REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE IRISH GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH
Dia dhíbh a chairde,
Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur láthair ar an ocáid seo. Tá me buíoch díbh as an cuireadh agus an fáilte forchaoin a chur sibh romham. It’s a great pleasure to join the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS). I would especially like to thank the President of the Society, Fergus Gillespie for his kind invitation to this evening’s celebration. Fergus is very familiar with this evening’s venue as the Former Chief Herald of Ireland, a post in which he provided a great public service. I would particularly like to thank the Society for having granted me a Fellowship of the IGRS. I am conscious of joining a long line of eminent figures who have received such a fellowship and I am both honoured and humbled by this great privilege.
Seventy-five years ago the Society was founded in London, a city which was home to many generations of Irish migrants. The Society was in a way the product of the events of the war of independence and subsequent civil war which altered so many aspects of life on the island of Ireland. The loss of so much of the hard copy Irish ‘national memory’ in the fire which consumed our public records in 1922 was the particularly grim reality that became the catalyst for the foundation of this society in 1936 - when the voracious genealogist Fr. Wallace Clare gathered a group of like-minded people and the new Society was launched.
Those first founders knew instinctively that this Society would have a worldwide appeal for people of Irish descent who needed a sure and trusted bridge to the facts of their ancestry and their heritage. The Society became a scholarly friend and companion to those interested in Irish geneaology whether in Ireland or in any part of the globe. You are the custodians, the gatekeepers of many millions of narratives and historic complexities and you have made yourselves open to people from the kaleidoscope of politics, perspective, faiths and identities which makes up our Irish history and heritage. Quite a proportion of the stories involve remarkable and dramatic odysseys in places far remote from Ireland for we have always been an adventurous people curious about the world. Some of the stories are well-documented, others lost in the mists of time and others only retrievable with professional help like yours.
Just last week, I was on a visit to Spain; as you can imagine the historic connections got fair mention, with the well-known stories of the Earls O’Neill and O’Donnell featuring large. But I also spoke of the twenty thousand Irish who once served in the Spanish Armies, of the Irish Prime Ministers of Spain, the Irish Vice-Roys who represented the Spanish Monarchy in Ibero-America, all of whose stories are a faded part of our patrimony that we rely on historical researchers to remind us of. It was interesting too to speculate on the longstanding theories that link the Irish and the Galicians and which some modern genetic research is tending to support.
Each one of us has a history, an ancestry but we are not all fortunate enough to have it meticulously and fully archived. Many people have a natural curiosity about their generational background – a curiosity that is as evident today as it was in the time of the
druids and the brehons who had an important role to play in recording the genealogy of Irish families. Pre-Norman Irish society, it is said, was almost unique in that every family, not just the wealthy rulers, recorded and passed down their genealogy from one generation to the next. With the massive success of the IGRS, we can see that we clearly haven’t lost that habit yet!
This keen interest in and respect for the past, the fascination with our roots is no doubt part of the reason why our global Irish family today remains so interconnected across the miles and the generations. The IGRS helps keep that connectedness alive and dynamic. As Edmund Burke stated “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
We owe a great debt of gratitude to those early genealogists, both prior to the destruction of 1922 and afterwards, who worked at recording and preserving records relating to Irish genealogy all over the world. Much of the roll of the early Council members of the Society reads like a catalogue of the most well-known Irish scholars and genealogists and to them we are extremely grateful. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to Fr. Clare whose original vision led to the foundation of the Society seventy-five years ago. I doubt even he would have envisioned the remarkable impact you’ve had, seventy-five years on, with flourishing bases in London and Dublin, a global presence through the internet, a rich library and a unique collection of manuscripts, and the regular publication of the excellent ‘Irish Genealogist’ journal. This great success was fuelled these seventy-five years, by the commitment, passion, expertise and wisdom of your staff, membership and volunteers, each one of whom Ireland is indebted to.
Your ever-expanding membership highlights the continuing importance of this work to individuals, to families and to the global Irish family. Along with our National Library and National Archives you help bring an intellectual rigour to this discipline which at a human level can often be as much a journey of self-discovery as the discovery of history.
They say that life is lived forwards, and understood backwards. Thank you for the marvellous work you do in helping so many people make progress in reaching that retrospective understanding. Congratulations to the Irish Genealogical Research Society on its first 75 years and may the years ahead with the human commitment and the wonder of the technologies we enjoy and those still to come, may the very best be yet to come for the Society, its members and its clients.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.