REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY IRELAND EXHIBITION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY IRELAND EXHIBITION: HISTORIC MAPPING ARCHIVE
Dia Dhibh a cairde agus míle bhúiochas as ucht an cuireadh teacht anseo agus an fáilte fiorchaoin.
My thanks to Richard Kirwan for the invitation which brings us together in this very apt setting to celebrate the Ordnance Survey’s launch of what is a very significant and important historic mapping exhibition.
The Ordnance Survey are of course my good neighbours in the Phoenix Park, a place which seems to attract more than its fair share of visitors who are absent maps or mapping skills, judging by the number who arrive at Áras an Uachtaráin looking for directions to the Ordnance Survey, the American Ambassador’s residence and St. Mary’s Hospital. It is a good job someone in the Park knows where everything is - at least for the time being for as the poet Henry Reed once said, ‘maps are of time, not place, so far as the army happens to be concerned’. Given the Ordnance Survey’s long association with the military going back to days when Sappers triangulated the country that improbable truth is very much in evidence in this exhibition. This exhibition shows us not only snapshots of a world which is past, but it reveals that changing world as it moved through time. The changes which have taken place in Ireland since the first map was made are charted with an immediate visual impact on the walls about us. It was said that had Dublin been destroyed, it could have been recreated by reference to James Joyce’s portrait of Dublin in Ulysses. It is a charming thought but really an Ordnance Survey map would be a surer starting point. Maps are not just portraits of place. They are also moments in the timeline of events in the history of the places they depict so uniquely. It is a great paradox of time that immense stone structures can disappear from the landscape and leave almost no trace that they once stood proud on the skyline, while the line of an insignificant stone-age pathway can be preserved for thousands of years in the curve of a city street or a country road.
The maps of Dublin display an astonishing and perplexing city that is both divided and united by the river at its heart. A city of old villages, and new suburbs of riverbanks and canal banks, of long established neighbourhoods and a thriving modern metropolis with its transient faces and phases. Take a view of Dublin from any high building today and an army of hungry cranes is devouring the landscape making it ready for new shapes and a new story. The Ordnance Survey is never going to go out of business in this city!
Maps peel away the layers that time accumulates. They reveal our heritage in all its depth and in the process of that revelation we begin to understand ourselves and this our capital city in a more profound and rounded way. The maps in this exhibition are more than simply windows on past times, important though that function is, they are also in their own right elegant and admirable works of art. So the exhibition explains and informs as much as it pleases aesthetically. The old copperplate maps were artistic triumphs of cartographic skill, just as today’s computer generated map is a triumphant amalgamation of art, science and technology. In these times when a click on a mouse can instantly bring to life maps of the minutest streetscape thousands of miles away, it is important to remember the deep wells that were, and are, the source of our knowledge. Those early cartographers had no satellite photographs or computer graphic packages to make the art of mapmaking easy. But of course as technology advanced it put their work under scrutiny. Remarkably those first satellite images of Ireland, which captured the entire country in one shot, showed clearly just how accurate was the work of the Ordnance Survey over the years that it dragged its chains across the fields and ditches of Ireland, to produce the first properly surveyed map of a whole country, anywhere in the world. We take great pride in the accomplishments of the Ordnance Survey over so many generations. I hope that, through this exhibition, our citizens and visitors will enjoy their walk into the past and leave, not just with a greater appreciation of Ireland’s history, but a real gratitude that we have such faithful chroniclers and archivists in the Ordnance Survey. This exhibition so carefully constructed and enthusiastically offered as a gift to each of us is a credit to the staff of the Ordnance Survey and it is with great pleasure that I now declare this exhibition open.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.