REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER, COLERAINE, FRIDAY, 9TH NOVEMBER, 2001
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER, COLERAINE, FRIDAY, 9TH NOVEMBER, 2001.
I am delighted to have this opportunity to be with you here today in the University of Ulster and I would like to thank Professor Gerry McKenna of the University of Ulster and the members of the Royal Irish Academy’s National Committee for Modern Languages for inviting me to open their annual symposium. I am also deeply honoured to receive this great accolade from the University of Ulster.
Once upon a time I worked in what some might consider a rival institution. I learnt many things there, among them a huge respect for the intellectual powerhouse this university is, for the energy which has infused the dynamic contribution it has made to the cultural, social and economic well-being of the entire island of Ireland. I am old enough to remember its birth, its hopes and dreams in those early years. I am old enough to have seen the huge changes embraced with confidence and a sure touch and I am I hope humble enough (despite being a lawyer and despite being a Queen’s person) to take an Ulsterwoman’s righteous pride in the many accomplishments of the University of Ulster’s staff and students.
I am particularly proud that this day allows me to join my brother and retinue of cousins who are graduates of this university, a university which by rigorous and relentless effort has carved its own reputation for excellence right across the globe. I congratulate everyone associated with the success story that is the University of Ulster.
The title of this year’s symposium is Translations, Paradigms of Linguistic and Cultural Transformation. Where better to talk about translation and transformation than here in Northern Ireland? For translation comes from a desire to communicate and to share, while transformation implies change and new beginnings. We are certainly seeing the power of communication and of change and of new beginnings in Northern Ireland today.
Over three years ago the people of Ireland voted for the Good Friday Agreement, and in so doing, they stated their wish to transform a culture of division and conflict into one of peace and prosperity through respectful partnership. We all knew that such a transformation would not happen overnight. We also knew that for change to come about we each had to start with our own hearts, hands and minds. The recent decision by the IRA to decommission, removed one of the last obstacles to the full implementation of the Agreement. All of us who have hoped and prayed and worked for peace and renewal on this island, welcome that decision, itself an act of transformation and an act which is capable of facilitating cascading transformation. The significant political progress in the past few days gives to Northern Ireland a consensus based government, which has the potential to harness, for the very first time in Northern Ireland, the energies and talents of all the people.
No generation has ever known the power of a working partnership between men and women, nationalist and unionist. None of us know what that power is capable of. But we know the wasteland its absence has left behind, we know the devastating consequences of conflict and the appalling price that had to be paid for this unique opportunity to transform the future for the better.
The Good Friday Agreement recognises the importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to cultural and linguistic diversity. Linguistic diversity is described in the Agreement as ‘a part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland’. This relates to the Irish and Ulster Scots traditions, as well as to those of the many ethnic minorities represented here. The evidence of our Irish and Ulster Scots linguistic heritages is all around us. It is a living diversity, evident in our speech; in our folklore and literature; and in our place-names. It is rightly a source of immense pride.
But in this pride we must take care. All too often our linguistic and cultural diversity has been expressed in exclusive terms – ‘either/or’; ‘us and them’; ‘for or against’. In many ways the liberating cultural transformation envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement remains an aspiration, while the impoverishing effects of sectarianism on the lives of many of the people of Northern Ireland are only too real. There is much work to be done to help each other grow comfortable with each other’s differences, to explore hidden or suppressed commonalities, to reveal to us our own complex and profoundly misunderstood shared landscape.
The recent establishment of the University of Ulster Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, will help us to travel unfamiliar roads to a shared destination. Through rigorous scholarship, which is the best antidote to ignorance based on self-serving historical editing, we may come to see the fears, tensions and hatreds behind sectarian conflicts in a more intelligible and intelligent light.
Cultural transformation is not the same thing as cultural abandonment or surrender. I am always deeply reassured by the surging cultural confidence which followed Ireland’s admission to the European Union almost thirty years ago. There were those who feared the consequences of a small jurisdiction’s vulnerability in a club of big and powerful members. Some predicted cultural obliteration and would have preferred the path of inwardness, of isolation. Like the parable of the talents they preferred to bury what they had to keep it safe rather than risk it in the market place.
Yet the truth is that the bigger European audience provided this small island with a huge showcase and an appreciative audience for things Irish. Through the broader interaction Ireland grew in confidence and assertiveness becoming the great success story of the Union in recent years. Beyond the shores of this small island, there is an enormous common human family to which we all belong and which has things to teach us about ourselves.
Accessing that massive resource is not always just as simple as getting on a plane or a boat. We ourselves need certain essential tools to make the most of this remarkable era of growing European integration and globalisation. Attitudes matter and skills matter. In particular language skills matter a lot. Ireland has particular historic cause to understand this reality. An image comes to my mind from my annual travels to Donegal where I regularly cross over a river by the name of OILY river. The name conjures up unhappy images of a polluted environment and yet the truth is very different. The word English oily was used because it sounded most like the native Irish name for the river - Áille meaning beauty. Sometimes language can transform drastically!
In this, the European Year of Languages, the European Union has reaffirmed its commitment to linguistic diversity, and highlighted the economic and social benefits of language learning. I pay tribute to the work being done in this regard here at the University of Ulster, the largest university on the island of Ireland, under the inspiring leadership of Vice-Chancellor Gerry McKenna. I would also like to pay tribute to the work of the National Committee for Modern Language Studies of The Royal Irish Academy.
Language learning demands hard work but it pays dividends in various ways. In an increasingly competitive labour market, the economic advantages of multilingualism are obvious. But perhaps there are less tangible benefits too. At a very basic level, language learning teaches us that there is more than one way to describe the world, that there is a dazzling inexactness about translation, that we have no monopoly on meaning, that there is a richly endowed world outside ours which has a place for us if only we let it in, a place we can both enrichen and be enriched by.
The motto of the Royal Irish Academy, an organisation which has exemplified academic excellence on the island of Ireland for over two hundred years is: “We will endeavour.” Endeavour is the energy that humanly decent transformation needs and demands as its basic building block. And the promise that lies beyond that endeavour and its transformative power is summed up in an expression John Hume often uses when addressing the question of conflict resolution and the building of peace: “We shall overcome.”
Thank You