ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE ON BEING AWARDED THE MEDALLA DE ORO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALCALA
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE ON BEING AWARDED THE MEDALLA DE ORO OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALCALA TUESDAY, 22ND MARCH, 2011
Señor Rector, Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am deeply moved by this occasion and am delighted to accept from this distinguished university the Medal of Honour. I do so with a sense of service to my country, to its fond links with Spain and to the past generations whose lives forged those links in very dark times when Spain was our refuge and our help. I accept this honour also with a gratitude and respect that derives from the formidable reputation of University of Alcala as a powerhouse in the cultural, intellectual, academic and scientific achievements of Spain from its foundation by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. As you know we in Ireland have a passion for literature and so your kindness to me resonates all the more knowing that it is here each year that the greatest authors of literature in Spanish are awarded the Cervantes Prize.
That there exists a special empathy between the Irish and Spanish peoples is beyond doubt. As a frequent visitor to Spain for forty-five years, I can personally attest to this from my own experience. The reasons for this affinity are deep-rooted and complex though Salvador de Madariaga in his volume “Character and Fate in Europe” offers a simple explanation when he asserts that the Irish are in reality Spaniards who took the wrong direction and found themselves mistakenly in the North!
There is a longstanding mutual fascination between Ireland and Spain which has expressed itself in a variety of ways from the great Irish Colleges that flourished here in the 17th and 18th centuries when our people were denied education at home, to literary figures like Kate O’Brien who wrote so passionately of her travels here, like the young Tyrone poet Charlie Donnelly who gave his life in battle here in 1936, like Ian Gibson with his masterfully scholarly biographies of major Spanish artists, like the novelist Colm Toibín and his love of Catalunya,….. the list is extensive and proof that Spain continues decade after decade to inspire the Irish mind.
Some think that this fascination has its roots in the legends which exist in both countries that the first Celtic inhabitants of Ireland came from the Iberian Peninsula. Tradition in both Galicia and certain parts of Ireland points to the idea that the inhabitants of Ireland were the sons of Míl who sailed for Ireland from the Tower of Hercules at A Coruña. These legends have been supported by some of the most recent research in both countries. Along the southern and western coasts of Ireland, there is archaeological evidence that survives from Neolithic times, right through the Bronze and Iron Ages, of commercial and cultural contact and migration. Recent work by archaeologists has revealed much about the remarkable frequency and intensity of these earliest contacts. Even more intriguingly, DNA mapping projects in Ireland, conducted by Trinity College Dublin, have provided further material evidence that supports the ancient historical and folkloric accounts of these contacts.
There are also place names in Irish counties which evoke Milesian legends and recall the Galician, Asturian, Cantabrian and Basque merchants and mariners who traded on the Irish coastline. Reports by envoys sent by the Court of Philip II attest that the inhabitants of certain coastal towns of Ireland spoke Spanish owing to the frequency of contact with Spanish traders. Today the evidence of these past exchanges survives in places such as Spanish Point in Co Clare and in the Spanish quarter of Galway City visited by Columbus on one of his voyages of discovery.
Trading links from the earliest times were followed by growing religious ties. There are clear records in the 14th and 15th centuries of Irish pilgrims travelling to Santiago de Compostela, where another Irish College was established, and of Spanish pilgrims making the journey to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg. Having made both pilgrimages I can attest that those travelling to Santiago got the better deal. Lough Derg pilgrims are obliged to abstain from food whereas the food on the road to Santiago is always good and plentiful.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Irish people found refuge here in Spain from appalling and sustained religious and political persecution. The generosity of the support given by the Spanish State is manifest in a letter dated August 1592 sent by King Phillip II to the Rector of the University of Salamanca on the founding of the Irish College there. In that letter, the King instructed that the Irish students “be assisted, favoured and helped in all that is necessary, in such a way that, having abandoned their own country and all they had there, they find in this University the shelter which was rightly promised to them”.
When Red Hugh O’Donnell arrived at A Coruña his contemporaries noted that he was happy to be returning to the land of his ancestors. Irish school children still learn of the fleets sent from Spain to support him, Hugh O’Neill of Ulster and the other Irish Chieftains. In Irish popular verse there were hidden references to this support - hidden because overt references would have invited persecution if not execution. In the beautiful old nationalist ballad ‘Róisín Dubh’,- or dark Rosaleen, Roisin is a metaphor for Ireland and the Spanish wine ‘fíon Spáinneach’ mentioned is a veiled allusion to the many forms of help received, or hoped for, from Spain.
That spirit of Spanish generosity was also evident with the foundation of the Irish College at Alcala de Henares. Although the smallest and perhaps least well known of the Irish Colleges in Spain, the College of Saint George from 1649 until its closure 136 years later produced hundreds of graduates who returned to Ireland where they enriched the people they served, intellectually, culturally, educationally and spiritually, with the wealth of their experience drawn from this great seat of Spanish learning. They and other Irish Colleges helped not only to preserve a distinct cultural identity, but also to facilitate Ireland’s engagement with the wider world. Not all of the graduates returned to Ireland, many pursuing careers in Spain and throughout the Spanish-speaking world as merchants, mariners, administrators, governors, soldiers, academicians and clergy.
These Irish students fully repaid a debt to the Spanish State with their loyalty and industry. They integrated well into Spanish society. These notable individuals included the two prime ministers of Spain of Irish origin, Riccardo Wall y Devereaux and Leopoldo O’Donnell; viceroys and governors in Spanish America such as Juan O’ Donoghue and Ambrosio O’Higgins; diplomats such as Thomas FitzGerald, Patrick Lawless, Carlos McCarthy and Dermicio O’Mahony; naval commanders including Philip O’Sullivan-Beare who was also a noted historian and Diego FitzGerald; military reformers like Alejandro O’Reilly, Vicente Kindelan and Guillermo de Lacy; distinguished medical authorities such as Timoteo O’Scanlan and Diego Purcell and intellectuals of European-wide stature such as Florencio Conry and Luke Wadding.
There were also merchant and banking houses of Irish extraction in Cádiz, Seville, Malaga and Tenerife, as well as sherry-houses of Irish origin in Jérez de la Frontera such as the Garveys, the Osbornes and the O’Neills. Families such as these organised extensive trading and financial networks for Spanish exports to northern Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of these illustrious families was that of the McColgans (or Cólogan) in Tenerife and I was very pleased to receive earlier today an illustrated volume on the history of the first ten generations of this family which first settled in Tenerife in the early 18th century. I am delighted that its author, Carlos Cólogan Soriano, is present at this event today.
I wish here to pay tribute to the late Patricia O’Connell who made such a valued contribution to research on the Irish Colleges in Spain and who was the author of the handsome and comprehensive history of the College at Alcalá. I am indebted to her research to learn that the Irish College at Alcalá drew most of its students and scholars from my native province of Ulster. Some have wryly remarked that this might account for the rather robust and strong-willed reputation of the college that gave cause for concern to the authorities. For example, the archival sources provide us with a fascinating portrait of one of the students, Bernard Cahan who in 1681 was reported for being ‘quarrelsome’. He had in his possession ‘a long arquebuss with an engraved stock’ - ‘un arcabuz largo con la caja grabada’. No doubt this piece of personal artillery was for the exercise of the college’s hunting rights for partridge in the area around Alcalá! History does not record how successful the College was in decommissioning that weapon.
The archives also tell us that local locksmiths were employed more regularly than might have been expected in repairing door-locks in the college. The students it seems had very inquisitive intellects! Indeed in 1785, when the college, by royal decree, was amalgamated for economic reasons with the Irish College at Salamanca, the last remaining student, Eugene MacMahon of Cregan, County Armagh, helped the last Rector, Patrick Magennis of Tallonstown, County Louth, to barricade the doors of the building against the Rector of the Salamancan Irish College, Dr. Patrick Curtis from Mornington County Meath, who had come to take possession of the building and to arrange its sale. Curtis had to obtain the assistance of the local police. It comes as no surprise therefore to learn that the highly motivated young Eugene McMahon would later play an important role in Spain’s patriotic struggle against Napoleonic occupation.
Señor Rector
It is deeply moving to know in such fascinating detail of the lives of the Irish in Spain many centuries ago. Their hearts and hands made solid bonds of friendship and kinship between Ireland and Spain. We build on those today and as we do we acknowledge the debt we owe to the scholars who continue the historical research that allows us not just to understand our past better, but allows us to understand our very selves better.
For that reason, I particularly welcome the formal Declaration concerning the establishment of a “Council of Spanish-Irish Historical Studies” that is being signed in Madrid this week between representatives of the Royal Irish Academy, the Real Academia de la Historia and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. This Declaration affirms the strong commitment to maintain and develop future cooperation and provide a more effective advisory structure for the coordination and promotion of collaborative research projects.
I am also pleased that in 2007, the Spanish Ministry of Defence, in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, sponsored and published a CD-rom ‘La Presencia irlandesa en los ejércitos de la Monarquía hispánica, 1580-1818’. This contains biographical information concerning approximately 20,000 Irishmen in the Spanish services. This data was collected by Dr Oscar Recio Morales, a graduate of this fine University, who I am delighted is present with us today. He was previously a research-fellow of Trinity College Dublin working on the joint TCD-UCD Wild Geese Regiments Database Project. I also look forward to the completion of the Maynooth-based ‘Irish in Europe Project’ which is funded by the Irish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This on-line digital resource, with biographical data concerning Irish migration to early modern Europe, will host valuable information on the many thousands of Irish migrants in Spain. These major research projects greatly enhance the availability and accessibility of the evidence underlying the historical links between Ireland and Spain and between our peoples. They are our shared patrimony and our pride.
Señor Rector
I view my visit and this event here today, as part of a process whereby two old friends, Spain and Ireland, rediscover each other and recall the wealth of their historical legacy. Education has been, and remains, a central theme in that relationship. Generations of Irish students have in the past drawn great benefit from the inspiration provided by this and other Spanish Universities. That cooperation continues today. I was delighted earlier today to meet with a large group of Irish Erasmus students currently studying here. I am also very pleased to know that a formal Agreement is now in place between Alcalá and the National University of Ireland at Maynooth and to learn of the progress being made in developing a course in Irish Studies for Spanish students interested in the study of contemporary Ireland.
On behalf of these Irish generations, past and present, and as representative of the Irish people, and at a heartfelt personal level, I am moved and honoured to accept this prestigious award.
Thank you.