Address by tHE, President of Ireland, Mary McAleese at the State Dinner at dublin castle
Address by tHE, President of Ireland, Mary McAleese at the State Dinner at dublin castle in honour of H.E. Olusegun Obasanjo
Your Excellency President Obasanjo, Mrs. Obasanjo, distinguished guests,
It is a great honour and pleasure to welcome you, President Obasanjo, your wife, First Lady Stella Obasanjo and the members of your delegation. I extend a heartfelt Irish ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’ – one hundred thousand welcomes to you all and indeed a warm welcome to all our guests at this dinner, which marks Nigeria’s very first State Visit to Ireland. Mr. President you come to a country which has been a friend to Nigeria and her people for a very long time.
The story of that deep friendship between our two peoples began one hundred years ago with the arrival in West Africa of the first Irish missionaries. Many thousands of Irish men and women devoted their entire adult lives, working in every part of what was to become the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1960. Their outreach of care, whether in education or health is seen as much in the Muslim North as in the Christian South. From the St. Louis nuns in Kano in the North providing education to young girls, to the Holy Ghost fathers training seminarians in the South, many Irish threads run through the Nigeria of today and yesterday. In the 1960’s over 2000 Irish priests and nuns worked alongside hundreds of Irish lay teachers and while today those numbers have dwindled considerably, the work goes on, the work of building a new and better future for the people of Nigeria. The significance of Ireland’s contribution was given special recognition recently when two of the six foreigners honoured in this year’s Nigerian honours list were Irish missionaries: Father Denis Slattery and Sister Dr. Anne Ward. Through their work and the work of all our missionaries the name of Nigeria and the story of Nigeria became known in Ireland just as the name of Ireland became known in Nigeria.
The traffic has not of course been all one way. There has long been a fine tradition of distinguished Nigerians coming to Ireland to study, primarily in the fields of medicine and law, including in my own law class at Queen’s University over thirty years ago. There has also been a small but growing number of Nigerian children attending Irish second level schools, and I am pleased to see those pupils include your own daughter and the daughter of your Vice President.
The most recent phenomenon in the interaction between our peoples is that in the wake of the economic prosperity that Ireland now enjoys, many more Nigerians come to Ireland to work. Partly through them, and through the arrival of immigrants from other countries, Ireland is adapting and quickly, to the new reality of being a more complex and multicultural society.
The Irish and the Nigerian peoples each have very distinctive cultures and very different contexts; we as a small island nation on the periphery of largely prosperous Europe; Nigeria the most populous country in Africa, a tragically under-achieving continent with enormous resources and huge potential all yet to be put at the service of its suffering people. Yet in both our histories we see the repetition of similar themes and similar experiences out of which come unique bonds of understanding and empathy.
Both our countries know what it is to struggle with the legacy of colonialism, with widespread poverty and violent conflict. Our people like yours have known the devastation wreaked by famine and we have known what it is to see our people forced to emigrate through lack of opportunity at home. For Ireland many of these grim problems have thankfully been consigned to history and we have in this generation taken our place among the successful, high-achieving and wealthier countries of the world. For Nigeria however, the scale of your contemporary problems is still colossal but you face into those problems with an integrity and determination which we admire. Nigeria and indeed the African continent, have the potential to be humanity’s greatest success story. They are surely a huge test of humankind’s ability to unlock the genius of our brothers and sisters, to harvest the huge natural resources of that great continent and to move beyond endemic poverty to prosperity for all. You, Mr. President are rightly seen as a crucial architect of that yet unwritten future. It is a heavy burden you carry and the Irish people are committed in many ways to helping make that burden lighter.
Mr. President, a month ago you celebrated the third anniversary of the return of civilian rule and democracy to Nigeria and you declared that the anniversary of 29th of May would henceforth be known as 'Democracy and Human Rights Day'. While you, more than anyone are aware of how much remains to be done to complete the emergence of the new Nigeria, let me congratulate you this evening on how much you have achieved for Nigeria both at home and internationally where the credibility of Nigeria has been so much restored.
Your own life has been very closely bound to major defining episodes in the life of your nation since independence in 1960. The greatest challenge of all must have been when you took over as Head of the democratically elected Government in May 1999. The institutions of State were in disarray. Your work was to end this national trauma and to rebuild Nigeria. One of the first steps you took was to begin a relentless war on corruption by sending an anti‑corruption bill to the Assembly. Another was to set up a Human Rights Abuses Investigation Panel under Justice Oputa to examine the principal abuses from the military era. You have worked with great energy and determination to restore what had been lost and destroyed including some of the most basic of services ‑ electricity, fuel, telephones, roads and the re-building of the education and health sectors. For these and the many other achievements in the rebuilding of Nigeria, I offer you my heartfelt congratulations.
In the Irish language there is a saying – ‘ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine - we live in each other’s shadow’. If Africa is weak, the world is weak. If Africa is strong the world is strong. A strong prosperous, peaceful, healthy Nigeria is not only good for Nigeria, it is good for Ireland, it is good for our common human family. Your future matters to us. That is why so many Irish men and women left their native land to make your home theirs.
There is much to share with each other, much to learn from each other, much encouragement and support to offer to each other as we each try to harness the full potential of our peoples and reveal the truest and best chapter in our respective nation’s histories. Neither of our two countries has anything more to learn about the failed politics of selfishness, conflict, injustice and division. We have each of us earned a better future, the hard way.
Ireland, North and South, along with our neighbour Great Britain is struggling courageously to transcend the bitter politico‑religious difficulties which have bedevilled so much of our past and the evidence is mounting that we have indeed turned the corner into a remarkable new era of respectful partnership. I know that you too have given exceptional leadership in the pursuit of peace in your region. While we do not have the extraordinary multi‑cultural and multi‑religious diversity of Nigeria we are, like you, trying to find imaginative, generous and effective ways of channelling diversity into a force for good. Clearly, we have great scope for sharing our respective experiences and insights and in doing so, we each increase the reservoir of wisdom from which we draw.
The Nigerian people like the Irish, are I am sure, anxious to have what seem like simple things when you have them but impossible dreams when you don’t - a decent home, a job that pays a just wage, an education, accessible and effective health care, a peaceful and fair society, a happy life. We wish you well as you take Nigeria along the road to realising those dreams. I hope that your visit and that of your delegation will enable us to build on many areas of co-operation including trade, industry, education and culture, areas where so much good work has already been done to the benefit of both our peoples.
Mr. President I hope that you find Ireland a comfortable and relaxing place. May you make many new friends here and renew many old friendships. May at least some members of your delegation take the opportunity of comparing the taste of Nigerian Guinness with what we consider to be 'the real thing', strictly for cross-cultural comparison purposes of course. And may the ties of friendship between Nigeria and Ireland so carefully crafted by previous generations, be renewed, refreshed and re-invigorated by the presence in Ireland of Nigeria’s most outstanding leader, one of Africa’s most distinguished statesmen, a founding architect of 21st century Africa.
May I ask everyone present to stand and join with me in a toast to the President and people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.