REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE MICHAEL DAVITT CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS, HASLINGDEN IDL CLUB
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE MICHAEL DAVITT CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS, HASLINGDEN IDL CLUB, WEDNESDAY, 12 APRIL, 2006
Dia dhíbh go léir inniu. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
Mayor, Bishop, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen
I am delighted to be here with you as we meet in Haslingden to pay tribute to the life and work of one of our most distinguished sons and one of your most famous residents, Michael Davitt.
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of his death but today’s celebrations and the distinguished group which has gathered here goes to show how strong his legacy remains, not just here in Lancashire or in Ireland but wherever the scattered global Irish family is gathered.
Davitt was part of that horrendous scattering that saw millions of impoverished Irish leave the land of their birth in desperation, not as adventurers or fortune seekers but food seekers, seekers of shelter and not much more than subsistence. Your forefathers and mothers may well have been among them. The prosperity of today’s Ireland, the success around the world of their children’s children may to some extent vindicate their sacrifice but in truth many of them went, unremarked, to early graves. But if the memory of so many of those tragic men and women dwindled, the same cannot be said for the name of Davitt who overcame the worst cruelties life could inflict, returned to Ireland and in championing the struggle for land reform changed Ireland’s history.
It was Michael Davitt’s misfortune to be born right in the middle of the Great famine or the great starvation as it is known in the Irish language. He was barely six when his family was evicted from their Mayo home in 1852. They took the boat for England and arrived here in Haslingden. Just imagine what it must have been like for him - the contrast between the Mayo fields and the mills and chimneys and the dense rows of workers’ houses, traces of which are still visible today. Yet it was here Michael Davitt, made the connection between the toil and suffering of the English working classes and the demoralised rural Irish poor back in Mayo.
The Davitt family lived close to this club which now bears his name and it was in a local cotton mill that the eleven year old Michael lost his right arm in a factory accident. Ironically that appalling event which ended his career in the mills became the key which opened the door to his education and here in Haslingden library and at the Wesleyan school, he acquired a decent education which was to equip him well for a career in public life. At the age of fifteen he found employment in Haslingden post office, just a few hundred yards from here, where he worked until his arrest and imprisonment in 1870 for activities associated with the Fenian movement.
It was here also that he learned tolerance and an understanding of other people’s points of view. Many years later when he was a famous MP and agitator for Irish freedom and land reform he visited this town and renewed his acquaintances with his old friends. They gave him a great reception, especially his old schoolmaster. In a speech to his old Haslingden friends Davitt said that although he had done and would continue to do his utmost to pull down the system of injustice maintained in Ireland through British Imperial Rule, his quarrel was with the system and he had no truck with vengeance for he had the deepest affection for the people of Haslingden who had been so kind to him as a boy.
From prison Michael Davitt began the campaign that would give him pride of place in Irish history and release the men and women of Ireland from servitude to greedy landlords. It was a struggle that led to profound social change in Ireland. It was arguably the key to a national regeneration which paved the way for an independent Ireland.
Davitt formally launched the ‘Land League’ in 1879 with the slogan
‘ the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’
and through the trials and tribulations of the land war, the introduction of the famous ‘boycott’, imprisonment and ultimately success he changed an ownership structure that went back to feudal times, transforming Ireland forever. Christopher Wren’s famous line in St Paul’s cathedral comes to mind as very appropriate – ‘If you wish to see my epitaph look around you’. Michael Davitt’s epitaph can be seen in every parish and every townland in Ireland and still one hundred years after his death it remains as a testimony to his great achievements.
It would be a great mistake however, to think that Davitt confined his entire career to the problems of the land in Ireland and to the struggle for Irish self-determination. His interests and travels were wide ranging especially for his time. He took up the cause of the Jewish people suffering persecution in Russia, he visited Australia and New Zealand where he spoke out about the mistreatment of the indigenous Maori and Aboriginal peoples, he resigned from the House of Commons in protest at the treatment of the Boer people during the Boer war and he never stopped arguing for better conditions for the working class in Britain and the small landholders in Ireland. He was a supporter of the Woman’s Suffrage movement and campaigned for the newly formed Labour party in Britain shortly before his death. In the words of his biographer “he had a passion for social justice which transcended nationality”.
Michael Davitt would surely approve of today’s thriving confident, multi-cultural Ireland, a new homeland for thousands of immigrants from around the world who are contributing so much to our economy, our civic life and to our cultural diversity. This Ireland is also his legacy. This one man, with a passion for justice, a blazing unshakeable belief in the equality and dignity of each human person would, I am sure, be deeply gratified to see an end to the old political enmity between Ireland and Britain as these two European Union partners enjoy the closest and friendliest of relationships and joint stewardship of Northern Ireland’s peace process. He would still see work to be done on the journey towards full social inclusion but there is reassurance in the considerable distance already travelled and in the egalitarian and democratic values that underpin our two democracies. In every generation those values have needed champions and in some generations the cost of such leadership was savage. We drink from the well he dug. We gather in gratitude for his life and the investment he made so unselfishly in our future.
The Irish Democratic League Clubs are a continuing direct link to Michael Davitt and to the Land League and Home Rule campaigns your clubs were established to support. It is a credit to your dedication that so many still survive in these changing times and I am delighted that in recent years you have been able to benefit from Government of Ireland Díon funding. I thank you for being here today and wish your clubs every success in the future.
Congratulations too to all those involved in the refurbishment work here at the Haslingden club, in particular John Barry and the Trustees and Angus Lindsay and the Club Committee. Special thanks also to Michael Cruise and the Irish Heritage in Haslingden Committee for the energy and creativity they put into the exhibition and their outreach to local schools. I am looking forward to learning more about that when we visit the library shortly.
My thanks to Mayor of Rossendale Cllr. Cheetham and his wife Ann who are here today as are members of the Davitt family led by his great granddaughter-in-law Mrs Shelagh Davitt. Here in the town that was the very crucible of Michael Davitt’s political formation one hundred years after his death, it gives me great pleasure to formally rededicate this club, to his memory. May those who “drink the water never forget the debt they owe to those who dug the well.”
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir. Gurb fada buan sibh. Thank you.