Speech by President Connolly at a Lunch in Honour of the Governor-General of Australia
Áras an Uachtaráin, 27 July 2026
Tá fíor-áthas orm, a chairde uaisle, sibh a bheith anseo in Áras an Uachtaráin inniu don ócáid speisialta seo agus ceithre scór bliain de chaidreamh taidhleoireachta idir Éire agus an Astráil á cheiliúradh againn.
Ba mhaith liom fáilte ó chroí a chur roimh Ard-Ghobarnóir Chomhlathas na hAstráile, A Soilse Sam Mostyn.
May I offer a céad mile fáilte to the Governor-General of Australia, Her Excellency the Honourable Sam Mostyn AC, Minister Feighan, an Ceann Comhairle, Verona Murphy, James O’Connor TD, Chief Justice, Donal O’Donnell, Excellencies, and all Distinguished Guests as we mark 80 years of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Australia.
Governor-General, you bring a wealth of experience to your role, having been a board member of numerous organisations across different sectors, not least the Australian Climate Council as well as the GO Foundation, which creates educational opportunities for Indigenous young people. I understand over 1,600 scholarships have been granted to-date by the Foundation, with 62% of those bestowed in 2025 awarded to girls.
Since taking up your role in 2024, you have placed an emphasis on a number of core issues including, though not exclusively, care, mental health, and violence against women. You are also known as a strong advocate for women in sports, having helped create the Australian Football Women’s League and serving as the first female AFL Commissioner. I’m delighted to note that the AFLW has emerged as one of the most high-profile examples of Irish-Australian cooperation, with 40 Irish women currently playing at the highest level with AFLW teams.
Indeed, notwithstanding the enormous geographical distance between our countries, Ireland and Australia share deep historical, cultural, diplomatic, and economic ties.
The first known Irish to arrive in Australia came with the First Fleet in 1791 when Britain transported 155 Irish convicts to Australia after the British government created a penal colony in New South Wales and later Tasmania. Around 40,000 Irish convicts were sent, in appalling conditions, to Australia between 1791 and 1867. The bulk of these individuals had been convicted of petty larceny and theft, often driven by extreme poverty and survival with dire consequences for the most vulnerable and permanently altering lives over minor infractions. These statistics are a relevant reminder in today’s world of the importance of ongoing public discourse about how our laws shape a particular view of society.
Moreover, between 1840 and 1914, over 300,000 Irish emigrated to Australia. More recently, emigration from Ireland to Australia has risen to its highest levels since 2013, with an estimated 13,500 people having moved in the year leading up to April 2025. Clearly, there are mutual benefits to both our countries, but urgent reflection is needed on the circumstances giving rise to it.
There are now over 100,000 Irish-born residents living in Australia, along with 2.5 million (one-in-ten Australians) who claim Irish heritage. The figures for the Australian diaspora in Ireland are smaller but significant, with approx. 3,500 Australian citizens permanently or temporarily residing here, showing how inextricably linked our two countries are.
On trade and investment, Ireland and Australia exceed €6.9 billion in two-way goods and services annually, further bolstered by the EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement. Irish investment in Australia totals roughly €56 billion, with Australian investment in Ireland reaching €88 billion.
We also share a proud history of UN peacekeeping. Australia commenced its involvement in peacekeeping in 1947 when the first Australian military observers were deployed to the Netherlands East Indies as it was at the time and which is now Indonesia. Ireland is very proud of her unbroken record of peacekeeping service under the UN flag, since 1958. Over that time, our Defence Forces have served in various conflict zones, including Lebanon, gaining the trust of the local population wherever they served. We lose that hard-won credibility at our peril. I had the privilege of receiving the credentials of four Ambassadors just a week ago, one of them from Liberia, and the main topic of conversation with that Ambassador was in relation to the reputation left by our Irish UN peacekeeping forces back between 2003 and 2007 and the memory is still alive of the trust that was built up.
Moreover, Ireland and Australia share a colonial past, albeit for different lengths of time and with different exit routes from that colonisation. That experience has profoundly shaped us as peoples, enabling and obliging us to recognise injustice wherever it occurs and to speak truth to power without fear or favour.
This responsibility is all the more important in today’s world. As we gather here together, there are approx. 130 armed conflicts ongoing throughout the world with 117.8 million people forcibly displaced – the highest figure since World War II. Indeed, we see the very structures, including the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, set up after that horrific war to ensure it would never happen again, being undermined on a daily basis by powerful entities and politicians, both elected and unelected. Nowhere is this clearer than in our courts – the rulings of the International Court of Justice are ignored by powerful states; Judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court are threatened and sanctioned simply for doing their jobs; and the European Court of Human Rights, established following that war, is under political pressure on so many fronts.
Of course, inextricably linked with the undermining of the UN and the normalisation of war, is the existential threat posed by climate change. In this regard, I want to recognise the Governor General’s record in this area and also the very courageous step taken by the Irish Government when Ireland became the second country in the world to declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency in May 2019.
Unfortunately, the transformative action consequent on that declaration has not happened at the scale or speed required. In fact, our approach to climate change is illustrative of cognitive dissonance. We all know that the planet is burning and yet we continue to believe that we can do business as usual - holding two fundamentally conflicting ideas together at the same time. It’s a tension that the psyche can only tolerate for a short period of time. The resolution of that tension requires us to choose and that choice is crucial for the planet and for humanity.
In light of the challenges we face, too often framed through the self-serving, narrow lens of security without background or historical context, it is essential that we reaffirm our commitment to the universality of human rights. Indeed, the recent words from Pope Leo are a call for urgent reflection on the detrimental consequences for humanity of seeing the world through that narrow paradigm alone. More particularly, in his address to the Spanish parliament in June 2026, he said, and I quote:
True security, however, stems from justice, patient dialogue, respect for international law, and a policy capable of placing the lives of peoples above the interests that profit from war”.
In the same speech, he also said we can never get used to counting our dead.
A chairde, may I conclude by inviting you all to stand and join me in a toast: -
Guímid sonas agus séan ar A Soilse Sam Mostyn. Go mba fada buan an cairdeas agus an caidreamh idir ár muintir i ngach gné den saol.
May I proposed a toast to the health and happiness of Her Excellency the Honourable Sam Mostyn, and to the continuing friendship and affection between our two peoples.
Sláinte!