which is evident in the impact it had on Irish short stories, novels and theatre in the early twentieth century Ireland.
Now in the 21st century, as contemporary politics and economics open us up to one another, the cultural ties between Ireland and Russia have developed markedly. The most visible of these links is the now annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Moscow. It is a great day of celebration for the Irish and the many friends of Ireland in Russia, and I am delighted to say that this year Dublin in turn played host to a very successful Russian Festival. On my own summer working visits to a relatively remote Irish speaking area in the North-West of Ireland in Donegal, I have met young Russians studying Irish language and culture with an aptitude and enthusiasm that is infectious and delightful.
It is in these comfortable human connections that a good future is built and in this room there are many who exemplify that investment in those precious human connections. Amongst us this evening are many Irish who have settled in Russia, perhaps intermarried here, made friends and colleagues here and whose lives open up here in Russia a window on Ireland and the character of her people. You and your children cherish both Irish and Russian heritage and you show us how possible it is to live with a heart big enough to accommodate and celebrate two identities. Today Ireland is home to a large number of Russian speakers who have chosen to make Ireland their home. So in our schools, communities, workplaces, shops, streets they are weaving their lives into our lives, opening up Russia to us in intimate and fascinating ways that no other generation has ever had access to.
These relationships are a hugely important resource as we seek to enhance mutual understanding, cooperation and commerce between our two countries. In this period of history we are growing accustomed to the fact that things change rapidly and often dramatically, and we must both navigate and manage those changes well in the best interests of our people and the global community we form part of. Ireland plays a significant international role within and through the European Union and the Russian Federation plays a major global role within and through the wider Europe. At a time of giddy even bewildering change, the steadfastness of our cultural roots exerts a steadying gravitational pull and we each are indebted to the writers and thinkers who are capable of connecting to those roots and creating stepping stones of thought and action, to a safer, better future. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “the testimony of art crosses frontiers and generations”.
The testimony of friendship however is what lowers those frontiers and allows future generations to know a growing peace and partnership few other generations have ever imagined. It may seem small in the scheme of things but in this place where we meet and greet one another with warmth and respectful curiosity, we plant the seeds of deeper friendship which will in time turn our world into a family of friendly nations and peoples, comfortable with difference and diversity, generous in their care for one another and showing the full potential of a world released from the wasteful bondage of cultural indifference and ignorance.
Thank you for the many ways you build up Irish Russian relationships and invest in the common human family. It is good to be in your company.
Thank you. Have a pleasant evening.