REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE HONORARY CONSUL’S RECEPTION, SERENA HOTEL
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE HONORARY CONSUL’S RECEPTION, SERENA HOTEL, NAIROBI
I am delighted to be here with you this evening in Nairobi on my first visit to East Africa, a hugely rewarding visit and one that I will remember for many days and years to come.
Everywhere I have been, both in Uganda and here in Kenya over the last nearly ten days, I have been welcomed with great warmth and wonderful hospitality. Since arriving in Kenya, it has been my great pleasure and privilege to have had an opportunity to meet with and observe the important work of the Irish missionaries, work I have heard and read so much about since my earliest childhood days. Centuries before a free and independent Irish nation sent her first ambassadors around the world, we were privileged to have the best unpaid ambassadors in our Irish missionaries. They brought Ireland to Kenya and they brought the story of Kenya to Ireland. Nothing they ever did was done for personal gain, for thanks, for fortune or for fame. It was done for love, simply that, love of the common human family and faith in the capacity of love to unlock the genius and the true potential of peoples and nations. I have found the experience of meeting these, Ireland’s noblest of ambassadors, heartening and rewarding. I am looking forward to meeting many more of Ireland’s sons and daughters in whose work we take such pride and from whose work we take such hope, in the time remaining to me in Kenya.
Growing up in Ireland, Africa was rarely far away. I lived literally a stone’s throw from the Passionist Monastery in Belfast’s Ardoyne. Many of the priests had spent time in Africa and like many of my contemporaries who lived in the pre-television world the greatest excitement in the parish was the annual African film show presented by returned missionaries. Often too, besides the daily newspaper, the only publications to cross our doorstep were missionary magazines and I am certainly not the first who went door to door delivering them throughout the parish.
Many of us had family members or neighbours who were lay or more likely clerical missionaries. Those of us who were members of the Legion of Mary often knew more about Nairobi and its environs than we did about other parts of Ireland and we idolised the young lay missionary Edel Quinn whose greatest desire was to serve the people of Kenya and who died here in their service. I took her name at confirmation and harboured a lifelong ambition to visit the place she loved so much - so I have come not to a strange and unknown place but to a place long thought of, long cherished, long known and loved from a distance. Those hauntingly attractive and mystical names like Lodwar, Kitale and Baringo have proved as exotic in reality as they were in my childhood imagination, and each in its uniquely contrasting way.
The stories wrapped up in that expression, Irish missionary, are as diverse as they are astonishing. They share characteristics of faith, courage, and resilience but there is a haunting uniqueness about each of them – they are a rich treasury – as much a gift to Ireland as to Kenya. It is today a matter of considerable pride to me too that not only do we celebrate and offer thanks for the immense work of the Irish Catholic missionaries in both Uganda and Kenya, we also offer thanks to the Irish Protestant missionary societies who have made a very real and important contribution to the welfare of people in this part of Africa.
The French Holy Ghost Fathers, with Fr. Tom Burke of Limerick among them, established the first presence at St. Austin’s Mission here in Nairobi a century ago. It was sixty years later before the "closed area" of Turkana was reached by Bishop Joseph Houlihan’s priests from the Diocese of Eldoret in 1962. Having also visited the Diocese of Kitale and Baringo in Nakuru Diocese in the last few days, it is almost beyond belief that these two dioceses and the Diocese of Lodwar, were all part of Bishop Houlihan’s vast Diocese of Eldoret only forty years ago. The scale of the barriers of landscape, politics, language and culture presented formidable personal challenges. The endemic problems they dedicated themselves to helping alleviate, demanded huge self-sacrifice. It took exceptionally dedicated and courageous men and women to last the course and precisely because they were so exceptional, precisely because they worked quietly seeking no trumpet blasts, we can sometimes forget the awesome loneliness they must have felt, remote from home and family and all those familiar everyday supports and conveniences which were not available here. Yet for all that many of them spent more years of their lives here than in their homeland. They came to love this place and its people and through their work, life here was changed for the better.
While in Uganda, I visited Kitovu Hospital, established by the Medical Missionaries of Mary. It was from there that the first sisters traveled to Kenya to Turkana at the invitation of the Kiltegan Fathers, shortly after their mission was established. The harsh terrain and great distances needed considerable endurance, ingenuity and more than a modicum of versatility. The sisters had all those things in abundance even taking to the air and earning the title - the "Flying Nuns" of Turkana. An extract from a diocesan diary kept on the Kiltegan Fathers in Kataboi on Lake Turkana in 1970 gives a flavour of an average day….
"Put roof on kitchen. Hadn’t got a hammer or saw, so had some job getting it on. Hope it remains there. Boat broke down on journey to Kataboi. Fr. (Jim) Brady walked ten miles back to find the painter had used two gallons of paint on one room".
Anyone who thought the missionaries came simply to preach got it very wrong indeed. These men and women were doers – accomplished doers for whom no task was too small, no job beneath their dignity, no problem without a solution. From the roof on the kitchen to the training of athletes, some of national and international fame, at the famous Patrician School at Iten in the Rift Valley - the men and women who came here from Ireland were the most accomplished of innovators and motivators in a huge range of spheres.
My visit to St. Austin’s Mission today provided the historical underpinning for everything else I had seen. The Mission Church itself is a symbol of the resilient and resourceful people who worked to establish St. Austin’s ‑ the French and Irish priests and nuns, the early Goan community, the native African parishioners. Together these strangers became a community of care for one another. The Irish connection with St. Austin’s is poignantly reflected in the nearby cemetery, bearing the headstones of Fr. Tom Burke, the Venerable Edel Quinn and, of course, Bishop Joseph Shanahan.
Bishop Shanahan’s story is a truly remarkable and well-known one. A man with a long history of service in Nigeria, from the early years of the last century ‑ especially in the field of education, and founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary - he retired to St. Austin’s Mission and died there in 1943. Such was the love and respect he had earned from his former parishioners in Nigeria, that their pleas to have his remains repatriated there were conceded to in 1955. Bishop Shanahan is one of those towering figures in the history of the Irish missionary movement whose name was revered by my generation growing up in Ireland.
My own mission, and I have a clear mission in coming here is to pay tribute to all the priests, nuns, brothers, ministers, lay missionaries and countless volunteers who have laboured with love, conviction and dedication in Kenya. The schools, hospitals, HIV/AIDS clinics and outreach services, the skills training institutes, the child-care centres and many, many more facilities, bear testimony to their life’s work. What started out as simple evangelisation in the early years mutated into complex developmental work as the overwhelming needs of the people they served became apparent and were responded to.
Those missionaries were Ireland’s first development practitioners, long before a development assistance policy was formulated by Ireland, or indeed, any other country. They were the trailblazers for the later generation of development personnel, many of whom are with us this evening, and of whom we are also immensely proud.
In the time left to me in Kenya, I relish the prospect of visiting the other Orders here in Nairobi among them the Sisters of Mercy to whom I owe my own primary education. I am also of course looking forward to visiting that other well-known "Irish" Diocese of Kitui.
In every capital city in the world there is evidence of our global Irish family and Nairobi is no exception. Had I been here a few years earlier I could even have visited my own uncle, aunt and cousins who lived here for many years and are now back home in Ireland. But typically, given five minutes with any Irish audience anywhere in the world, we can ferret out clan relationships and connections among people who presumed they were complete strangers.
With us this evening are Irish people who are attached to international organisations based here or who have made their mark in the business community. I bring you greetings from Ireland and good wishes in all you do. I also bring you thanks for your role too as unofficial ambassadors for Ireland. Through your lives you too tell the people of Kenya what kind of people we Irish are. If we are liked and respected it is thanks to you. If our music is appreciated – it is thanks to you. If the people of Kenya know that there is an island far away where people care about them, it is thanks to you and if we in Ireland know the many stories of Kenya it is thanks to you. I am delighted to have this opportunity to meet with you, to learn about your experiences and to wish you every continued success in your adopted country. I know many of you have come long distances to be here and we are deeply appreciative that you think so much of your ties to Ireland that you would take such pains to be here.
Your warm welcome to Martin and to me made us feel at ease and at home, as if among friends and not strangers. It is that gift of open hearts and comfortable welcomes that has forged the bonds which keep Kenya and Ireland hand in hand. May each of you and your Kenyan homeland know the joy of the peace and prosperity you wish for yourselves and Ireland wishes for you.
I would like to thank our Honorary Consul, Mr. Joe O’Brien and his wife, Gaye, for everything they have done to make our visit such an enjoyable and successful one and for hosting this evening.
Tá mé an-buíoch daoibh a cháirde Gael. Go raibh maith agaibh. Thank you.