REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE TO THE JACKSON SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE TO THE JACKSON SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, THURSDAY, 25 AUGUST, 2005
President Emmert, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a singular honour to be in this distinguished University at the invitation of both the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the World Affairs Council and to address the theme of Europe, Ireland and the United States. I put Ireland in the middle, for that is where geography and history have roughly located us giving us a destiny as a special, indeed a unique, bridge to both.
This University has its own bridges to Ireland not least of which is a very telling scholarship exchange programme for young lawyers named after two great heroes of Ireland's doomed United Irishmen rebellion in 1798, Thomas Addis Emmet and William Sampson. Both were champions of liberty, fraternity and equality, strong advocates of the human rights of every man and woman. When their struggle against England's cruel imperial domination failed in Ireland they came here to the United States, both becoming eminent lawyers and indeed in Emmet's case, Attorney General for New York City. Only for that R in your family name, Mr. President, we might be able to claim a connection of kinship! The scattering of the United Irishmen after the rebellion tells a lot about Ireland's relationships with America and Europe for just as many of Emmet's colleagues fled to France or Germany or Spain and there too they rose to prominence, though mostly as soldiers. Thus Ireland gave Presidents to the United States and to France. In Ireland's Golden Age from the 6th to the 8th centuries when it was a world center of erudition, Irish monks founded monasteries the length and breadth of mainland Europe, their influence still echoing in names like Switzerlands' St. Gallen or Austria's great Saint Vergilius, better known in his native Ireland as Fergal. In Ireland's darkest hour in the middle of the nineteenth century, its impoverished, starving and oppressed people took to the famine ships in their hundreds of thousands, their destination America.
Today around 40 million Americans proclaim Irish ancestry and the formidable human bonds have been renewed in every generation, for as historian David Fitzpatrick has noted "growing up in Ireland meant preparing oneself to leave it". And of those who left right up until the last decade, the destination of choice was the United States of America. Over generations, Ireland's children's children have woven themselves into the complex tapestry of American life so that the story of America itself is incomplete without the telling of the story of Ireland and of course vice versa.
Today a modern high achieving Ireland with net inward migration and a growing population for the first time in a century and a half, is one of the most successful member states of the European Union and a showcase of the Union's huge potential. Our future is linked to the future of half a billion men and women from Estonia in the Baltic to Malta in the Mediterranean and we are part of an extraordinary adventure in democratic partnership that some might see as nothing short of miraculous.
The first half of the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. 5 million died in World War 1, the so called war to end all wars. 55 million died in World War 11. The seat of the wars was predominantly Europe but America stood shoulder to shoulder with the ultimate winners, the Allies.
When Scoop Jackson stood in the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald a few days after its liberation, could this man, who had seen Europe's nations bankrupted and decimated in the orgy of hate unleashed by ruthless ambition, have ever foreseen the day when Europe's bitter old enemies would work together for a shared European future built on peaceful politics, and a unifying human rights-centred democratic vision. Even in today's Europe, preoccupied as it so often is with the vagaries of economics, it is easy to forget that essential preamble to today's European Union. Ireland entered that Union thirty years ago, the poorest country to do so. Today it is the Union's best rags to riches story with booming growth rates, low unemployment and such considerable success in the high tech industries that we have become one of the largest exporters in the world on a per capita basis. If the Union can take credit for Ireland's transformation so too can the United States because it was U.S. investors who very early on saw Ireland's potential, who invested billions and who now employ tens of thousands in first rate sophisticated enterprises. It was the transfer of skills from those businesses which generated an indigenous entrepreneurial sector which is now itself a heavy investor in the United States and, of course, it was the U.S. government which so helpfully nudged Northern Ireland's embryonic peace process into an international peace treaty, helping to settle a centuries old sectarian and constitutional conflict.
So Ireland inhabits a world of hugely important overlapping and interwoven relationships and it is in that context I want to reflect on those transatlantic relationships between the United States and Europe which some contemporary commentators have characterized more in terms of tension than harmony in recent times.
It is a topic which deserves clear and full exploration in all our interests. We in Ireland are convinced that Europe and the United States will and can continue to work together, cementing those enduring transatlantic ties of kinship, mutual dependence and shared values. Both share the unshakeable conviction that democracy, the rule of law and human rights form the essential basis of modern society. We espouse a free market and an enterprise culture as a means to securing economic growth and prosperity but we temper that conviction with an ambition for full social inclusion of the poor and the marginalized. We recognize our duty to the developing world, where so much human misery is wrought, so much human potential outrageously wasted. We accept that we are mere stewards and custodians of our planet and so share a duty of care to future generations for the responsible use and management of limited resources and of nature itself. Inevitably, in the international discourse leading to problem solving, we will not always see entirely eye to eye on perspective or solution but that should never obscure the fact that when push comes to shove, as it so often has in human history, we are branches of the same tree.
Today the European Union stands as perhaps the greatest conflict resolution mechanism ever devised and the United States has been a firm supporter of the Union throughout its brief fifty year history. However, it is clear that the growth and development of the European Union has affected the way in which the United States and Europe view each other. The fractured Europe of the Cold War, of the Iron Curtain and communist dictatorships has given way to a Union of twenty-five member states which are growing closer politically, economically, socially and culturally. Many do not share the same language, each has its own particularity , its own keen sense of identity but they have shared institutions, laws, ambitions, a growing shared memory and on certain issues they speak with one powerful voice. Holding all their differences and demands in the right relationship is absorbing and testing, but the evidence is in that the Union is Europe's future and the queue for admission to that future gets longer by the day.
Ireland's EU membership changed the entire nature of our political and economic culture, and our relationship with the outside world. The effects of membership on Ireland were not instantly visible, and indeed it has taken over thirty years for the full benefits to become apparent. It has to be remembered that while the European continent is old, the Union is young, in fact very young. But already that youngster has accomplished what nine hundred years of Irish history failed to do, it helped to bring about a tangible cooling of tempers between Ireland and our former and your former imperial colonizers, Great Britain. The model of equality among sovereign states of all sizes around the table in Brussels effectively recalibrated the historically vexed Anglo Irish relationship and allowed a mutually respectful consensus approach to develop towards Northern Ireland, that part of Ireland which remains part of the United Kingdom. But of course the peace process necessitated many more partners than that. From paramilitaries to politicians, to the public, all had to be encouraged to believe in and to commit to the peace process. It was, as I have remarked earlier, the consistent and even-handed intervention of the United States government which ensured that our historic opportunity was not wasted. Ireland is itself a stunning example of the creative genius of America and Europe working in partnership. America is a stunning example of the creative genius of the waves of European emigrants, among them millions of Irish.
Sometimes it is forgotten that those starving ragged Irish men and women of the mid-nineteenth century who fled to this country from the Great Famine, who built railways and dug roads, brought with them a very advanced political vocabulary from the land which had in the previous two decades invented the world's first mass peaceful political movement, led by the Liberator Daniel O'Connell. Their problems and divisions followed them it is true, but those early democratic instincts helped bed down and shape America's culture of democracy. Their contribution to American political and civic life over many generations gave Ireland not just pride but hope - when hope was scarce that there would come a day when the genius of our own people would flourish, in freedom on our own soil. Their hard-earned dollars and cents sent back to Ireland in envelopes, kept children in school and food on tables until the new Ireland of opportunity was able to feed, educate and employ her own children.
Such strong bonds as these are among the keys to the warm and rich relationship that exists between us, the cultural compatibility, the easy friendships, the speed with which we are at home in each other's company. These bonds are also clear in the deep roots of Irish American communities throughout the United States, many of whom I have had the pleasure to meet, including here in Seattle. All of them retain a keen sense of their Irish identity while of course being proud to be American.
Thankfully, our relationship does not rest solely on memory or on nostalgia but also on a raft of vital and vibrant contemporary links. We have many friends on both sides of the aisle in the US Congress, as well as in State Legislatures all around this great country. The longstanding bipartisan support of the Friends of Ireland in Congress for the peace process has also been a source of invaluable encouragement, and we look forward to this continuing. I would like to mention in this context the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tom Foley, who represented part of this State and played a significant role in establishing the Friends of Ireland in Congress.
I would like to acknowledge in particular the continuing support of President Bush and his Administration and his Special Envoy, Mitchell Reiss, as we work together following the recent British elections, to overcome remaining challenges and bring about the full implementation of the historic Good Friday Agreement, which remains the template for a just and lasting peace in Northern Ireland.
US support has not been confined to politics. The US has also been a key contributor to the International Fund for Ireland which was established as an independent, international organisation by the British and Irish Governments in 1986. The total US contribution to the Fund since its inception amounts to some $371 million, and it has funded projects designed to build trust and opportunity in poor areas damaged by sectarian division and conflict.
As I mentioned earlier, Ireland has been a major beneficiary of foreign direct investment from the United States and this has been a crucial element in the development of our economy, and of our prosperity. US investment in Ireland in 2003 at US$ 4.7 billion was more than two and a half times greater than US investment in China. Today US companies employ almost 100,000 people in Ireland, while Irish companies employ 65,000 in the United States. What closer economic partnership could you get? And of course the story of U.S. investment in Europe and vice versa is not confined to Ireland but forms part of a strong web of intercontinental interdependence. No other trading relationship can come close to the depth and breadth of the economic relationship that bridges the Atlantic. $2.5 trillion dollars worth of business is done between Europe and the United States each year and it is worth remembering that between 12 and 14 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic depend on that being maintained. In 2003 corporate America invested over $87 billion in Foreign Direct Investment in Europe, a 30.5% increase, while Europe reciprocated to the tune of nearly $37 billion.
Europe and the United States are key partners as well as key players on the global stage. There is no doubt that this transatlantic relationship remains central to all our hopes of creating a safer and more prosperous global society. We in Ireland continue to make every effort to bring Europe and the US closer together. The new EU Ambassador in Washington is our former Taoiseach, John Bruton and of course Ireland was privileged to host a EU/US summit last year while we held the Presidency of the European Union.
Some commentators, both in the United States and in Europe, believed policy differences including on Iraq, Kyoto and the role of multilateralism boded ill for that summit and survival of the transatlantic relationship.
Drawing on our special bond with the United States, we set out to overcome some of the myths that had been allowed to develop and sought to highlight the utterly indispensable nature of the relationship. We believe we went a considerable way towards achieving this and we were proud when our Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern and President George W. Bush concluded one of the most successful and productive U.S./ EU summits ever held. A total of seven substantive Joint Declarations were agreed between both sides, ranging from combating terrorism to the fight against HIV-AIDS, a solid platform for practical and pragmatic EU-US co-operation. There is I believe a clear recognition by both sides that the problems we face are shared problems, and that solutions can only be arrived at through partnership.
The decision by President Bush to pay his first foreign visit to Europe following his inauguration is a clear sign of the constructive and positive turn the relationship has taken. Those who predict the demise of the cooperative and collaborative relationship between Europe and America would do well to look more closely at what binds us together rather than what separates us. We are both robust and opinionated centers of democratic gravity. In democracies based on free speech we expect noise. Noise makes news and so it will go from time to time but we are more than strangers who just happen to live side by side, we are family and we are friends.
An old Irish saying essays "ar scáth a chéile maireann na daoine", which translates as "people live in each other's shadows". Its a poetic way of saying that we all need each other. In my view, it could have been invented to describe the EU-US relationship and the bridge between them, - that small island which cares deeply for them both and which will keep on working to keep them close in heart and mind.
Thank You.