REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH PEN/AT CROSS LITERARY AWARD DINNER DUN LAOIRE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH PEN/AT CROSS LITERARY AWARD DINNER DUN LAOIRE, DUBLIN FRIDAY, 2ND FEBRUARY, 2001
Tá lúcháir orm bheith anseo libh ag an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle bhuíochas libh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin a chur romham.
It is a great pleasure to be here among such distinguished and talented company this evening. I would like to thank Fr. Tony Gaughan and Irish Pen for the kind invitation to present the Life Time Achievement Award to such a distinguished and deserving Irish woman of letters, Edna O’Brien.
And what a life it has been – so far! From the turbulent reception of her first novel The Country Girls in 1959, Edna weathered those early storms and indeed many more on the lonely road to establishing herself as a formidable literary force. Today as the proud author of a substantial and respected corpus of work including novels, short stories, plays, film scripts and most recently a biography of James Joyce, Edna is recognised as one of the most gifted women writers in the English language and we in Ireland are proud to describe her simply as a great Irish writer.
Writing is in her blood. She once remarked ‘I am told by my parents and by people I knew in my childhood that I always wrote. And on my way home from school I used to sit down in certain places and just write something in my copybook for what I called make – up people… The hunger, the quest to write was always with me.’
That hunger has taken her on an extraordinary pilgrimage. Come to think of it, it has taken many of us on an extraordinary pilgrimage. Her first books caused the Irish public to take a look at ourselves and our society in a new light. Stripped of the veneer of the social niceties we had built up to protect the established order, we came face to face with our darker side, with the hypocrisy and the double standards that are the underside of many so called civilised societies. Not everyone was ready to face that leprous side. Easier to kill the messenger than listen to the message. And Edna came to know hurt, the kind of hurt that time and vindication and awards from the prophet’s own land may we hope even now assuage a little. No-one deserves this recognition more. Edna’s pioneering work helped recast and recalibrate the skewed gender relationships which kept so much of the creative power and genius of Irish women from blossoming as it could and as it should. It made it possible for Irish women writers to write about and to define their own lives and experiences in a world where a woman’s place was narrowly defined, her worth undervalued, her voice too corralled behind barricades of history’s making.
Edna knew that the magical alliance of imagination and words could breach those barricades and time and again she pushed the lines back, revealing new territory, penetrating old landscapes from fresh angles so that we could see them differently. Not everyone wanted to look. Not everyone could stomach the things that cascaded from such a pen as Edna’s. Peace of heart was hard to find even at times at home. Easy then to have given up, to have lost faith in self, in one’s talent, one’s muse. Harder to keep faith with that God-given talent, to pursue it and let its course guide wherever, whatever. And as is so often the case the universal integrity of her themes were validated on other shores before they were validated on her own.
We in this generation have been privileged to witness the transformation of our country’s fortunes as we inherit the fruits of its economic success and its cultural confidence. This last decade alone has witnessed a wonderfully uplifting and long overdue explosion of women’s talents into every sphere of life. I look at young women of my daughters’ generation, and marvel at their self-confidence, their unselfconscious assumption that they are capable of competing and achieving in whatever walk of life they choose, irrespective of gender. They have no fear in voicing their feelings, in telling their truths and it is thanks to writers like Edna O'Brien that we are nearer than we have ever been to enabling the full genius of women to blossom.
Edna has won many awards and accolades in her life, recognition of her genius from around the world but precisely because the prophet’s hardest audience is the home audience I am sure the honours bestowed at home have about them an added piquancy and a special delight. At least that is what I hope. That is why I am here. Your fellow and sister writers, playwrights and poets take great pleasure in honouring you this evening with the Irish PEN/AT Cross Lifetime Achievement Award. You join what until now has been a tiny but hugely talented fraternity of two previous recipients, John B. Keane and Brian Friel. It is no longer a fraternity but a company of writers who inspire the pride and admiration of their generation. I add my voice to this tribute and hope that in it are the blossoming seeds of a culture of celebration, a culture comfortable with the uncomfortable, a culture hungry for the creative imagination to knock down its barricades and reveal it to itself so that it can confidently go the journey beyond those barricades.
The first poem I taught my children was Patrick Kavanagh’s Shancoduff with its pitiful closing lines where the poet has overheard the cattle drovers sheltering in the bush, speaking begrudgingly of him, the poet. He says “I hear and is my heart not badly shaken” That is what we do to each other when we begrudge talent, when we take the bitter word to it - we hurt each other. That is the human condition Edna has written of so brilliantly. That power to hurt each other has a powerful opponent - the power of affirmation of the other, of praise, or recognition, of reward, of love.
Great thanks is due to Irish Pen/AT Cross for providing this opportunity to give recognition, here in Ireland, to an Irish writer, now, today, while the praise can affirm and support her, energise her self-belief and encourage her in all she is doing and all she plans to do.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.