Address by Mary McAleese, President of Ireland At St Paul’s Cathedral, London
‘The New Millennium: Blessed Be the Peacemakers’
We are here today on the cusp of a new millennium: a point in time that sparks in us a heightened consciousness of the continuum of human history, as past, present and future move sharply into a unique focus and the smallness of our own time on earth, our little place on that continuum, is starkly evident. The continuum is embodied in the very stone of St Paul’s Cathedral. This ancient gathering place has many stories to tell from the days when it was a green field site, to its destruction and its historic rebirth. Much of what is perplexing about life and death has been mulled over in this place.
By a quirk of fate, the sole relic of ‘Old’ St Paul’s to survive the great fire of London is the monument of John Donne, one-time Dean of St Paul’s. In his celebratory poem ‘The Anniversary’ Donne offers a ridiculously simple yet profound analysis of the human condition:
‘All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day’
His words find echo in the words of the man who would later become the President of Ireland, Dr. Douglas Hyde writing at the beginning of this century:
“Hatred is a negative passion; it is a powerful, very powerful destroyer, but it is useless for building up. Love on the other hand can remove mountains….”
This millennium, this century, now in its dying moments is one which has hardly been notorious for its love. Indeed it would be hard to find in the annals of history, a period of time which has provided such horrific, such heartbreaking proof of humankind’s capacity for hatred and destruction. These past hundred years have been scarred by the lethal combination of human hatred, human greed, allied to an unprecedented capacity to inflict harm through modern technology and munitions. That unholy alliance has brought us two massive world wars, a nightmare of vicious regional conflicts, to the brink of world destruction, and deep into an abyss where we have seen with ugly clarity where hatred brings us when it runs amok.
At times it may seem that we have learned little from the experience, that the power of love everlasting of which John Donne spoke, has little place in our hate-filled world. As if we were condemned forever to repeat the cycle of history, a story of triumphalistic winners and bitter losers who planned their revenge – on and on in an endless cycle of antagonism.
But the story of our century has another side. For even at those times when past hatreds have seemed most immovable, when they appeared to be ingrained deep into the hearts and minds of entire peoples, persisting, in the words of the Ulster poet, ‘in every knuckle and sinew’ of their being – there have always been people who have worked to redeem that past, to soften those hearts, to break that cycle of hatred. They are the peacemakers. They are men and women who looked at the violent chaos into which they had been born, whose tragic effects they had witnessed, whose destructive mentality they had been taught to perpetuate – and they responded not with hatred, but with this phenomenon called love, against all the tides. Amazingly, even miraculously they nutured a fragile seed of hope first within themselves and extended it to others, drawing them in by the sheer force of its integrity; they resolved to build rather than destroy; to offer partnership even to bitter enemies; to obliterate the ‘win- lose’ ethic of the past, replacing it with a generous new ethos built on trust, mutual respect and the peaceful ironing out of differences.
Those values seem little more than a vague pipedream in many parts of our world today where ‘might is right’ still prevails, where lives are hopelessly twisted and skewed by man-made horrors. Have we anything to offer them but a cynical counsel of despair, or is that dream realisable and in our time?
We ourselves live inside one man’s pipedream. Jean Monet’s unlikely vision arose from the ruins of a Europe torn apart by war and out of it came a remarkable partnership, a European Union where old enemies work together, collegially for the common good.
We in Ireland, with our historical experience of colonisation and the damaging effects of unequal relationships have fitted easily and well into that community of equals. Based on mutual
respect, regardless of size, the European Union has provided us with a new model for international relations. It demonstrated that the pattern of old enmities could be reworked and new relationships forged in their place. It gave us the self-confidence to challenge some of our own received truths, to understand that moving beyond those preconceptions could create the space for a fresh new engagement with others.
In particular it recalibrated our relationship with the United Kingdom and in the visible maturing of that historically blighted relationship, we have begun at last to see the benefits of peaceful and mutually respectful co-existence.
As Prime Minister Blair said in his historic address to the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, we have ‘so much shared history’. Unfortunately so much of that history has been a story of mutual incomprehension and mistrust, a story of closed minds and blinkered attitudes. Each side possessing its own version of history, the history of the same events yet unrecognisable as the same story. Those old prejudices have contaminated relations within Northern Ireland, between North and South, between Britain and Ireland for centuries, the toxin carrying on from one generation to the next. And it seemed destined to carry on forever, so that, as Hewitt put it ‘the future can find no crevice to enter by’.
Creating such crevices by which peace can enter is never easy. They do not happen as accidents of nature, falling like manna from the sky. They must be crafted, painstakingly, like the action of acid on stone, slowly etching a channel between the parallel but untouching caverns that form the histories of these islands. Creating the space in which peace can breathe is a slow and frequently frustrating task. It takes dedicated and patient work to make possible each modest, carefully taken step forward. It takes immense bravery and frequently demands a heroic resilience to keep going when it would be all too easy to give up. But all those efforts do bear fruit, have borne fruit, and today on these islands, a crevice has finally been created – and through that crevice the future we now face in Ireland has entered.
Now to quote Hewitt again ‘we build to fill the centuries arrears’. We have a very long history of arrears to make up.
But there is an Irish saying ‘Tús maith leath na hoibre’ – a good start is half the work. Our journey is far from over, but we have made that good start. Recent developments – developments which, in the past, few could have imagined or dreamed of - show that we are making steady headway towards a future built on partnership, reconciliation and tolerance. We may even soon learn to be joyfully curious about each others story, identity and culture instead of fearful or contemptuous. Having seen the great prize that lies before us, we have determined that there can be no turning back. Even as we speak, a new script is being written, one that is not a mere repetition of the past but an exciting adventure in broadbased participative democracy.
This very day, an inclusive Executive, drawing together Ministers from all political and cultural traditions and backgrounds, stands ready to hold office in Northern Ireland. Those who will serve on the Executive have pledged to do so in good faith, and to serve all of the people of Northern Ireland equally. They have an unprecedented opportunity to create a society of equals, not a place of clones but a society where differences whether cultural, political, racial, religious, or gender based - will be no impediment to full social inclusion. Every person with a scrap of charity in their hearts will wish them well in their endeavour as we do here today.
As we celebrate these important developments, it is right that we remember the heroic work of a great many people which has brought us this far. Some worked in the glare of publicity, many more worked quietly in obscure and lonely places. An enormous gulf of trust between both sides had to be bridged. It is hard to credit that in such a small place where people appear to live cheek by jowl that there could be such profound ignorance of each other, such profound distrust yet at every level the evidence of that deep-rooted estrangement abounds. It was not easy for anyone to reach out across that divide and to trust that a welcoming hand would be extended from the other side in reply. But many did. Instead of ransacking the past for missiles of spite and vengeance to hurl at each other they began to sift it gently looking for shared memories to recover friendship and to heal the wounds of mutual victimhood. Instead of an unhealthy preoccupation with a past that could not be changed they set about crafting a future that could be different. Theirs was an uphill, often thankless job, for old certainties sometimes seemed to offer more comfort than the self-stretching compromises which peace requires. So often they were seen as double deviants, regarded as traitors by “their own” and viewed with suspicion by “the other”.
Political leaders from all sides of the community in the North, in Dublin, London, the United states and further afield, have shown great courage and taken enormous personal risks for peace. They richly deserve our praise and thanks and they will rightly be remembered as true and dedicated peacemakers. I would like, in particular, to pay tribute to Senator George Mitchell. We were extraordinarily lucky to have a man of such vision, wisdom and calm serenity as Chair in the
Talks which concluded with the Good Friday Agreement. But we were doubly blessed that he returned to assist, in whatever way he could, in the resolution of the difficulties that had arisen in its implementation. A tireless, energetic and modest man, we owe him a huge debt of gratitude not just for the consensus he assisted people to create, but for the fresh new language he introduced into political discourse. He showed the futility of the old language of snarling, angry, personalised, contempt and proved that softer, more humanly decent language was more likely to produce humanly decent results.
There are a great many other people whom it has been my privilege to meet through my work as President and indeed over the course of my life long before the Presidency who, in less high profile ways, dedicated themselves to the achievement of peace and reconciliation. Working in singularly hostile and unlikely ground they seedbedded new thinking, new ways of engaging with each other, they learnt to listen to the other and they persuaded the sceptics and the cynics that there was something precious to be gained from talking and listening to each other. These remarkable people formed a rough and tumble, disorganised conspiracy for good, through a myriad of organisations working at community and cross-community level. Often working in the most socially disadvantaged places and spaces, they challenged their own assumptions, stripped away their own prejudices, and little by little created a new warp, a new weft, for a healthier new emerging society.
All of these people, all of these peacemakers, have taken personal responsibility for the shaping of a new society, creating a new language, learning new ways of dealing with each other, unlearning old ways and building a new space in which peace can grow and where, as George Mitchell put it, trust can creep in. Some of these have been widely recognised for their actions, but most of them will remain unknown to those whose lives they have tried to help. At this time of hope, as we steady ourselves for the difficult road ahead, we remember and cherish the contribution of all those peacemakers.
To some people in Britain, the conflict in Northern Ireland may seem a distant phenomenon, a local problem, which has little to do with them, their attitudes and perceptions. But the roots of conflict in Northern Ireland are not neatly sealed within its borders. They are to be found in the interlocking history of perceptions and prejudices right across both our islands, in attitudes here in Britain towards Ireland, and in Ireland towards Britain; in the South towards the North of the island, and the reverse. In the same way, the hard-earned peace can only be consolidated and helped to flourish if the entire set of relationships is healthy, open, generous. There is a journey all of us on these islands must go on in terms of learning and unlearning.
Exciting new formal channels for co-operation have been agreed and will be a crucial part of that journey we have embarked on together. But it is in everyday relationships, in looks, gestures, things said, things written, in the ups and downs of ordinary human discourse that the history-making changes will be needed. Our politicians can only do so much. The greatest chance for making peace a living, breathing reality, lies in the hands of each of us. We each have a role in helping the crevice through which peace can enter a little wider. We can allow old biases to act as a braking mechanism on progress, or we can let the grace of love release in us a new energy, a softened heart.
That means taking a broader and more generous look at our histories, at those stories which have defined how we look at each other and at ourselves. It means creating the space for new stories to enter, ones which may have been buried in the past because they did not fit in with our attitudes and beliefs, our version of history. Stories such as the one enshrined at the Peace Tower in Messines, which I jointly inaugurated with Queen Elizabeth just over a year ago in honour of those soldiers from both the North and South of Ireland, from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who fought together in the First World War, dying in their thousands for a cause they believed in. I recalled on that occasion that none of us has the power to change the past, but it is possible to remember it differently, to use that knowledge well to shape a better future.
I hope that there are many more such stories to be rediscovered and retold between our two islands. Stories which will help to change the landscape of our memories, which will help us to come to a more open and generous understanding of our shared past, and our common future. Stories which will provoke a change in attitudes, a sense of curiosity about each other as we really are, not as we have imagined the other to be. Speaking here in this great church I am reminded of the words of Miroslav Wolf the contemporary Croation theologian and apostle of peace who hit a searing and embarrassing truth when he said that too often the churches have been accomplices in war rather than agents of peace”. As we approach the great jubilee of the birth of Christ it is worth reminding ourselves of how even the Magi, those wise kings, lost their way, could not find their guiding star. Their story could so easily be a metaphor for the Christian and indeed all the great Abrahamic faiths who share so much in common but whose integrity is compromised time and again by inter-faith and intra-faith enmity rather than friendship. The baleful downstream consequences of allowing religion to become so deeply enmeshed in the vanities and brutalities of localised politics that it loses touch with the star, should need no rehearsal in this company. We all have the T-Shirts.
The centuries old conflict we are now thankfully consigning to history has taught us valuable lessons about the management and resolution of seemingly intractable problems which we hope may be transferable to other troubled parts of our small world. While no two conflicts have the same character, and there is no one-size-fits-all template for their resolution – nonetheless, just as we took heart from South Africa, just as we take heart from the great adventure in partnership that is the European Union, so too we hope that others will take heart from the success of our own peacemakers.
Both our countries have a long and proud record of involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. We are all too well aware, from that experience, just how many parts of the world remain mired in the politics of violence, oppression and endemic abuse of human rights. We know that just as we are closing a door on a tragic past, new chapters of atrocity are unfolding elsewhere on this planet. Through them, the yet unlived lives of millennium babies are already doom-laden, their life chances stillborn before they themselves are even conceived. In the first forty years of its existence the United Nations established just 13 peacekeeping operations. In the last ten years, since the end of the Cold War, a further 30 have been established. These are statistics we should find hard to stomach. Their scale may be scary to us but it must not frighten the peacemakers. Today we know that the resolution of many of these problems require new skills, a more subtle understanding of the nature of ethnic conflict, greater international cooperation, more determined adherence to and vindication of the principles of international human rights. The history of this century teaches us that whatever about being blessed, peacemakers are unlikely to be unemployed for some time to come.
As we stand on the brink of this new millennium, some stand as cynics, foreseeing only another chapter in the unfolding story of human rottenness. “Look at the mess’’, they say, their venom and energies directed at finding scapegoats, people to blame. Others stand as “doers”. They acknowledge the existence of the mess but ask “What can I do about it?” It is the “doers” who make the difference, who refuse to give up on the redemptive power of love. In this century we have been privileged to know great individuals who have changed the tide of history by committing themselves to the path of peace, sticking to it no matter how provoked, no matter how difficult. Through their lives and in some cases through their deaths, we have nothing left to learn about hatred’s ways, nothing left to understand about its legacy. There is no mystery here. We need no more lessons in hatred.
It is worth remembering that the Three Wise men lost the star. It did not lose them. It is still there waiting for the peacemakers to lock onto its co-ordinates, follow its track in faith and in hope. At its end there was a helpless child and at his end, a man murdered for the most radical command ever to insinuate its way into human hearts and minds. “Love one another as I have loved you’’. The millennium is an open invitation to do just that and so to alter beyond all recognition the trajectory of human history.
In his poem, ‘New Year’, Patrick Kavanagh wrote:
“The New Year’s unwritten pages we view
As a lea field to plough and sow
The memory of weeds from the last
Turned page comes through
But only matters what this year we grow”.
In that short poem we hear again the message of Christianity and indeed of many of our world’s great faith systems, reassuring us that change, redemption is always possible. I am reminded of that message on this evening as we gather beneath the magnificent Dome of this Cathedral. I have heard that when Christopher Wren was planning its construction, by a happy chance the stone fetched to mark the centre of the Dome proved to be a fragment of tombstone. It had the latin word ‘Resurgam’ - I shall rise again - inscribed on it.
It could be a motto for the peacemakers, a rallying cry to redeem the past by working to make this new Millennium a time of deep, enduring peace. At midnight in 30 days time, the bells of St Paul’s and of churches all across the world will ring in the new Millennium. Let ‘resurgam’ be the unspoken word behind each peal of bells. As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:
“The year is going, let him go
Ring out the false, ring in the true
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more.
Ring out the feud of rich and poor
Ring in redress to all mankind”
(from In Memoriam).
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.