REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE HARVARD CLUB OF IRELAND ‘THE POWER OF PEACE’
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE HARVARD CLUB OF IRELAND ‘THE POWER OF PEACE’ NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Dia dhíbh a chairde. It’s good to be here this evening and I would particularly like to thank Dr Seán Rowland for the kind invitation to join you in this lovely evocative venue.
One of my favourite paintings hangs here. It is the 12th century marriage of Strongbow and Aoife by Daniel Maclise. It isn’t the happiest wedding scene you ever saw but then it isn’t so much about Aoife’s arranged marriage to the man who conquered Ireland as it is about Ireland’s tragic and bloody history. A pile of dead Irish soldiers lies in the foreground. The famous harp that symbolizes their country is broken and crushed and like other great paintings in Maclise’s canon, the theme is of an Ireland ever mired in conflict, ever condemned to weep. It is a painting that is absent of any semblance of peace, for the delicate plant of peace began to grow only in the closing years of the second millennium and until it is harvested in the generations ahead we will not truly know the full power of peace. Still we are already a unique generation for we are even now able to see its early promise.
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday marking the end of the so-called great war in which it is estimated 20 million people died, among them 50,000 Irish men. Far from being the war to end all wars it was merely the prelude to an even worse Second World War in which over 70 million lives were lost and Eastern Europe was entirely abandoned to a further nightmare which only began to end with the tumbling of the Berlin wall twenty years ago today. At the service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral we sang the words of a familiar and heartfelt hymn- “As with silent hearts we bring to mind/ How hate and war diminish humankind/ Give us….. Strong love in our pursuit of human worth/ Lest we forget the future of this earth”. The hymn ends by calling on us to “Remember forward to a world restored.”
That “remembering forward” calls for a mighty act of imagination in many parts of today’s world, including our own, where the work of peace is not called a process for nothing. Yet it is and it remains one of the most important acts of imagination and acts of will, for enmity is much easier to grow than peace. Not just in Ireland but globally, the toxic culture of conflict has historically had a much stronger grip than peace. In fact peace was often cynically defined as merely the absence of war. The peace we are building here is not just a lull between storms but a deep-rooted calm in people’s hearts, homes, streets, communities and countries; it is built on new attitudes, new institutions and values that uplift humankind.
That is why those who have successfully made peace are such important contributors to the future development of humanity. Those who built the European Union out of the ruins of Europe’s devastating wars needed no persuasion of the power of peace for they had seen its opposite wreak hell on earth. The wicked wastefulness of human life and the earth’s resources, the zero sum of a culture of imperial competitiveness, galvanized them to try for a peace immersed in partnership, egalitarian democracy, human rights and the rule of good law.
The Union is today an important witness to the transformative power of a well constructed peace which was not about winners and losers like so many peace-making efforts of old but rather about winners and winners working together for a future which would bring benefits to all. It would not bring the glory of conquest to one above all others or the cyclical shame of the wounded loser waiting in the long grass, but instead it would bring equals around a common table to work with each other for the benefit of all.
Ireland too is an important contemporary global witness to the replacing of an embedded culture of conflict with a still embryonic culture of consensus. There have been many photographs of great iconic moments on the way to peace on this island but in truth they were simply milestone markers in long and difficult journeys undertaken by individuals and communities. It would be flattering to believe that the genius of this generation, the most educated generation ever on this island was the sole genesis of the peace process and undoubtedly it did play a very considerable role. But it would be wrong to ignore the many others of past generations, in Ireland and abroad who invested in peace, justice, freedom and the advancement of democracy and whose legacy was much more emphatic than mere nostalgic memory but infused subsequent generations with a way of looking at the world that thirsted for the true peace that would come from freedom, equality, human rights and fairness.
How did we get from bitter conflict with its litany of dead, wounded and broken hearted to the Good Friday Agreement which was so overwhelmingly endorsed by the people who share this island? That tidal wave of hope and compromise did not rise up spontaneously. Rather it was coaxed over a long period through dialogue, diplomacy, persuasion and argument, trial and error, risk-taking and relentless effort on the part of countless groups and individuals, governments and institutions, inside Ireland, Northern Ireland, Great Britain, the United States, the European Union and further afield. People were persuaded that their best future interests and those of their children lay in compromise and the pursuit of consensus. They were persuaded that they had to make partners and good neighbours of their enemies, because these were their forever neighbours and the alternative was just more of the same old history’s blundering.
Growing up in Belfast I saw the descent into the most recent phase of Ireland’s conflict, the part known as the Troubles. Back in the summer of 1969 we teenagers surmised it would be over within days. Suddenly we were middle-aged and it had taken forty years. The achievement of peace in the teeth of appalling political and sectarian violence often seemed an impossible dream. But it was a dream which never died, to paraphrase that great and sorely missed friend of Ireland and Harvard, Senator Ted Kennedy. It did not die because so many people, from both unionist and nationalist communities, and from all corners of the world - not least Boston - refused to give up on their insistent belief that only peace on this island could unlock this island’s true potential and best ever future.
The United States administrations and Irish America in particular kept faith with the peace-makers even when the going was at its roughest. Their many and varied efforts helped keep the momentum for peace going and laid the groundwork for reconciliation. They were no fair weather friends but stayed with us for the long-haul. John Hewitt describes it beautifully when he says- “We build to fill the centuries arrears.”
There is no doubt that the chronic absence of peace feels like being in a deep, dark hole and the job of peace building feels like filling in that hole one shovel-full at a time. The image is a good one for we have not yet fully filled in that gigantic hole of history’s making and so we do not yet fully comprehend the kind of landscape which will greet us when we have it filled in and stand together on new but solid and shared ground. That is what the power of peace will gradually reveal over the generations ahead in that “world restored”. But the signs of the power of peace are already evident in the working institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement and St. Andrews accord, in the new collegial relationships between North and South, between Dublin and Westminster and within Northern Ireland where shared government fraught though it may be, is at work and infinitely preferable to anything which preceded it. Those improved relationships embrace not simply the world of politics but every layer of civic society including increasingly the most excluded, poor and hard to reach communities which supported paramilitarism. The day of the paramilitaries and the culture which generated them, is almost over but not quite for there is still a litany of cyclical sectarian and paramilitary dissident violence. Every day that peace is shown to work, every day that peace consolidates is a day when their thinking is challenged and their scope is narrowed. The politics of peace with justice is capable of suffocating the thinking which supports both sectarianism and paramilitarism. Those politics need champions in parliament and public and also in homes, streets, communities, workplaces and all the places where dangerous attitudes help fester the old toxic culture of contempt and breed cynicism about the peace process.
If there is a sliver of a silver lining to be found in the economic storm clouds above us, it is precisely in the new values and fresh vision this generation brought to peace making and peace building. It recreated the meitheal of old though while we associate the meitheal mostly with the harvest, this meitheal went in to sowing the seeds of peace which a future generation will harvest in full. By then the current recession will have been transcended and will have passed into legend and lore, its bitter lessons hopefully distilled to a deeper wisdom from which will have come a surer and more sustainable prosperity for all.
In that hymn I mentioned that was sung yesterday, we were asked to coax the plant of peace to flower. This economic winter is cold and harsh, not great weather for blossoming you might think, yet almost unnoticed the green shoots of peace are beginning to break the surface. We saw it in the solidarity after Massarene and Craigavon, we heard it in the outstanding words of Dawn Purvis last week, we recognize it in efforts by many former paramilitaries to embrace the peace and the blossoming everywhere of new evidence of good neighbourliness and the growth of trust.
These things and many more bring with them the prospect of a very different future harvest. For the first time in centuries those who share this island will see what happens when our energies are no longer sapped by conflict and violence and hatred but are focused on a shared future and harnessed to the same plough.
This peace is still vulnerable to the gravitational pull of old ways, the evident and current danger of political vacuums, especially the failure to yet complete devolution, but the greatest danger of all comes from taking any of this for granted and forgetting too quickly the long unhappy road travelled to get this far. It may seem a fairly tepid little word, the word peace, but we have lived deep in a world without it, we have been diminished by its absence, more than any other thing on this earth its absence has generated nothing but a landscape of appalling waste. In our search for renewable energy, sustainable sources of energy, we have actually found the most enduring, the most hopeful and the one capable of delivering a “world restored.”