REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A STATE DINNER IN HONOUR OF PRESIDENT KACZYNSKI AND MRS KACZYNSKA
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A STATE DINNER IN HONOUR OF PRESIDENT KACZYNSKI AND MRS KACZYNSKA ÁRAS AN UACHTARÁIN
Your Excellency President Kaczynski, Mrs. Kaczynska, distinguished guests,
Good evening, Dobry wieczór.
The traditional Irish welcome is Céad Mile Fáilte, one hundred thousand welcomes and I offer it warmly to all our guests at this special dinner in honour of the State Visit by President Kaczynski and in celebration of the ever-growing links between Ireland and Poland.
For most of our respective lifetimes the Irish and Polish peoples, despite the highest respect, regard and indeed concern for one another, inhabited spheres which were relatively remote from each other. We watched your country’s struggle for freedom, willing you on to independence and subsequently membership of the European Union.
This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of this miracle that is the European Union, a seed of hope that grew from the unlikely ashes of a war-torn and divided continent. Today the children of Poland and Ireland grow up in that Union as partners, as friends, as neighbours. They build a shared future and indeed some of your countrymen and women are helping to build up Ireland’s future with their skills, their experience and their talent. Our once relatively homogeneous homeland has blossomed into a multicultural society with Polish the predominant influence. In fact you can find buses in our city centre proclaiming that their destination is Warsaw, Polish pubs, Polish bread shops, adverts in Polish on radio and television, a Polish newspaper or Polish sections in our newspapers. All signs of remarkable times through which the vision of the founders of the Union for a peaceful and prosperous, cohesive Europe is being realised.
I have visited Poland twice in recent years, once on a marvellous State visit shortly before your accession to the Union and the second on the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The twentieth century showed us starkly both the unspeakable brutality some human beings are capable of and the phenomenal courage of others in the face of that brutality. The twenty-first century is the place where we build a new reconciled Europe, founded on democracy and respect for human rights, a bulwark against tyranny on our continent and in our world, a quiet homeland for all the children of Europe. Ireland and Poland each bring their unique identities to the European table, adding depth, lustre, texture, perspective and experience to the debates and decisions that are shaping Europe’s present and future. The late Pope John Paul II said in 1980, “I am the son of a nation that has lived through the greatest experiences in history which, though condemned to death by its neighbours, has survived and remained itself.”.
Poland’s self is a huge asset to the Union and of course the Union is a huge opportunity for its member states. Never before has any generation of Polish or Irish citizens inhabited a landscape of such open prospects for their own development and the development of their countries.
As Adam Zagajewski has written in his poem, “Don't Allow The Lucid Moment To Dissolve”:
We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves
Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth
Poland and Ireland are both countries and peoples recently freed from the many shackles that kept them from rising to their true level. We are on a common journey as members of the European Union and, building on our longstanding deep solidarity, our common values and ambitions, we now work to put the relationship between us into a new and exciting gear, building the strong cultural, political and commercial links which will improve the lives of our peoples for many generations to come.
President Kaczynski, in paying us this visit you are helping to cement the friendship between the Irish and Polish peoples and to provoke curiosity among them as to the kind of future we can build together. I enjoyed memorable hospitality in your great country and I hope that you will take away from Ireland equally warm and happy memories of a place where you were welcomed as an old and valued friend.
I now invite you, distinguished guests, to join me in a toast;
- To the health and happiness of President Kaczynski and Mrs Kaczynska
- To peace and prosperity for the people of Poland
- And to continued friendship between the peoples of Ireland and Poland
Sto lat (may you live a hundred years) or, as we say in Irish, ‘Gura fada buan thú’.