Remarks by President Michael D. Higgins at the St Columbanus Day Lunch
Belfast City Hall, 21st November 2013
Lord Mayor
Lord Bannside and Baroness Paisley
Councillors
Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly
Ladies and Gentlemen
Is mór an pleisiúr é bheith anseo libh inniu i suíomh iontach Halla na Cathrach le Lá Cholmáin a shonrú; le breathnú siar thar na blianta cairbreacha ar a bheatha agus an méid is féidir linn foghlaim uaidh a iniúchadh.
[It is a great pleasure to be here with you today in the splendid setting of Belfast City Hall to mark St Columbanus Day, to look back over great time and distance to the life of Columbanus and examine the lessons we can learn from him.]
One thousand three hundred and ninety eight years ago, and over two thousand kilometres from where we now sit, St Columbanus died in Bobbio. It is an extraordinary testament to his influence and legacy that, in the globalised twenty-first century, Columbanus’ message, his vision and his memory are still powerful enough to bring people together from different communities across this island.
I would like to thank very particularly the Ullans Academy and Dr Ian Adamson for inviting me to join you here today. The Ullans Academy promotes a vision of “common identity”. It is a well whose water we share, whose spring carries rich traces of what we shared in the past. At a time and in a place where identity can be used as a tool of division and demarcation, a tool to reinforce the chasms that might keep us apart, the Ullans Academy seeks instead to use identity as an instrument to promote mutual understanding and to explore the many aspects of our history and heritage – such as Columbanus – that we share in common.
Columbanus’ Irishness placed no obstacle on either his physical or his spiritual journey. He was a man deeply at ease with not just an Irish but a European identity, travelling huge distances, and coping with a disjointed Europe, its broken pieces that were emerging from the shadow of the fall of the Roman Empire. A skilled linguist with a fine mind and strong character, he adapted well to the languages and customs of the historic kingdoms that made up the chequered European landscape.
Names like Lombardy, Neustria and Burgundy may no longer be on today’s political map but, in these places, Columbanus wielded considerable influence and their peoples recall and remember Columbanus’ legacy to this day. James Joyce’s manifesto so many generations later to “Hibernicise Europe and Europeanise Ireland” was anticipated many centuries earlier by Columbanus.
The values that Columbanus preached and shared have stood the test of time and are of value as we are challenged to shape the European identity we live and work in today. A part of his rich legacy to us all are the words taken from his letter, and now immortalised in the stone of the Columbanus chapel in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, “si tollis libertatem tollis dignitatem”. If you take away liberty, you take away dignity.
How true those words still ring across the centuries. Next month will see the 65th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. This was a moment when the peoples of the world, in the shadow of a Second World War that saw human behaviour brought to a terrible nadir by the death camps, massive loss of life and immense physical destruction, set out what might be the universal human rights of all people as individuals. How remarkable that we can recognize Columbanus’ seventh-century philosophy in the core principles that the world’s nations endorsed in the aftermath of devastating war and bloodshed.
Columbanus placed a high value on the power of education, the study of texts, reflection and meditation and thus he established many flourishing centres of learning in a Europe of the Dark Ages. His emphasis on knowledge and scholarly learning shone through in a darkened Europe where the fall of the Roman Empire had led to economic and political fracturing, and not just a loss of learning but a hostility to its practice. It seemed very appropriate to me, therefore, that when I addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg in April, I should invoke the name, memory and inspiring legacy of Columbanus.
Despite his pan-European consciousness and mission, today’s European Union of twenty-eight member states would be an unrecognisable dream to Columbanus. The EU we have, and are challenged with today, is born out of centuries of war and strife and was conceived when a small number of very determined people decided there must be another way, a better way to live, work and prosper together in peace. While it has struggled in recent years to meet the best aspirations of its founders, the European Union is still perhaps the most successful peace project process ever witnessed. Both in terms of the inspiring model it has offered – so often eloquently articulated for many years by, among others, John Hume – and by virtue too of the practical financial support it has provided, the European Union has made a crucial contribution to the advancement of the peace process in Northern Ireland; a contribution which no doubt would please Columbanus.
Making peace is of course only part of the task. Lasting peace requires care, nurturing, reconciliation and facing up with honesty and determination to the legacy issues that will continue to fester if left unaddressed. The Good Friday Agreement provides us with the institutions and principles not only to create peace but to enable it to endure. The names associated with the Agreement may be those of political leaders, but those leaders acted in a context where the broader civic society had made immeasurable contributions to promote the conditions for peace. As a result, in referenda over fifteen years ago people throughout the island were consulted and in both jurisdictions they voted for peace, for stability, for a shared and prosperous future – a future that they envisaged and to which they were willing to commit their efforts.
It would therefore be a mistake to see the Good Friday Agreement and the St. Andrews Agreement as merely structures to accommodate engagement between politicians. Our challenge today is to ensure that peace is not merely seen as a political construct, but rather something valuable that constitutes a living breathing reality within communities, between communities and between both parts of the island.
Columbanus, in founding monasteries throughout Europe, did much more than just create high or abstract institutions. He created living communities where shared values and a sense of solidarity could and did lead to great engagement and vibrancy. He was a man of strong and complex character, independent thought, unafraid to ask the hard questions, even if it meant challenging those in positions of authority.
Had he sought to withdraw or act alone, or had he meekly bowed to the received wisdom of the day, I very much doubt we would be recalling his name with such relevance well over a millennium later.
His story tells us of both the power of leadership and of community. A strong and flourishing communal life gives staying power and enables values and ideals to pass through the generations. It is for this reason that support for a healthy, vibrant and engaged civic society in Northern Ireland is so important to cementing the progress the peace process has made to date.
On this island, the impact and legacy of history continues to shape the daily narratives by which we live. We are now well into what has been called the decade of commemorations, where centenary anniversaries of the signature events for both parts of the island will, I hope, be recalled in a spirit that both respects historical accuracy and complexity. I also hope that tolerance, mutual understanding and generosity will characterize our efforts at engaging with the different, and sometimes differing, narratives that are cherished by each community.
In 2015 we will be commemorating events such as Gallipoli and the march-past by the 36th Ulster Division right outside this very Hall. In the same year, we will be assisted by casting our eye much farther back to commemorate the fourteen hundredth anniversary of the death of St Columbanus. It is my fervent hope that the lessons of his life – its reflection, scholarship and work – will advance the liberating and healing potential of this decade of commemorations and, conversely, will discourage and dislodge any tendency towards exploiting memory that might reignite hatreds or foment division.
On this island, it is our tendency to place a high value on the past and cherish the memory of iconic moments and revered figures that changed the trajectory of history. Our motives, and actions indeed, in delivering this passion for history have however not always been the purest. As we all know, history can be wielded in a deeply negative way, combed forensically to find justifications for grievances against “the other side” and versions of the past used to feed the animosities of the present.
The Ullans Academy is therefore making a very positive contribution by taking that innate and valuable passion for history, that seems to be in the very soil of this island, and guiding us towards a use of our historical curiosity that leads to a more healing and reconciling direction than we might have taken in darker times.
Today’s event reminds us that while the passage of time can change the contours of political maps and perhaps even community allegiances, it does not alter the call of our shared fundamental humanity with its innate decency and dignity, values which unite us all. Instead of history being used to divide, to assert how we are right and others wrong, to nurse grudges and grievances, it can be an instrument of reconciliation, an instrument for the nurturing of a new understanding and tolerance.
Our individual memory we must never forget, is entwined with the memories of so many others. Undoing the knots of memories so as to unlock the power to heal rather than divide is a challenging, often painful, but ultimately rewarding, and even cathartic task. Undoing these knots requires acts of leadership, such as that demonstrated by Lord Bannside when he led his party into a power-sharing government with his erstwhile political enemies. An act of leadership of a different kind was shown by your Lord Mayor when he recently participated in a ceremony of remembrance previously perceived as exclusive to one community.
We know the corrosive effect a frozen version of the past can have on political life and community relations in Northern Ireland. The challenges faced by post-conflict societies are never easy to address. The legacy of conflict leaves many painful issues and we must work through it with honesty, and generosity too, if we hope to reconcile the competing needs for truth, memory and justice with the maintenance of, what is sometimes, a fragile political consensus. At present, there is important work being done to address this difficult and complex dilemma. I wish Dr Richard Haass and all who are at the moment participating in, and contributing to, the Panel of Parties process, well as they seek a path to resolve these and other issues.
To overcome the challenges of conflicting versions of memory, civil society needs sources of vision, courage and much practical and sustained support to help frame in a new way what and how we are to remember, and how we let those memories impact on the work of today. We should not forget however that the challenge of dealing with contested memory is not unique to Northern Ireland and there are lessons we can learn from elsewhere.
In the past year, I have visited three countries in Latin America that are dealing with the legacy of violence. Memory was a recurring theme of these visits and it was instructive and moving to witness, first-hand, how countries like Chile, Argentina and El Salvador were setting about the task of moving – however slowly and painfully – from a divisive past to a shared future.
While each of those countries had their specific circumstances and particular challenges, one common feature was very clear to me; any invented or false amnesia is not the solution – neither for the victims, nor for the future of society if it wished to genuinely move on and flourish. For the victims, the words of the philosopher Paul Riceour:
“to be forgotten is to die twice”.
has a particular meaning, as it has for us all. We have to construct an ethics of memory for our reconstructions of the past and their commemorations.
Whatever mechanisms are ultimately agreed upon for this task, the overall needs of a flourishing and shared society must be at their heart and the memory of victims must appropriately be reflected, and cherished, in thoughtful memorials and initiatives that bring communities together, so that we all learn from the terrible failures of the past. Achieving an ethics of the memory makes, and will make, a demand on all of us, on all sides of history.
There are, of course, also opportunities to create new and benign memories; opportunities to participate in symbolic acts or gestures that can create a new template of shared understanding and reconciliation. The State Visit of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, to Dublin in May 2011 saw a number of such gestures – including a simple but profound bow of the head and five words in the Irish language. These had a hugely positive impact on how people in the South regarded the nature of the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
In my State Visit to the United Kingdom next April, I hope to further strengthen this thread of understanding, reconciliation and friendship and to also avail of the visit to highlight particular themes which merit recognition and commendation, such as the very positive role of the Irish community in Britain.
Mar fhocal scoir, ba mhaith liom a mholadh dhaoibh go dtugann ár gceiliúradh ar Cholmán anseo inniu an deis dúinn ár macnamh a dhéanamh ar an gcaoi gur chóir go ndéanfadh sábháilteacht inár bhhéiniúlacht féin muid a mhisniú, ar mhodh gníomhach, chun dearcadh agus tuiscintí an phobail eile a thaiscéaladh agus le dul i dteagmháil leis an dearcadh agus leis na tuiscintí sin.
[In conclusion, may I suggest that our celebration today of Columbanus is an opportunity to reflect on how being secure in one's own identity should actively encourage us to explore and engage with the perspectives and narratives of the other community.]
Fifteen years on from the Good Friday Agreement and six years after the restoration of the devolved institutions, Northern Ireland has much to offer the world, and equally much to gain from its interaction with Europe. In remembering how Columbanus set forth from Ireland and engaged with the great European leaders and movements of his time, we might all reflect on how an ever more open and evolving dialogue with Europe, built on cohesion and solidarity, can be broadened and deepened, in the interests of all the communities who share this island.
Thank you.