REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT BABEŞ-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY CLUJ
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT BABEŞ-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY CLUJ, FACULTY OF LETTERS PROFESSOR HONORIS CAUSA AWARD CEREMONY
Secretar de Stat, Ministru, Excelenţele Voastre, Rector, Decan, Doamnelor şi Domnilor
[Secretary of State, Minister, Your Excellencies, Rector, Dean, Ladies and Gentlemen]
I arrive for the first time in Romania on the first State Visit by an Irish President to a country which geography, but especially history, conspired to keep at a distance from Ireland. And here I find an M.A. course in Irish Studies, a showcase if ever there was one of that indomitable human spirit, that curiosity about the otherness of others that transcends all natural and artificial barriers and reminds us so powerfully of all that we have to offer each other if only we take a chance and reach out to one another.
So when I say I am thrilled to be here I really mean it. The City and the University have complex histories and serve complex constituencies across three official languages. No wonder Romania is so at home in the European Union and this University in particular for as Umberto Eco has said, ‘translation is the language of Europe’. He could have been talking about your own Faculty of Letters with its remarkable reputation in teaching and research in languages and literatures as diverse as Norwegian and Japanese and Finnish. Needless to say I was delighted to learn that the Irish Studies students are also given an insight into the Irish language for it is without a doubt a window in the deepest realms of the soul and story of our nation.
I have a confession to make for this is not in fact my first encounter with your MA in Irish Studies. For before I became President of Ireland, I was for a number of years Pro Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast where I was able to encourage the work of one of my colleagues John Fairleigh, one of Romania’s greatest Irish friends. From his visits here which go back over thirty years he developed a network of academic contacts and importantly a vision for bringing the story of Ireland to Romania.
It was indeed fortunate for Ireland, for Cluj and for the staff and students of the MA that one of the people who first travelled to Ireland to look into developing an Irish Studies course, was the enthusiastic and indefatigable Liviu Cotrau. In 1999, after assuming the Office of President, I was pleased to host Professor Cotrau and his equally dedicated colleagues in my official residence in Dublin; just prior to the first term of Irish Studies in Cluj.
Since then, they have driven the programme to the level of excellence it enjoys today. It is a source of great personal delight to see that the project which began in Belfast has been so well nurtured; and that it is now a successful and integral part of the Faculty’s programme with Romanian and Irish academics of the highest calibre. I pay tribute in particular to Leila Doolin and David Harkness for their contribution in the fields of film and history respectively and above all, I salute the teaching staff of the University who have been so dedicated, professional, resourceful and passionate about our Irish culture.
To cover a curriculum that includes our great 20th century writers such as Joyce and Yeats, as well as short stories, contemporary poetry, fiction and language, not to mention history, theatre and film, is a massive achievement. Now the teaching staff includes a PhD graduate from Maynooth University in Ireland and one of the course graduates has made her home in Dublin and now lectures in Irish Drama in University College Dublin. The exchanges and summer schools, the annual John Fairleigh Scholarship and the graduates who are torchbearers across Europe for Romania and for Ireland, these are signs of great dynamism generated by the meeting of our two cultures and peoples. Your work deserves the recognition and gratitude of both our peoples for it opens up to us a story that has for too long been overlooked and that is the ever deepening artistic and cultural exchanges which have been going on between our two countries, in the areas of music, theatre, film and literature in particular.
Irish musicians have proved to be wonderful cultural ambassadors on their visits to Romania for St. Patrick’s Day concerts and Romanian musicians have certainly made their mark in Ireland. For six years, from as far back as the late 1970s, the quartet-in-residence of our State Television company came from Romania. Now, the Galway ensemble-in-residence based in NUI Galway, is ‘Contempo’ who studied and performed in Bucharest before making the move to Ireland.
As regards the theatre, it is well known that Romania and Ireland were home, in their early years, to two of the great masters of European theatre, Eugène Ionesco Yon es-cu] and Samuel Beckett. Both authors had much in common; their work belonged to the avant-garde Theatre of the Absurd. Both left their homelands for the bright lights of Paris, Ionesco swapping the Paris of the East for Paris of the West. Already on the eve of the tragic events of the last century, our writers and artists were exchanging ideas in the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe, perhaps even sipping coffee together in the Quartier latin or Montparnasse.
The deep connection which both our cultures have with theatre and language, and how we use it, connects us as people. Irish productions travelling to Romania and Romanian shows in Ireland are opening audiences to the theatrical traditions and the cultures of our respective countries.
Earlier this year, the Blue Raincoat theatre company from Sligo opened the Comedy Theatre Festival in Bucharest with their production of Ionesco’s
‘The Bald Soprano’. Cluje has contributed to these exchanges with Gábor Tompa of the Hungarian theatre directing Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Other landmarks include awards for the Bucharest based ‘Green Hours Theatre’ at the Dublin Fringe Festival and a very popular ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ directed by Ireland’s Lynne Parker in the National Theatre in Bucharest.
As for literature, where better to celebrate the literatures and languages of our countries than here today in the Eminescu Hall, named after Romania’s national poet? For our part, we in Ireland are very proud as a small nation to have contributed much to the great tradition of literature in English. We are honoured that academics and students in a country with such a strong literary tradition as Romania should choose to study our literature, language and history.
Translations of Irish works into Romanian and Hungarian are opening up new audiences to our writers. I am proud that my own book Reconciled Being was translated into Romanian by a former Romanian Ambassador Elena Zamfirescu, the woman through whom I first got to know of Romania and her people. I believe that a translation of Flann O’Brien’s ‘At Swim-Two-Birds,’ by an academic of this University will soon be published in Cluj.. I am glad to say that there is already a strong body of translation - and this is growing all the time - of contemporary Romanian plays and poetry available in Ireland. These include translations of Romania’s great Ana Blandiana into English by our own distinguished poet and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.
I would like to quote a few lines from Ana Blandiana’s beautiful poem “The Country we come from”. It captures the fragility of our existence and our civilisation in the face of the forces of history:
‘I am from summer,
A homeland so frail
The fall of a leaf
Could crush it to nothing’
For Romania, the twentieth century, with its horrific World Wars and crushing totalitarian tyrannies, was a profoundly difficult one. In times of hardship and oppression, in times when books were banned and the State attempted to control peoples’ minds, your culture, literature and national language were deep sources of solace, of resistance and, above all, of hope. For our part in Ireland, the 20th Century brought different challenges, some also involving the cancer of violent conflict. For us too, culture, literature and language were a source of nourishment of soul and mind which we draw on deeply. Although separated by distance and the Cold War, Ireland and Romania share this common heritage of a Europe where culture and ideas are without borders, the invisible ferrymen slipping past the watchtowers.
In the radically different setting of this century, we have an opportunity to make up for lost time in terms of direct connections and are already doing so. I remember with affection the day of welcomes in Dublin in May 2004.
Seamus Heaney said this on the day and of the day….
‘Let it be a homecoming and let us speak
The unstrange word, as it behoves us here,
Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare
Like ancient beacons signalling, peak to peak,
From middle sea to north sea, shining clear
As phoenix flame upon fionn uisce here.’
As members of the European family, our two countries are committed to a way of life that is founded on democracy and the rule of law. This shared EU membership is giving a sense of common purpose to our relations, an entwined future to our children. From this ‘New meanings will flare’ and the relations between our countries will be deepened, hand to hand, neighbour to neighbour, poem to poem, song to song.
Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union once said “I should have started with culture”. This University is giving effect to Monnet’s wise words. I am proud that here in Cluj Ireland and Romania have joined forces to pursue this aim of fostering enhanced mutual interest in our rich and diverse European culture. Here you introduce us to one another with scholarly and joyful curiosity. Here you invest in a future Monnet would be proud of. For Ireland and Romania are still only at the beginning of our explorations of each other and indeed of our own potential as free, independent nations within the European family of member states. I am convinced that the best is yet to come.
Once again I thank the Faculty and the University for the honour bestowed on me.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
Thank you very much.
Si va multumesc pentru attentie si v-urez zi buna.