ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY MCALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE LOUVAIN 400 CELEBRATIONS
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY MCALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE LOUVAIN 400 CELEBRATIONS LOUVAIN INSTITUTE FOR IRELAND
Louvain 400 - Shared Histories
Director General, Rector, Bourgmeister, Governors, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
What a joy it is to be part of the Louvain 400 celebrations and to have the privilege of opening the exhibition of paintings by Professor Breda Ennis whose acclaimed work in Rome as artist and teacher continues at the highest level the venerable tradition of Irish cultural interaction with mainland Europe.
This College is itself a fascinating part of that historical, cultural interaction and we gather in honour of the 400th anniversary of the foundation of St Anthony’s College or the Irish College in Louvain as it is usually affectionately called.
We are the most privileged, educated and liberated of all generations to cross the College’s threshold, the one with the most peaceful and prosperous present, the most exciting future. We arrived to this point by a tortuous road, a wasteland of broken human hearts but here in this place four hundred years ago a stand was made, a haven created that would harbour hope and build for the future with faith. This is also the centenary year of the birth of one of Ireland’s finest poets, Louis Mac Neice, in whose famous poemCarrickfergus he crisply alludes to those contrasting fates that have pervaded Ireland’s history since the early 17th century and even earlier:
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of host sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottleneck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
And in his Validiction the same Mac Neice declares:
From Phoenix Park to Achill Sound,
Picking up the scent of a hundred fugitives
That have broken the mesh of ordinary lives,
But being ordinary too I must in course discuss
What we mean to Ireland or Ireland to us;
That line ‘What we mean to Ireland or Ireland to us’ could aptly encapsulate what today’s commemoration of events 400 years ago means to all of us who live on the island of Ireland in the 21st century.
1607 was a cathartic year for Ireland for, if the foundation of this College was a forceful statement of intent, it and faith in the future was in the teeth of overwhelming evidence of failure. The great Gaelic chieftains on whom so much depended fled Ireland in what has been romantically termed the “Flight of the Earls” but there was nothing romantic about it. As they left the English and Scottish Planters moved in.
Together, these events signalled the end of the old Gaelic order in Ireland and the opening of a critical phase in the shaping of modern Ireland with the emergence of the complex mix of identities and competing political philosophies that underpin the structures of Irish society today, North and South. They also helped embed a culture of Ireland in exile as the Earls scattered to places like Lisbon, Rome, Louvain.
The Louvain they came to following the 7th century footsteps of Saint Foillan and his fellow Irish monks was a city of note for trade and scholarship, boasting the oldest remaining Catholic university in the world. And their coming here was no accident of history for Louvain was central to the Counter-Reformation movement in Europe and an obvious choice for the Franciscans who, through the petition of Irish Franciscan, Flaithrí Ó Maoil Chonaire (or Florence Conroy), persuaded King Philip III of Spain and his brother-in-law Archduke Albert, co-ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, to support the foundation of an Irish College linked to the University.
Pope Paul V added his sanction in April 1607 and the scene was set for our rendezvous four hundred years later. Conroy himself was no accidental player on this stage. For a theologian he had a colourful life history as a former aide to the Earls of Tyrone and chaplain to the Spanish invasion force in Ireland so tragically defeated at Kinsale in 1601. So it was no surprise when the Earls and their entourage arrived in Louvain to spend the winter here before the onward journey to Rome. They were among friends and Ireland would have need of such friends in the generations ahead when the penal laws drove waves of Irish migrants from their homeland to exile throughout Europe, joining the armies of France, Austria and Spain, making their names as merchants, especially in the wine trade.
With the brutal suppression of Catholicism in Ireland, there developed a network of 35 Irish Colleges stretching from Lisbon to Prague, providing seminary training under the auspices of the major religious orders. Not only did they contribute largely to the maintenance of the Catholic faith in Ireland but that network was itself underpinned by a wealth of well-placed Irish soldiers, diplomats and scholars working right across Europe and together they ensured the cause of Irish freedom stayed at the centre of the European political and cultural agenda.
In the Spanish Netherlands, modern Belgium, itself a zone of military and confessional conflict at the time, the Irish communities tirelessly worked to affect the outcome of events in their homeland. In Louvain, the historian Micheál Ó Cléirigh directed a colossal programme of collecting materials relating to the history of Ireland, effectively assembling the collective memory of Gaelic Ireland. The resulting Annals of the Four Masters gave Ireland a national, island-wide history for the first time, allowing it to take its place among the nations of Europe. It is also worth remarking that in this scholarly achievement
Ó Cléirigh remarkably had the help of the Church of Ireland Archbishop James Ussher (an antiquarian of note in his own right) in accessing ancient manuscripts. A fine early example of ecumenical endeavour!
What is striking about the new seminaries was the high educational standard seminarians were expected to reach and the fact that Irish priests became steeped in continental Europe’s intellectual discourse, in fact it was through that very discourse that Gaelic-speaking Irish Franciscans gave to the Irish language the word ‘náisiún’ for ‘nation’ for the first time.
Louvain became not just an educator of Irish priests and a place of Irish scholarship but an important repository of medieval Irish manuscripts and a seminal influence on the evolution of the Irish language. It was here in Louvain that an Irish font was developed and the earliest printed books in Irish were produced.
The Irish Franciscans in exile became the conservators and champions of an ancient culture and indeed it is thanks to their care that many of these priceless treasures have been given into the care of the Micheál Ó Cléirigh Institute for the Study of Irish History and Civilisation at University College Dublin. It is wonderful to see the arrival on Louvain’s early summer scene of the first Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Summer School and to know that these four hundred years of sacred stewardship of Ireland’s heritage and Ireland’s hopes will be celebrated in many diverse and exciting ways throughout the Irish universities and museums, the media and our National Library this year.
All these generations later and the imprint of that fateful era is still traceable across Ireland’s physical and emotional landscape. We have laboured long under its dark shadows and in truth are only really beginning to emerge into something resembling light. Through our thirty-year membership of the European Union we have recalibrated our fraught relationship with Great Britain, transforming it into a respectful and effective collegiality. From that new mood came the shared impetus which helped consolidate the peace process and bring about the Good Friday Agreement whose fulfilment we will shortly see reveal itself.
With investment in widespread access to education, Ireland started to harness and harvest effectively its greatest natural resource - the brain power of its men and its women. This new generation with, as Seamus Heaney memorably describes, ‘intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars’, took on and overcame Ireland’s longstanding problems - mass emigration, endemic poverty, underachievement, poor investment, little industrialisation.
Today Ireland is the success story par excellence of the European Union, a story whose opening chapters start with education and with Europe. The first generation to know a combination of peace and prosperity is enjoying a level of sophistication and confidence unimaginable a short few years ago. It is, of course, still a work in progress for there is much still to be accomplished in consolidating the peace, promoting reconciliation, in building a comfortably multicultural Ireland, in sustaining a high standard of living and in making it accessible to all. And of course St. Anthony’s is part of the discourse that is driving modern Ireland, having metamorphosed into the Louvain Institute for Ireland in Europe, thanks to the generosity of the Irish Franciscans who in 1983 made the College available for development as a secular resource for the benefit of Ireland as a whole, north and south. I take this opportunity to congratulate the board of the Institute under its Chairman Tom Jago and its Director-General Malachy Vallely for these years of passionate work of keeping Louvain deeply implicated in Ireland’s well being.
The Louvain 400 celebrations in Europe as well as in Ireland have needed many energetic champions and long, long hours of work. Those who deserve thanks are too numerous to mention individually here though I thank each one of them with a heart and a half but I would like to single out Drs Edel Breathnach and John McCafferty of University College Dublin for the extraordinary intellectual leadership they have provided.
So here we are four centuries later and after many twists and turns, many wasted lives and much courageous effort Ireland has at last come into its own but not on its own. Today, standing in the former chapel of St Anthony’s Irish College, how do I begin to find words to thank the Irish Franciscans, past and present, for the immense contribution they have made to the history we all share as citizens of Ireland and of Europe? We may never know the full extent of our indebtedness but we certainly do know, to paraphrase Mac Neice’s phrase, ‘What they mean to Ireland and Ireland to them’.
Go raibh céad maith agaibh, fáinne oir oraibh.
May Ireland’s heartland in Louvain continue to flourish for many centuries to come.