“IRELAND: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN A GLOBAL COMMUNITY” ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE
“IRELAND: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN A GLOBAL COMMUNITY” ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO
Thank you all for your warm welcome, and thank you to Fr Privett, the faculty and the University for the honour you have bestowed on me today. I am happy to count myself an alumnus of this great university. Since you have honoured this Irishwoman who is President of Ireland I thought I would share with you some reflections on Ireland and its challenges and opportunities in a global community.
Sometimes the challenges crowd your view. Sometimes they don’t feel like challenges but like immovable obstacles or like unnerving threats. In Ireland, as with countries around the globe there is a lot of foreboding about and we do face serious economic challenges at home and not for the first time. As members of the international community, the earth’s human family, we are also facing not just the challenge of this pressing global financial crisis but also the questions of what we can do to deal effectively with endemic global poverty, climate change, terrorism, state repression and the abuses of human rights that paralyse and waste human potential. There are some obstacles that you can lift with one hand on the crowbar and some you can’t. Most of the problems we face need a lot more than the power of one. Yet the advocacy of one and the charism of one can be a very powerful tool of inspiration and that is something Ireland can bring to the global picture, its story, its advocacy of humanly decent values and its charism.
Ireland’s story as a nation that has faced and transcended colonial domination, poverty, famine, waves of emigration, sectarianism and conflict is an important story in a world where so many citizens wait for their day of liberation and opportunity. This is the first generation in our history to have known a confluence of peace and prosperity. Yet as Lincoln once said, “nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power’. With our newfound power, which was largely underpinned by widened access to education, we have built a generous, just and agreed peace with our long-estranged neighbours and a globalised, entrepreneurial economy of opportunity, openness and innovation. We have welcomed many migrants to our shores, reversing the generations-old haemorrhage of outward migration and while the newcomers have arrived in a new Ireland, they have also found and appreciated the old Ireland, important parts of which remain embedded in our character.
We have always been a place of strong, caring clans and local communities and the investment we make in strong human connections at home, we also make with our extended family right around the world to whom we owe so much. As we face uncertain economic times, it is that character, that connectedness and our newfound confidence that are among our greatest resources. We are a youthful country, one of the most youthful populations in Europe, well-educated, adaptable and innovative. However, the accomplishments of this generation in Ireland do not buy us a cosy seat around the table of complacency. Instead they equip us with the tools and the toughness to rise confidently to the next set of challenges and opportunities that face us. Many of these challenges are not unique to us but face many of the world’s citizens. Some of them we face with other nations through our membership of the European Union, which we joined 35 years ago, and the United Nations which we commenced service with 50 years ago and where our militarily neutral and non-aligned nation’s defence forces have served with distinction as peacekeepers. We currently head up the EUFOR mission to Chad and our troops and police are in Kosovo, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Congo to name just a few of the ten current UN operations we are involved in. Looking outward to the world has never been difficult for us for we are one of the earliest and longest globalised nations on earth.
A millennium and a half ago, Irish scholars were sailing to America and to Europe bringing the Christian gospel and literacy. Today the over five million who inhabit the island of Ireland are part of a scattered, global, emigrant family that numbers some 70 million world wide, half of them here in the United States. They keep us well-globalised through our many connections and through their constant replenishing of the wells of Irishness, enriching our heritage with the mixed heritages of their new homelands and identities. Our inward migrants, now over ten percent of our population, who are quite a recent phenomenon, keep us globalised and challenge us to honour their beloved ethnicities while welcoming and integrating them into the bosom of Irish life.
Irish arts and culture have an extraordinary, universal appeal with a remarkable litany of artists who have created a canon of genius that is appreciated in the farthest flung ends of the globe and that rapidly opens up friendships wherever music is played, or poetry recited, or jigs danced. We are connected through foreign investment in us and our own investment abroad. American companies have created 90,000 jobs in Ireland and Irish companies have created 80,000 jobs here. As one of the top exporters of software worldwide, we are globally engaged in developing the high end of modern technologies. Our dynamic tourism sector brings millions to our shores each year, building connections of friendship and memories thanks to the ease and cheapness of global travel.
And our missionaries, NGOs and development aid workers keep us connected, through care, to the world’s poor and suffering as they have done for two centuries. Here, too, we have found that partnerships with donor agencies like the Clinton Foundation or with experienced NGOs or recipient governments or the UN have allowed us to develop much more powerful synergies than ever before, allowing us to help roll out national strategies in some of the poorest countries to tackle HIV/ AIDS education, healthcare, infrastructure and good governance. And as we face the viral financial instability that has hit the globe and cope with our local problems, our international responsibilities remain important priorities for, if we feel the chill, you can be sure the poor are feeling it too, only worse.
The financial crisis that confronts the world shows yet again that the ‘global community’ is not any empty shorthand, but a lived reality. It may not always be coherent in its structures but the effects of our connectedness are real in their consequences. Weak global structures add greatly to our vulnerability. A community, if it works right, is a place with the feel of a village, but not its narrow insularity. It is a place of welcome where neighbour has a sense of responsibility for neighbour and where a robust system of mutual dependence flourishes. It only happens by the alchemy of human interactions, people working with each other and for each other, an ideal close to the heart of the Jesuit heritage of this university. We no longer live in the age of villages and we are emerging rapidly and chastened from the era of rampant individualism. Our nature, our instinct, tell us that community is where we thrive, just as children thrive in a loving, supportive and caring family environment and now, our earth is teaching us that, unless we act as global community, as members of a family to one another, we will run the risk of being overwhelmed by problems and obstacles that can only be tackled by joint effort.
Central to the development of a truly functioning community is good communication, the healing of wounds and conflicts, the bridging of ignorance and hatred, the reconciling of even considerable differences with the emollient of mutual respect. We live in an age which is increasingly probing the necessity for a sense of structured and communicating community that transcends geographic, political and cultural boundaries. It was that same search for community and focus on mutual interests that led to the foundation of the United States of America and the European Union. It was that same spirit that infused the old Irish custom of the ‘meitheal’, a concept not easily translatable into English but which describes the old custom in rural areas of farm families coming together to help each other with their respective harvests. The meitheal was no accident, it was the sensible, structured human response to need.
Neither community nor peace happens by accident. The Irish have reason to know that and perhaps our experience can provide some small insights that help the sum of the global understanding around issues that hold us back from being community to one another and indeed keep us either in ignorance of one another or, worse still, in conflict with one another.
First, a thought from our search for peace on the island of Ireland. It is a task that has taken literally centuries, for the seeds of hatred and mistrust which gave rise to conflict among neighbours, generation after generation were sown deep in our history as an unhappily and immorally colonised people. Those toxic seeds proved to have a very, very long shelf-life. They helped turn neighbour against neighbour; instead of one community we had bitterly divided communities, hermetically sealed and separate identities. In this university I can say without fear of contradiction that it is no accident that peace emerged in the generation which is the best-educated and most accomplished in our history. With the analytical skills and the confidence of mass second and third-level education there grew space for new thinking and for the compromises on all sides that peace agreements such as ours needs.
Three key relationships had become messed up over history and they had to be straightened out. Within Northern Ireland, relationships between Catholics and Protestants were hostile. Cross-border, the relationship between Northern Ireland and Ireland was distrustful and historically the relationship between the Dublin and London governments was fraught. However, Ireland and Britain joined the European Union on the same day and, across its table sitting as equals, politicians and civil servants soon developed a warm, collegial relationship. That new friendship became a vital source of focus and partnership in tackling the building of peace and straightening out the remaining two relationships. Today all three relationships have been transformed utterly and the signs so far are very exciting and reassuring.
However, straightening out all that mess needed outside help and it was our amazing Irish family here in America which ensured that successive US governments and voluntary organisations added their weight to our crowbar. America shares Ireland’s laurels of peace. It was in recognition of that miraculous and enduring dynamic that the Irish government changed our Constitution in reaction to the Good Friday Peace Agreement and expressed Ireland’s “special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage”. There are perhaps one or two of those people in this room and this is an appropriate moment for me as President of Ireland to acknowledge just how important the story of our global family has been to us.
Generations of Irish emigrants came here often in poverty and in desperation but with a formidable courage and with the Irish capacity for finding joy in life even through the worst of times. Not only did they build a great country here but their cents and dollars sent to an impoverished Ireland helped bridge the gap until Ireland’s children could find their feet at home. They made good and Ireland made good and in the words of the great Walt Whitman,
“What you wept for was translated, pass’d from the grave,
The winds favor’d and the sea sail’d it,
And now with rosy and new blood,
Moves today in a new country.”[1]
We are both new countries today but we are still clan to one another and the warmth of our affinity is undimmed by time or generation. In every generation, it finds new expression and in some ways we are still only at the beginning of our fullest potential. A few weeks ago, I was visited in Dublin by members of the Irish Technology Leadership Group, a new network of high-achieving Irish and Irish-American Silicon Valley executives. Now they want to build new links, new networks between Ireland’s high-tech sector and America’s to the benefit of both. I could see the future being constructed before my eyes. Building on the enormous platform of connection that has been created by our links with Irish America, we hope to continuously deepen our engagement with our amazing diaspora right around the world, reflecting the special affinity with them now marked in our Constitution and drawing on the extraordinary advances in technology today which make such engagement a daily possibility. Our hope is to build our own global community within the global community, as it were, not on the basis of keeping something for ourselves, but rather as a special well that all can draw from and be nourished by.
But Irish America will always remain for us a key group in that matrix. Ireland and the United States have shared much historically and share much today in values and in vision. We each have much to share with the world. Sixty years ago this month, thanks to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, the entire human family unanimously promulgated the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in which were set out the inalienable rights of every single human being - rights not concessions, entitlements not gifts. It took courageous champions, audacious and hope-filled men and women, to bring the world to that watershed moment and it will take such champions to realise those rights in every corner of the world. With your new President-elect, so very symbolic of that courage, that audacity and, with the added, great joy of knowing he has inherited some of our Irish DNA, we wish him well and pledge to work with him to build a global family where each child ‘will be cherished equally’ to quote our 1916 Proclamation.
It will not happen by coincidence or by accident but rather by design and determination. Each generation, each individual faces the choice to commit to a world where he or she is a welcome villager or to settle for a world where we are destined to remain suspicious strangers. It has been so lovely to be made welcome here today, to arrive as a stranger and to be awarded, above all, the gift of friendship.
Thank you and thank you again for the honour you have done me today.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
[1] “Old Ireland”, by Walt Whitman, taken from “Ireland in Poetry”, edited by Charles Sullivan