REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION FOR THE IRISH COMMUNITY, SANTIAGO, CHILE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION FOR THE IRISH COMMUNITY, SANTIAGO, CHILE, TUESDAY, 23 MARCH, 2004
Dia dhíbh. Tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith libh tráthnóna ag an tionól seo de Ghaeil agus de chairde na hÉireann.
I have been looking forward for a very long time now to visiting South America and it is a great honour and privilege to be here in Chile on a State visit and to have enjoyed such wonderful Chilean hospitality. I am glad to see that so many of you could be here this evening to enjoy each other’s company and the wonderful, mystical music of Anúna. The Irish poet John Montague has a few lines that sum them up….
The sounds of Ireland,
that restless whispering
you never get away from,
I expect that there are many people in this room who have left Ireland but who never really ‘got away’ or left it behind in their hearts and minds - I am very glad to have this opportunity to meet you. As our Irish Constitution declares “the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage” and it is in this spirit that I welcome being in the company of so many members of our global Irish family.
I follow in the footsteps of many Irish men and women who have come here and been welcomed as friends for over two centuries, the great O’Higgins family, father and son, among them. When visiting the magnificent monument to the Liberator Bernardo O’Higgins, I was powerfully reminded of the courage, the integrity and the achievements of those far off generations and the values they handed on to their children. Bernardo himself only knew Ireland in his heart but even without his name, his portrait clearly makes him one of Ireland’s own.
The poverty stricken and oppressed Ireland that Ambrose O’Higgins left behind belongs to a different world, an altogether different time. Today Ireland is a wealthy country, the success story of the European Union. When we joined the Union thirty years ago we were the poorest member nation earning only 65% of the Union’s average income; we had endemically high unemployment and a culture of outward migration by our young people to whom Ireland offered little or no opportunity. Today we earn 130 percent of the Union’s average income, unemployment is down to 4 % and we have reversed the 150 year old tide of emigration. Now our young people are coming back along with men and women from many other cultures for whom Ireland offers the chance of a better life. At last our country is realising its fullest potential thanks to a combination of our youthful, educated labour force, our membership of the European Union, a financial climate which favours investment, our social partnership arrangements and a certain openness to change. Now a new confident and sophisticated generation is growing up in a successful, high-achieving environment and even more importantly they are growing up in a peaceful Ireland.
Relationships between the Irish and British Governments have never been better. The bitter legacy of mutual distrust between coloniser and colonised has given way to a partnership out of which has come the peace process in Northern Ireland and significant improvement in relationships between Ireland, North and South and between Ireland and Britain. “Peace comes dropping slow” as the poet Yeats once said but better slow and sure than never and it is getting better day by day.
Ireland’s cultural heritage in music and poetry, dance and drama, literature and film has never been more dynamic. Today it blossoms not just on the island of Ireland but wherever in the world two or more are gathered in Ireland’s name. Our global Irish family - scattered around the world - introduce us to the cultures they have adopted and from those dialogues has come a remarkable cultural assertiveness. I have heard that Chile has its own very fine Irish traditional musicians and we proudly count then among the many who help Irish culture to flourish at home and abroad.
Currently Ireland holds the Presidency of the European Union and with that enviable bit of Irish luck we will welcome ten new member states into the European Union family in a few short weeks, on May 1st in Dublin. The family of fifteen nations will grow to twenty-five with a total population of 450 million people on that day. What a remarkable challenge and opportunity not just for Europe but for the rest of the world. Our ambition for this miraculously reconciled Europe is to extend its horizons and stimulate the Union’s constantly developing relations with other regions of the world, as exemplified by the Association Agreement with Chile and the negotiations with MERCOSUR and the ongoing dialogue at every level with the United States.
In Ireland, membership of the Union over the past thirty-one years has been a transforming experience in many respects, opening us up to the world, opening us up to our own genius and to the awesome power of partnership. During those three decades, our contacts with the wider world, including Latin America, have increased and multiplied. In May, we also look forward with Mexico, to leading the Summit Meeting of the European Union with the Latin American and Caribbean countries, work on which is already well under way.
While I was unable to be in Chile with you precisely on St Patrick’s Day, we all know the celebrations last a month, so let us celebrate together our great patron, himself an emigrant to Ireland. His generous embrace of Ireland and her people wraps itself around the world to draw in every member of Ireland’s remarkable global family. It is a wonderful thing to travel half way across the world and to find here not just friends but family, people who love their beautiful homeland of Chile but who have space in their hearts for a little island which glories in its children’s lives - and never forgets them no matter how far or how long past the journey from home.
Go raibh maith agaibh.