ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE BIG HOPE “THE ROAD TO PEACE-WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE BIG HOPE “THE ROAD TO PEACE-WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS” LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY
Chancellor,
Vice-Chancellor,
Pro-Vice Chancellor,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you very much for that very warm welcome, and thank you, Chancellor, for your kind words of introduction. I am delighted to be able to take part in this wonderful congress of young persons, and in particular to do so here, at this university, and in this city. I have spent most of my adult life on the academic staff of two universities, Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin so it is very much a labour of love to visit universities, especially around exam time when I get to savour again the unique camaraderie of university life while languishing in the certain knowledge that I have neither an examination paper to correct nor a thesis student to supervise!
The words “student” and “hope” fit well together and today I want to address the theme of hope, particularly as it was expressed in the peace process in Northern Ireland. But beyond that too, in how it has now given us access to a fresh history on these islands as a whole. There could be no better place to discuss these ideas than Liverpool which has always been at the apex of Ireland and Britain’s shared social history - a place of meeting and of change. And within Liverpool, there could be no better forum than Liverpool Hope. This institution has made hope its mission. From its roots in nineteenth century teacher training colleges established to educate women, when they were prohibited from entering universities, right through to the present day as the only ecumenical university in Europe, Liverpool Hope has a history of breaking moulds and championing human potential, of doing things differently, things others said could not be done.
Isn’t it the case that hope is strengthened in direct proportion to how widely it is shared? That is why we valued the engagement and solidarity of our friends so highly on the road to peace. Hope, like most of the important aspects of life, is not easily measured. But I can tell you that from my vantage point, that when things were at their bleakest, and hope seemed a very distant thing, the goodwill and support we received from the Irish and people of Irish descent in Britain, including here in Liverpool, was a crucial psychological crutch and a source of renewed energy.
For make no mistake, hope is no namby pamby word. It is a driving force. It is the indispensable precondition of positive change. In a world that sometimes seem transfixed by threat, by tragedy, by cynicism and by the counsel of despair that characterises conflicts and desperate situations as intractable or impossible to resolve, hope is the great sign of contradiction, the life-force that energises transcendence and triumph over the worst that nature and human nature inflicts on us.
In Ireland’s darkest times, during and after the Great Famine of the 19th century, a million and more Irish people came to Liverpool driven by a desperate hope. Many stayed and many travelled on to other parts of Britain, to America, and beyond.
The story of the Irish diaspora is testament to the irrepressible determination that is hope. It is no longer a story that begins and ends with the sadness of an age which drained Ireland of its youth and its hope. Now it is a story of a massive global family, its skill and genius immersed in new homelands in every continent yet with an indelible imprint of Ireland. Their success literally fed us and educated us during lean years when their hard-earned dollars and shillings scraped together from menial jobs were religiously sent home from Liverpool’s building sites, from the kitchens of Boston’s big houses, to their family left behind. Their step-by-step social advance in their new homelands saw their children become corporate America, intellectual Australia, political Great Britain and sent a powerful message back home, that Ireland was itself a place of genius and talent waiting to be harvested and harnessed.
Liverpool, once described as the “real capital of Ireland” was a part of much of that wider experience, both as a home for waves of Irish people and as a staging-post along the way. Sadly, however, no city in England was more affected by the conflict between Protestant and Catholic, orange and green, than this one, for the politics of history followed them across the sea and continued to blight their lives as it had done at home. So it stands to reason, therefore, that no city in England should share more in the triumph of hope represented by today’s hard-earned peace in Northern Ireland than this great city. But the story is bigger still for the growing peace in Northern Ireland is part of a bigger and more complex picture of once very dysfunctional relationships that are now healthy and thriving. The once fraught relationship between Ireland and Britain has metamorphosed into a remarkable warm collegiality and a very effective partnership which created the context for the peace process.
In the ten years since the growing consensus between Ireland and Great Britain culminated in the Good Friday Agreement and especially in the past year, we have witnessed what many believed to be impossible, a government in Northern Ireland headed jointly by previously sworn enemies, that formidable voice of the Unionist tradition, Ian Paisley and that equally formidable voice of the Nationalist tradition, Martin McGuinness.
The old culture of conflict in which nothing would satisfy either side but outright victory - the winner takes all model - had abjectly failed over decades if not centuries in Ireland. Now the best-educated generation ever on these islands tried a new solution, one where each side conceded a little and both walked away substantial but not outright winners, having been willing to accept that ninety percent of something is infinitely better than one hundred percent of nothing.
The emerging culture of compromise has led to the most historic reconciliation of the two great traditions and political movements on the island of Ireland, made manifest in the institutions of political partnership and cooperation which are seed-bedding a very different future.
Hundreds of years went into the toxic harvest which cost so many lives and robbed generations of peace of mind and at times almost all hope. But the invasive weeds that were that harvest carried their venomous spores in hearts and attitudes from one generation to the next, infecting the future even before the children of the future were born.
Now the worst of that appalling harvest is over but it is instructive as we stand at this moment of sea change, a moment charged with the grandeur of great possibilities, that we who face this now fallow field of the future, seed it with the very best of values, the very best of seed, so that the future harvest will be peace and good neighbourliness in abundance and in perpetuity. This is not just a task for the island of Ireland but for all of us on these neighbouring and once not-so-neighbourly islands.
Senator Mitchell, the former United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland and indeed one of the great gifts of Irish-American influence on the American government, was deeply involved in brokering the Good Friday Agreement. He warned us that the hard part came next, in making it stick. He has since acknowledged that this was more true than even he then suspected. The colossal patchwork of effort by governments, politicians and people that produced the agreement now has to be sustained to make the agreement work and deliver a just, egalitarian and effective society, where, to borrow a phrase from the Irish Proclamation, all our children are cherished equally.
When the laurels are being rightly given to the major and well-known protagonists like Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach and Prime Minister Blair for the success of the peace process, it is also important to acknowledge the wind at their backs, the strength in their spines that came from the irrepressible hope of the tens of thousands of everyday men, women and children who refused to accept sectarianism, who reached out across the divides of politics and religion, who made bridges of friendship across the chasms of fear and mistrust, to infuse hope into the unlikeliest of barren places and who quite simply took risks for peace.
All over the island of Ireland you will find such people and the organisations they set up.
You will find them here, born of incredible suffering like Warrington’s Foundation for Peace, set up in memory of two youngsters Tim Parry and Jonathan Ball who were robbed of their lovely lives in a callous bombing.
You will find them in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, throughout the European Union, people who made peace in Ireland their business, who set up funds to encourage the peace-makers, who used their influence to put the hope word and the peace word into people’s hardened hearts, who talked to people whom others would not talk to, who prayed, cajoled, nagged, harangued and comforted a tormented people into believing once again in the power of hope and the possibility of change.
Between them they shifted the kilter of history, they opened up new space and brought us out of the cul-de-sac of interminable going nowhere, of endlessly repeated conflict.
We have learned an enormous amount from our experience of conflict and its resolution.
We have learned that when you focus exclusively and relentlessly on division and difference you completely miss the opportunity to discover all the space that could be usefully shared to the benefit of all.
We have learned that when you ransack history to find missiles to hurl at your opponents you miss the profound truth and richness of shared memories, shared legacies that have to be suppressed in order to characterise the other as the implacable enemy with whom we have nothing in common.
Conflict blinds us to commonalities and, unless we want to live in perpetual cycles of conflict, we need to explore those commonalities, to build on them, to develop and sustain them for they are ironically our best guarantee of a humanly decent and secure future for ourselves and guess what - they are also the best guarantee for a humanly decent and secure future for our so-called enemies who are, of course, our nearest neighbours and who are not going away.
Focus on common ground, as we have learnt, takes nothing from our identity, and does not dilute one whit our politics or our religious beliefs. It gives us respectful space in which to exercise those things and makes us sacred custodians of each other’s space, for neither of us can have peace unless the other has peace.
Today with the conflict receding we concentrate on building a future to be proud of, one where sectarianism is anathema, where those most damaged by its evil ways are helped in their difficult journey into the light of hope. The problems we encountered, the solutions and models that were developed may be of some help and interest to others trying to end bitter conflict elsewhere in the world but most of all, our story is a soaring statement of hope.
Lin Yutang, a Chinese Christian writer who died in 1976, described the essence of hope beautifully,
“Hope is like a road in the country. There was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”
Lin captures well one dynamic of our road to peace. At first, people prepared to tread new ground were dismissed as dreamers and sometimes even traitors. But some followed them. And then more followed them, and then the narrow path they trod in the earth became the highway we all travel today.
The path to this city from Ireland has become well travelled over the centuries. In the middle of the 19th century, at the height of the British Empire, when Dublin was the second city of the Empire, a million Irish men women and children starved to death. A million more came through this city on famine ships. Ten years ago I unveiled a monument to them here in the grounds of St Luke’s Church. For many of them Liverpool and its hinterland became home.
Here they planted the story of their homeland, its music, dance, poetry, values, its faith and its indomitable hope. They thought themselves of little value and indeed were often made to think themselves of little value. Today their adopted city, the city of their descendants is a very proud European Capital of Culture and its intricate cultural tapestry is woven tightly and colourfully with the threads of their lived lives. Liverpool’s success, the friendship between Britain and Ireland, the peace in Northern Ireland, the prosperity and freedom we enjoy, these things are the plants that blossom from the seed of hope well sown.
Former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in his historic address to both Houses of Parliament in Westminster last year said,
“The success we have seen - in re-imagining British-Irish relations and in establishing peace in Northern Ireland - is not the end, but only the beginning of what we can achieve together.”
We are linked, not divided, by our communities of Irish ancestry here in Britain, and our communities of British ancestry in Ireland. We understand them differently, we understand each other better. We are partners in Europe. We are partners in peace.
Here in Liverpool, the words of some of your greatest musicians, themselves not without Irish connections, still inspire us:
We took our sunken eyes and learned to see.
We took our broken wings and learned to fly.
Because, all our lives,
We were only waiting for this moment to arise.
This is the moment past generations hoped for and longed for, prayed for and fought for. Finally it is here and we are slap bang in it. Given to us now is the single most hope-filled chapter in the history of British-Irish relations. Ahead of us are the blank pages of all the volumes that will make up the future for ourselves and for our children.
They will tell the story of the seeds we planted and the plants we grew. Of the ugly plants that grew from conflict and contempt the poet Patrick Kavanagh says, “their roots have fed on tears”. We have lived with their bitter, bitter harvest for too long. Now we alone of all generations get the chance to see what kind of plants grow when their roots are fed on hope.