INAUGURAL “SAINT PATRICK’S DAY LECTURE AT ARMAGH” BY PRESIDENT McALEESE FRIDAY, 19TH MARCH 2010
INAUGURAL "SAINT PATRICK'S DAY LECTURE AT ARMAGH" BY PRESIDENT McALEESE FRIDAY, 19TH MARCH 2010
Dia dhíbh a chairde tráthnóna. Tá gliondar orm bheith anseo libh ar an ócáid speisialta seo agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh as an chaoin-chuireadh agus an fháilte. Where better to be in this week of St. Patrick than in the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland. I thank Councillor Thomas O'Hanlon, the Mayor of Armagh City and District Council, for the kind invitation to give the Inaugural "Saint Patrick's Day Lecture at Armagh."
In divided communities, particularly where the divisions are bitter and where memories are often invoked only to sharpen the division, the calling to mind of a shared heritage, a shared memory can be an important bridge to reconciliation and to recognition of one another as brothers and sisters rather than strangers. Gathering here as we do in the name of Saint Patrick, across borders of history and of hearts and minds, we acknowledge that whatever our politics or perspective, we are each one a child of Saint Patrick, his story is our story, his legacy our legacy. Patrick created for us a platform of shared inheritance strong enough to help us to share more, to share better with one another in the days and years ahead.
It is always going to be difficult to interrogate thoroughly a life lived over a millennium and a half ago. Patrick’s life has gathered legends and contradictions in the generations between his day and ours but there is neither mystery nor legend about the fact that he came among us as a stranger, that he was a passionate Ambassador for the Christian faith and that the message he espoused left an enduring impact and indeed an enduring challenge on this island that he came to love so much and to be identified with in every corner of the known world.
The man who came as an immigrant slave to these shores became by sheer force of principle and personality, a powerful catalyst for change. He was a victim of violence, a child kidnapped, held captive and abused. He was one of the downtrodden, the overlooked, the disregarded. He knew the cruelty of loss and loneliness for he was taken away from those he loved and who loved him. He knew well the inhumanity of which his fellow human beings were capable for they visited enough of it directly on him to leave him in no doubt that almost all the unnecessary suffering in the world is inflicted by human beings on one another.
Seamus Heaney’s poem, Cure at Troy says tersely "Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard." And there is truth in those words as this country has cause to know. But not everyone gets hard. There are some who refuse to become hardened and bitter, who do not through their acts add more to the pile of human misery but instead commit their lives to softening, to reducing the mountain of hurt, to ending the cycle of misery. Patrick was one of those rare human beings, a man whose righteous frustration and indignation, his anger and his pain, distilled not into more hatred but into a loving forgiveness that stopped the toxin of hate dead in its tracks.
Sometimes we remember only Patrick the Bishop, striding through Ireland, powerful, persuasive and compelling but there is another Patrick more pertinent to these times. He is the slave boy, herding sheep on Slemish, frozen to the bone, realizing the sheep were regarded more highly than he was and wondering was there ever to be a life for him, would he ever know freedom to live life on his own terms.
In this city and county and around Northern Ireland there are men, women and children who feel that they too have been left out and left behind. They have been demoralized and drained by the conflict, they feel their youth and potential was robbed by forces beyond them and though peace is gathering momentum, consolidating day by day, the benefits of this great historic shift are not yet evenly distributed. That will take time. It will also take the same kind of courage, focus and commitment that was demanded of Patrick. The seemingly wasted years of his youth, distilled into a passion that would make his name resound a millennium and a half later. Instead of letting victimhood and vengeance consume the rest of his life, he used the present not to dwell on the past or in the past but to fix what he thought needed to be fixed so that the future would be a place of hope, a place where all could safely belong. There are more and more people doing just that here in Northern Ireland. They are trying to build a reconciled society and at the same time trying to address the underlying tensions and problems which helped fuel the conflict. They are searching for ways to deal effectively and sensitively with the many deep traumas of the past. The fresh new momentum they have gathered into this phenomenon we call the Peace Process has offered such a new vista that more and more people have become peace-makers, including many who once sought to advance their cause through violence. The transformation in their thinking and their lives is the very thing that gives us such hope that real change is possible, that love can indeed transcend hatred and help heal hurt. The conversion to peace is not unlike the conversion of Ireland to the vision of St. Patrick for he too knew the wonder and the miracle of persuading skeptics and enemies to give up their old ways of thinking and join his mission. Patrick also knew what it was like to make hard choices, to put the common good before his own safety and wellbeing, to put his life in the service of others. He had escaped from captivity after six miserable years. He had gone home. He was safe. He was free but a voice called him back to Ireland and he surrendered to that voice very reluctantly, as he said in his Confessio, "... I did not proceed to Ireland on my own accord until I was almost giving up."
Had he given up, there would be much more than a big vacant hole in the March calendar. In every generation whatever its circumstances there has been a part of St. Patrick’s story to inspire, to comfort and to engender hope. In this once deeply fractured Ireland which is on the journey to healing, there is his capacity for forgiveness of those who hurt him and his great love of this island. His status as an emigrant lodged deep in the hearts of the many millions of Irish who left their homeland driven out by poverty and politics. His arrival as a nonentity of a stranger who was to leave a massive imprint on the country of his adoption, reminds those of us who live in post-plantation Ireland and who live in multi-cultural Ireland that the stranger is a repository of new energies, ambitions and perspectives that can make a rich contribution to our society. So Patrick teaches the stranger to have faith in the contribution he or she can make and he teaches the native to see inward migration as an opportunity.
A key element of Patrick’s success was that he respected and worked alongside the old pagan culture so that his form of Christianity was absorbed easily and fluently into Irish life, growing side by side with the old pagan culture, with no anxiety to obliterate it. As a result Ireland was transformed into something new, a place with a distinctive psychological identity, capable of seamless yet radical change.
When we speak of radical change, it is easy to miss the import of the cumulative changes we ourselves have lived through. Perhaps we are as yet too close to these events to see their true magnitude. But who could ever have imagined that an Irish Government would purchase the site of the Battle of the Boyne and develop there a heritage site for all the people of the island of Ireland? Who could have imagined a government in Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin Ministers working side by side with Democratic Unionist colleagues? It is only when we pause and take a step back to look at the bigger picture, over a longer perspective of time, that we truly appreciate how momentous this process of change really is and how much closer it brings us to Patrick’s vision for the people of this island.
We are no longer the one time island of Saints and Scholars that illumined all of Europe with scholarship, erudition, literacy and the great commandment to love one another. But that Ireland is still embedded in our DNA just as the memory of those wandering monks is still to be found in the street names all over the European mainland. Centuries later, the children who had grown up on those European streets and who had slaughtered each other in their millions in two devastating world wars would out of the craven wreckage of those times create the European Union, a most unlikely partnership of old enemies. They put war behind them and a future of friendship in front of them and it was our membership of that Union along with the United Kingdom that set the scene for the development of one of the most crucial dynamics in our peace process. Shared membership of the Union allowed the relationship between Ireland and Britain to metamorphose rapidly from lukewarm and distrustful to fulsome and warm. A new collegiality opened up the space for a joint endeavour to bring peace to Northern Ireland and to put all the fraught relationships of history on a fresh and healthy footing.
This city was to become associated with the recalibration of those relationships in a very special way for appropriately the city where Patrick established his See is now home of the North South Ministerial Council and the Centre for Cross-Border Studies. Here the new culture of consensus and good neighbourliness is being incubated each day and rolled out across the island. North-South co-operation has replaced the wasteful days of living with "back turned to back." So much potential for everything from simple friendship, safety and commerce leached away into the sands of time because of the embedded culture of conflict. We are the first generation to know the joy of a future to look forward to, one that is humanly decent and uplifting. The politics that deliver this new horizon are not always pretty or straightforward but they have a visible forward momentum and importantly they result from democratic dialogue, plain speaking and compromise.
Now we have Ministers from the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive cooperating regularly across a range of issues of common importance. We share North/South bodies like InterTradeIreland and Tourism Ireland. We harmonize our plans for building roads together, we share our precious natural resources and provide cancer and GP services on a cross-border basis. These things show what happens when our energy and initiative are liberated to be a positive force that makes a real difference to the lives of people on both sides of the border. There is no better place to observe that force at work than here in Armagh.
Last month, with the agreement reached on the devolution of policing and justice powers, we witnessed a moment when the Peace Process transitioned from potential to reality. It was a lumpy, awkward and difficult business. All of us on this island know that politics is at times a painstaking business, but in the end something inspirational did occur, the two traditions began to look more and more like one community and they spoke more and more convincingly with one voice. The politicians answered the call of the people for leadership just as St. Patrick answered the voice that called him to leadership in Ireland.
He wrote in his Confessio: “I am the sinner Patrick. I am the most unsophisticated of people, the least of Christians... ” He was an ordinary man who found in himself the capacity for extraordinary, heroic things. Every community needs such people – the simple and the sincere who don’t follow the giddy crowd, but who give remarkable leadership in their families, streets, communities, workplaces, clubs and country. They are the men and women who stop the toxin of hatred by refusing to laugh at the sectarian or racist joke. They are the men and women who make friends across the fractures of history’s making. They are the men and women who teach their children to respect all others and to expect difference as well as to respect it. They are the backbone of the peace process and they have always been true to Patrick’s call to love one another, forgive one another and to see each other as brothers and sisters.
We have rounded the cusp of change and now need to gather the momentum which will build, grow and consolidate this new emerging culture of good neighbourliness. That momentum is being quietly gathered in so many corners of this island by the persistent but largely unsung transformational work that is being done by individuals and all sorts of voluntary groups. They are unobtrusively fixing things that are or were wrong, they are filling in the “centuries arrears.”
The peace process went through many a wobble; some of them of seismic proportions but today its robustness is a cause of real hope. The economy is going through a considerable wobble and history teaches us that we will find a way out of it - and this time we have on our side the resource of a peace - a resource denied to so many other generations over the centuries.
In his great poem, from the Canton of Expectation, Seamus Heaney described the grim psychological hinterland inhabited by the generations before us: "We lived deep in a land of optative moods, under high, banked clouds of resignation.” Not any more we don’t. Today there is a lovely stanza from Station Island that describes this moment better:
"As little flowers that were all bowed and shut
By the night chills rise on their stems and open
As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight
So I revived my own wilting powers
And my heart flushed, like somebody set free"
There is the touch of sunlight in this hard-won peace. And in this week we think of the littlest flower of them all, the shamrock, so beloved as a teaching tool by St. Patrick.
In his poem, The Shamrock and Laurel, the Reverend William McClure points the way to our coming future.
“As the Lily was the glory
Of the olden flag of France,
As the Rose illumes the story
Of Albion's advance
In the Shamrock is communion
Of all Irish faith, and love”.