REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
President, Secretary and distinguished guests,
Thank you for the warm welcome, for the invitation to the Society’s 326th session and for the honour of making me the recipient of the inaugural “William Molyneux medal for Contributions to Irish Life”. I am particularly delighted that William Molyneux, co-founder of the forerunner of this Society over three hundred years ago, is himself called to honourable memory by this Society in the twenty-first century. He entered this College as a student in 1671. His portrait hangs here. It shows what appears to be a seventeenth century gentleman in a great powdered wig, a man from another Ireland, distant, quaint, past.
Yet his life intrudes in ours in more ways than the historic fact of his relationship with this society. The late poet and TCD graduate Robert Greacen has a poem called Procession in his collection of poems entitled “Protestant without a Horse”, in which he comments on the annual Twelfth of July commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne. The last two stanzas say:
The sons of William march today,
Recall the ancient feud
In sacred place names;
Derry. Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne.
The past invades the present,
The present lives in the past,
The future will never come.
The reality of the depressing resignation in the final line was true for every generation from William Molyneux until mine. It is no longer true, for though we cannot disconnect the present from the past, we can stop the recurring infection of the present with the powerful toxins stored up in the past. The Peace Process which is today allowing a new future to come to this island involved the resolution of issues of competing identities, attitudes and ambitions which would have been very familiar to William Molyneux. As we who are the children of the Williamites and children of the Jacobites try to make sense of the aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne, Molyneux lived through the actual battle, even fleeing to England for safety for a time, but all the while intelligently interrogating the relationship between Ireland and the English parliament, forensically scrutinising and challenging a system which bound the Irish to laws over which they had no control and in which they had no say. Molyneux’s championing of Parliamentary autonomy, though a long way from the independent democracy we take for granted today, nonetheless stirred notions of nation, of governance by consent, of the legitimacy of the Union which have remained threaded through Irish political discourse for all of the intervening centuries. Henry Grattan almost a century later in his famous Great Speech was to say, “Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation.”
It would be as much a disservice to Molyneux to attribute to him political legacies which were outside his realm of contemplation, as it would be to diminish his contribution to prising open Irish and British political thought. His is a life, a place, a position full of questions and contradictions. The philosopher in him chose to probe for fresh, innovative insight rather than plump for rigid certainties. Walt Whitman’s lines seem to suit Molyneux:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
I am large, (I contain multitudes.)
Molyneux was indeed large in the intellectual sense. He could comfortably contain multitudes. His problem was that in his presumptuous world of tight complacent elites, a man of open, probing insight, such as he, was apt to be mistaken for a man of firm and subversive judgments and to be harshly judged in turn, as he was. Molyneux, master of optics, author of Dioptrica Nova, a treatise on telescopes and microscopes, knew things are much more complex than is generally admitted.
Like Molyneux we have paid a heavy price for a history which insisted on forcing the prism of narrow categories through which those who shared this island lived lives unnecessarily limited and wasteful, fearful of neighbour and fragile enough to descend into regular unresolved conflict. Today an educated, diverse, multicultural and egalitarian Ireland is more intuitive than judgmental, more open to the possibilities of the future than in thrall to the vanities of the past. The achievement of peace on this island is an outstanding achievement of this generation and one worth remembering at this time when our immediate focus is consumed by the consequences of a very serious economic retrenchment and the atmosphere of disappointment and negativity it has produced.
Negativity was the easiest commodity to find during all the long years when every attempt at peacemaking appeared to fail. There were many shrill voices which were sure the future would never come. But there were other voices who learnt from every failure, distilled it into the wisdom that comes from experience and, thanks to their persistence, a blueprint for a sustainable peace emerged in the form of the Good Friday Agreement. It is a mere thirteen years old and yet the progress made under its auspices is more than was accomplished in the three hundred years which preceded it. The principle of consent so beloved by Molyneux is enshrined there, as are respect for human rights and parity of esteem. There is a roadmap to better community relations within Northern Ireland, better cross-border relationships and better relations between Ireland and Great Britain. Those three once fraught and skewed sets of relationships are manifestly shifting into a healthier alignment which will over the coming centuries utterly transform life on this island for the better. They are changing not just because of the Agreement or its structures but because as John F Kennedy observed:
“Peace does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. And if it is cast out there, then no act, no pact, no treaty, no organization can hope to preserve it without the support and the wholehearted commitment of all people.”
That is what drives today’s peace – the wholehearted commitment of virtually all people on this island. There are still some fading remnants of the old culture of conflict and sectarianism but not enough to stop the future, for in the words of John Hewitt “we build to fill the centuries arrears.”
Those who kept on digging the pit of sectarian and political strife deeper have mostly stopped digging and vast swathes of people now fill in the arrears. It is a work in progress but with the parties in the Executive now leading the longest and most successful period of powersharing government in Northern Ireland’s history, the door to the future is wide open.
Many of you grew up as the violence of Troubles was diminishing and the work of peacemakers was showing real fruit. Your generation will have a unique opportunity to grow a culture that is comfortable with difference, with contradictions and with multitudes. The coming decade is replete with anniversaries that have the potential to provoke very differentiated passions and prejudices. Equally though they have the potential to showcase this emerging Ireland of the mutually respectful multitudes. Two examples set out the range of what is ahead. 2012 marks 100 years since the signing of the Ulster Covenant – a moment of huge importance for unionism. 2016 and the centenary of the Easter Rising will be a major event for nationalists and republicans. The conflicting political ambitions underpinning each event have never yet been reconciled but the equal legitimacy of both has been acknowledged in the Good Friday Agreement. Can we make these coming commemorations events which at the very least do no more harm? Can we go further, aim even higher and approach them as shared opportunities to learn more about the forces which shaped each of us and our “otherness.”
Very successful work has already been done in recalibrating the communal memory of the thousands of Irishmen who served in the British Army in the Great War. That chapter in our history was long bedevilled by the contradictions inherent in the bitterly resisted struggle for independence of a small colonised nation and the sacrifices of its heroes over and against the sacrifices of their compatriot young Irish men who died in Flanders in the uniform of the coloniser. Now we have the Irish Peace Park at Messines to honour their memory and in 2006 we had the first official commemoration of the Anniversary of the battle of the Somme in 1916. The Irish Army played a major role in both and representatives of the British Government and British Legion are to be seen at events commemorating the Easter Rising.
We are learning to live with contradictions. Tonight a Belfast born Catholic and Irish nationalist is here as President of Ireland. Outside Stormont stands the statue of Sir Edward Carson, founder of modern unionism and first signatory to the Ulster Covenant. He was born in this city almost exactly two hundred years after Molyneux, played hurling here at this University where his legendary legal career began and here too put his mind to work on the same problem as Molyneux – what is the proper relationship between Ireland and Britain. The relationship has taken many twists and turns since their day. Now partners in the European Union, partners too in the co-sponsoring of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, the two islands enjoy a relationship that is healthier and more mutually respectful than at any time in the past.
In his correspondence with his good friend John Locke, William Molyneux posed a conundrum, known as Molyneux’s Problem: if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given the ability to see? Maybe we suffer from an inversion of Molyneux’s Problem. A short time ago we saw our county as a dynamic, high-achieving, successful place, in which the momentum was always going to carry us forward in straight lines. Now it is as if our sight has been taken away and we are struggling to find the Ireland of hope and optimism and faith in the future. It is at precisely such moments that we need men and women who are clear-sighted about our potential, our proven abilities and about the manifest strengths we have which derive from the “multitudes within us”. Progress like peace needs the insistent support and wholehearted commitment of the people and just as the genius of this generation gathered up the wisdom that came from past failures and turned it into a robust intuitive and solid peace, so too this generation will quickly learn the bitter lessons of this economic and financial crisis and turn them into the tools with which to build a secure and sound prosperity.
In the Táin, Fer Diad says cynically to taunt Cúchulainn “Your journey is in vain for one stick makes no fire”. He was wrong. Cúchulainn triumphed against the odds and so will we.