SPEECH BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE UCD IRELAND DIASPORA FORUM BELFIELD, MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER, 2008
SPEECH BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE UCD IRELAND DIASPORA FORUM BELFIELD, MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER, 2008
Thank you for your warm welcome.
Introduction
As President, I have had the distinct honour to meet with Irish communities throughout the world. My personal encounters with thousands of members of our global Irish family have deepened greatly my respect for their experience and broadened my appreciation of what it means to be Irish. Their hunger for a meaningful connectedness to one another and to Ireland is a recurring theme and their pride in being Irish no matter how distant the connection is also a recurring and genuine phenomenon.
By organising this conference and through the ongoing work of the Institute for Global Irish Studies, University College Dublin is assisting all of us to better understand and appreciate the powerful resource that is our widely distributed Irish family. I pay tribute to Dr Hugh Brady for his leadership in giving a particular priority to this important issue. I am delighted to see Loretto Brennan Glucksman here today but not surprised. For many decades Loretta along with her late husband Lew and the Ireland Funds, have been wonderful builders of a highly effective global Irish network which among its many contributions can claim a big role in the development of peace and reconciliation in Ireland.
Good to see here too that other great champion of the Irish in America Niall O’Dowd. I know that with Irish America Magazine he has worked closely with UCD and the Ireland Funds to make today a success.
Thinking of the United States, I cannot let the opportunity pass, particularly in the presence of many proud citizens of that country, to say how impressed and moved we all were by the election last week of Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of America. I said in my statement congratulating Senator Obama that his election was transformational in its power and scope and served as a beacon of hope not just for America but for the whole world, particularly in the context of these turbulent times of anxiety and uncertainty that we live in. If ever America and the world needed just such transforming experiences it is now and Senator Obama knows he has our support and solidarity as he sets forward on his momentous mission and not just because his ancestors hailed from Offaly. I also want to pay tribute to John McCain who having fought a long, spirited campaign brought it to a close with a memorably gracious concession speech on Tuesday night. His words augur well for the kind of new unity of purpose and people that President-Elect Obama is seeking to build.
The Legacy of the Past
And we too seek a new unity of purpose and people among the Irish at home and abroad. Over one million people born on the island of Ireland are estimated to live abroad - a remarkable figure for a population of some six million. When people who claim Irish descent are included, the number who can be counted as part of our global Irish family rises to an estimated seventy million. These figures are at once both a frightening testament to the searing legacy of forced emigration and an awesome contemporary resource from which to forge new synergies and opportunities for this still new century.
There are of course enormous differences in culture, outlook and experience between and among our communities abroad. A group of seventy million people spread throughout the world is by its nature extremely diverse and complex. We can truly respect this community and its role in the modern world by avoiding lapses into lazy assumptions and false generalisations.
For instance, our community in Britain - where by far the largest number of Irish born people outside Ireland live - have had a very different experience to that of the Irish in the United States. Our Diaspora includes people as diverse as a third generation Irish American steelworker in Pittsburgh; a Dublin born financial expert working in Hong Kong; an Irish-Australian family in Perth; a Galway born pensioner in North London; a young Cork born designer in Paris; and a fifth generation Irish Argentinian or Newfoundlander whose lilting Irish brogue is remarkably strong for someone who has never set foot on Irish soil and proof positive of the longevity of the Irish imprint.
In my travels abroad as President, one of the joys has been to encounter pockets of the Irish family in the most unlikely places as well as on the better known tracks. I will never forget my visit to Butte, Montana, a few years ago where I encountered an Irish welcome and identity as warm and proud as when their ancestors left the Beara peninsula over a century ago.
Even within this huge dispersion and diversity certain common threads seem identifiable. Something palpable in the Irish psyche nudges us to be and keep on being community to one another. A deep appreciation of the emigrant experience and an affinity with a sense of Irishness - however that is interpreted - are defining characteristics of the global Irish family. Our culture and heritage are powerful instruments of connection. The music, dance, poetry and stories of Ireland have quite a capacity to gather and to bind this enormous, diverse, scattered Irish family. Of themselves they both entertain and nurture, they showcase and recruit and are effective pathways to linking with our family abroad.
There are though subtleties and complexities around the nature of the Irish Diaspora that we need to comprehend as well. Sometimes in Ireland we make the mistake of assuming that because so many communities in the United States, Australia or elsewhere celebrate St Patrick’s Day or embrace an aspect of Irish culture, that they are automatically affirming a connection to modern Ireland. Yes, some do have a formidable ongoing interest in all things Irish and are well up to speed on what is going on here. Many others have not that same level of interest in or knowledge of today’s Ireland. For them these occasions can often be more a celebration of the Irish emigrant experience in their adopted homeland. Yet while at times there may be no more than a tenuous affinity to the modern Ireland, they are all an extremely important part of the wider Irish family and part of the ever growing story of Ireland in the world. In building culturally sensitive connections to them we open up to them an unknown part of their history and they open up to us an unknown part of ours. It’s a journey of mutual discovery and rediscovery of great benefit to both of us.
Any discussion of our modern Diaspora and how we in Ireland should interact with it in the future must begin with an acknowledgment of the trauma of the past. As President Kennedy observed during his visit to Ireland in 1963 - “no country in the world has endured the haemorrhage which this island has endured”.
Modern Ireland stands today on the shoulders of giants - the men and women who left a land barren of opportunity and built better lives in their adopted countries. Far from ignoring the fate of an Ireland that had failed them, our emigrants kept alive the traditions of home, sent millions in remittances to family and friends in Ireland and worked to ensure that Irish issues featured in the political discourse of their adopted countries.
Out of this awful haemorrhage has emerged the modern Irish global family - unique in its collective experience, its determination to endure and its willingness to engage with and assist a small island on the edge of Europe. They have shown time and again that the heart has room for two homelands and for parallel identities which enhance each other rather than cancelling each other out. Yet today that longstanding image of ourselves as an emigrating nation has been altered dramatically.
Changing Dynamics
A whole new set of dynamics are impacting on us and on our global Irish community. They will bring changes yet to be revealed and some that need to be planned for. Over the past decade we have seen a reversal in the pattern of emigration that plagued so many generations. Ireland relatively suddenly became a place of net inward migration thanks to a sustained period of unprecedented economic success, new arrivals came from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia and many thousands of Irish emigrants and their families decided to return to avail of new opportunities at home. The total number of returned emigrants since 2003 is over 107,000. The return of our people over the past decade has been enormously positive for Ireland in so many ways. However, it has led to a decline in the numbers and vitality of some of our communities abroad, particularly in parts of Britain and the United States where the vibrancy of Irish communities has depended historically on a largely unbroken flow of emigrants from Ireland. That story has now changed. Also changed however is the story of Ireland’s relationship with Britain which has become collegial and warm in recent decades, not least because of the new opportunities for partnership and friendship which have been provided by our common membership of the European Union, creating quite a different backdrop for Irish emigrants in Britain.
Ireland’s relationship with the United States has at political level been elevated to an unheard of degree of intimacy with the involvement of successive American administrations in the peace process. In every country where we have a substantial Irish presence - Canada, New Zealand, Australia - there has been a heightened engagement with Ireland largely due to efforts at peacemaking. These have sparked renewed interest and a sense of shared success in achieving peace. Ireland’s new economic profile as a global exporter of goods and services has created a new class of emigrant not to mention serious Irish investment in many other countries both inside and outside the European Union.
A further transformative development has been the acceptance on the part of the Irish State and its people of the need to give proper recognition to our emigrant family. The recent amendment to Article 2 of our Constitution now states “the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage”. Our outreach to Irish emigrants who are in need has grown and developed exponentially in recent years with new structures and resources now well in place.
In 2002, the Task Force on Policy regarding Emigrants, chaired by Paddy O’Hanlon, provided a comprehensive policy framework aimed at enhancing support for our emigrants. Out of that came the establishment of the Irish Abroad Unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs. Its remit is to focus on our emigrants, to invest in Irish communities throughout the world and to develop strategies aimed at further enhancing the relationship between Ireland and the Diaspora. While the Unit has focussed primarily on increasing the capacity of Irish organisations abroad to deliver frontline services to our emigrants in need, its agenda has also broadened to include substantial investment in the heritage, social and cultural life of our communities abroad. Irish Government funding for our communities abroad has also reached unprecedented levels, increasing more than fifteen fold in ten years and now spanning Britain, the US, Australia, Argentina, Canada, South Africa, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Singapore, the Netherlands, Mexico and France. On my visits to communities abroad, I have seen the practical difference that this funding has made to the most vulnerable and how it has enhanced the relationship with today’s Ireland, building connections of visible care.
The impact of globalisation and new technologies has been a further transformative development for our Diaspora. Thankfully, the days when an Irish emigrant would leave on a boat never to return are long gone. Relatively affordable air travel has meant that more and more people of Irish descent are able to visit and connect with the place of their birth or the place of the ancestors. Instant communication has also brought Ireland and her far-flung family closer together.
Today, children of Irish background in Chicago or Singapore or South Africa can see and speak with their grandparents or other relatives in Ireland via the internet; Irish people spread throughout Asia can share business knowledge, build connections and network through innovative websites; and people throughout the world with an interest in Ireland can stay fully informed of developments here by accessing the wide range of online media and information outlets.
By the way, I recently experienced at first hand a wonderful example of technology connecting people across generations and oceans. I had the honour to launch the Galway branch of a great initiative called the Senior Help Line on a day when they had a live link to an emigrant Irish group in New York. This listening service created for older people by older people here in Ireland is soon to be exported to America, for the organisers of the Irish Senior Help Line are about to work with Irish Centres in New York to develop a similar service there - evidence of the new connections and synergies that are growing out of old kinships and longstanding mutual care.
Another example of how a greater engagement with our Diaspora can be invaluable is the economic space where both the problems and the solutions are global. Harnessing the amazing power of our people, who are scattered in all parts of that globe, is a key opportunity for us. Emigrants are by nature positive, dynamic, can do people who face into adversity and who produce their best under pressure. Today they are to be found in every walk of life and with every kind of wisdom and experience. That is an ideal spirit and resource we can draw on as we seek to chart our way forward in these uncertain and difficult times. Properly harnessed, our Diaspora can be hugely helpful to us and we to them, in that journey.
The technologies of the modern world with their easy and instant universal communications offer exciting opportunities for much more creative and sustained development of multi-faceted relationships between Ireland and its global family.
Wherever they are they are marked by the indelible imprint of Ireland and in so many remote places they have showcased Ireland’s genius and character, making for us friends among strangers, making us known and respected. Theirs has been a formidable ambassadorship, from our missionaries to our famine poor, to our labourers and our university graduates, this family of ours has a phenomenal capacity for connectedness to one another across the miles of geography and down through the generations of history. At the most human of levels they have given us a fearlessness and a confidence when confronted with serious challenges. We have shared and share an irrepressible joy in life.
Conclusion
The challenges of the 21st century are now ours to deal with. Many of those who have gone before us on emigrant ships would gladly swap their times for ours. Facing courageously into the responsibilities our time demands would be a very fitting tribute to our scattered forbears. Another tribute lies in connecting today to their children and grandchildren, as friends and partners who have a spontaneous cultural compatability and a value system of mutual care which they share with us. We are not all the same for different histories have shaped us differently but we are cut from the same cloth and in a very fragmented world, our bonds of kinship, our mutual telepathy and empathy, our ease of mutual understanding are a reassuring resource and a basic building block towards a much more peaceful global human family.
Occasions such as this gathering here today, which bring together a whole range of individuals and groups who understand how exciting and important all of this can be, are vital for the success of the journey of reconnection. My congratulations to all involved in putting the event together and my thanks to each and every one of you for showing your interest and commitment by being here.
Go n-eíri an bothar linn go léir.