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Address by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON at the NEXUS IRELAND and UN50 Anniversary Dinner

Address by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON at the NEXUS IRELAND and UN50 Anniversary Dinner Dublin Castle, 22 November 1995

Some months ago I was asked by Nexus Ireland, an initiative of the Youth Board of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, to speak on tolerance. We discussed the fact that this year had been designated by the UN as the Year for Tolerance, and yet, curiously, there had been little informed discussion of the concept in Ireland itself. I was aware of the work of the Lucan Youth Centre, and had met Youthlink members from the different Churches both at Aras an Uachtarain and on a recent visit to Belfast. And so I accepted the invitation. That was the easy part. Later I found I had to think quite deeply about what we mean by tolerance: what exactly we mean by an open, tolerant society.

And when you think about it - tolerance still has a negative sound. `All we ask is tolerance'. `The most we can hope for is tolerance'. The cry and the aspiration have echoed down the centuries from too many oppressed people. In derivation and usage tolerance denotes the - often grudging - social acceptance of people who because of difference in race or religion, in gender or class - or even physical or mental ability - from the dominant group are refused as of right equality in respect and in law.

Human history is marked by savage regimes of intolerance as well as by painful struggles to achieve tolerance. This century has experienced some of the most devastating expressions of intolerance; from the Stalinist purges and the Nazi holocaust to recent or current ethnic-religious conflicts on every continent. Ethnic purity and religious fundamentalism offer a deadly mix in face of the different. This was brought home vividly to me on my visits to Rwanda. The shocking human capacity for inhumanity, and the hesitant, inadequate response of the international community to breaking the cycle of impunity from genocidal killing, in order to begin the healing process.

But intolerance may be no less pervasive where peace prevails. Discrimination of different kinds is to be found in civilised societies. Let us not look beyond our own shores. Irish treatment of the travelling community, despite many improvements, retains an intolerant edge. Sometimes that discrimination is unintentional, and only gradually discerned. The latest edition of Oideas, published by the Department of Education, contains an article entitled `The Alienation of Travellers from the Educational System' by Maire Mac Aongusa, a graduate of Queen's University, Belfast. She explains the problem:

"To the ordinary well-disposed settled person education would seem to be the key to better health, greater safety in the home, better job prospects, better personal relationships; in other words, an end to the more visible shortcomings of Traveller life. However, most Travellers have tried education as we know it and have found it wanting. The dilemma in which Travellers find themselves is the choice between literacy and numeracy skills and the chance of skilled or semi-skilled employment on the one hand, and, on the other, the retention of their culture and traditional way of life."

Her solution is to introduce interculturalism in the classroom, but she shows how this requires a real understanding of the Traveller culture and a whole-hearted commitment, in that teachers need to realise that even their language may unconsciously convey value judgments prejudicial to the development of a good self-image in the Traveller child.

I have had a long standing involvement with the travelling community as a lawyer, and I am very conscious of the link between tolerance and human rights. Over the last couple of centuries the reality of tolerance has been most effectively promoted by the development of human rights language and legislation. Gradually, what was for so long seen as a concession by the powerful to the powerless, made of course in the interests of the powerful, was reconceived in terms of rights. The deprived, or discriminated against, could now appeal over power to justice, beyond concessions to the weak, to rights due to human beings. The slow evolution of the social understanding and the legal protection of human rights over two centuries has not yet reached full realisation in practice. Yet an irreversible change has occurred in human consciousness. Whatever the present abuse and future setbacks, human rights as formulated in various international instruments and in domestic law provide critical guidance and legal authority in ensuring justice and equality for all.

The move from intolerance to tolerance to rights was undoubtedly influenced both in Europe and North America by revulsion at the horrors of the politico-religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The move was gradual, erratic and uneven. Slavery persisted in the newly formed United States of America long after the Bill of Rights was adopted; religious and racial discrimination in law much longer; gender discrimination has had to wait to this century to be considered a serious rights issue. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man at the time of the Revolution was quickly followed by the Terror. The heritage is precious but the history is bloody, redeemed undoubtedly by the non-violent struggles inspired by Gandhi and by Martin Luther King adopted and developed by the contemporary feminist, environmental and other movements.

It is essentially in the non-violent movements that tolerance is truly endorsed. The oppressors are not to be eliminated, as in violent revolution, but to be changed. That approach is at the heart of the campaign launched last December by the Council of Europe, of which I am honoured to be a co-patron. Under the logo "all different, all equal", it seeks to enlist the young people of Europe in a conscious rejection of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance. You may recall the youth train which left Dublin in early July for Belfast, and then joined other youth trains from European cities converging on Strasbourg. Sadly, the need for a conscious youth campaign - for eternal vigilance in promoting tolerance - is all too evident.

But I want to move beyond the lawyer's analytical approach to the protection and promotion of human rights. Equality under the law and by right is based on the true human dignity of each person. Human rights and human dignity belong together. Denial of the human dignity of any individual or group breeds intolerance and forms the basis for denial of human rights. Contemptuous references and practices in relation to others manifest an intolerant attitude which may lead to discrimination and injustice. The different are sometimes readily dismissed in this way, and those who are different without power suffer at the hands of the powerful. Their intolerance may be due to fear: fear of the stranger and fear for their own privileged position. Psychological and social insecurity feed off each other. The stranger appears as a threat prompting a defensive reaction. Inability to overcome this fear would bring to an end all human community. Essentially, human community develops through the familiarisation of the strange or different. It is in this recognition and acceptance of the stranger that human dignity is primarily affirmed. Without the other the self could not discern his or her own humanity and its dignity. Dignity and difference belong together in the family, in neighbourhood and society, both national and international.

Without the stranger there would be no human society. Yet the stranger continues to inspire fear and established groups resist the incursion of strangers. Tribalism or more accurately a fearful protectionism and exclusivism pervades many human groupings. Self-protection for individual and group is often necessary in a destructive world. It can however become self-destruction, instead of self-protection, if it becomes totally self-enclosing and refuses the richness at its gates. In the hopeful and finally only livable vision of humanity the stranger is potentially gift rather than threat. The call to each person and each community is to help the potential gift of the other, the stranger, to emerge. For this, above all else, trust is needed and trust comes dropping slow. It is of course a trust in oneself as well as in the other, and they develop simultaneously if not always at the same speed. Parent-child and other intimate human relations bear witness to this.

Tolerance is the first and necessary step in overcoming fear of the stranger, but it is not indefinitely self-sustaining. It provides immediate breathing time for both parties. That could be a long time but it should eventually enable the beginnings of trust. It will do this more easily and quickly in a context of rights recognised and implemented. Tolerance, rights and the beginnings of trust are the way to transform the stranger from threat to gift, and the society whose dominant and restricting concern is security to one whose priority is cooperative development and mutual enrichment. Tolerance, underpinned by the protection of basic rights, is moving to recognition, acceptance and celebration of the stranger. A new civic household is being formed.

This, I believe, is what leads to the true meaning of civil society, both domestically and internationally. International friendship has gone the way of many over-used and abused but valuable terms. The word friendship is confined nowadays to personal relations with overtones of affection and shared socialising. Yet the great political philosopher, Aristotle, saw it as a necessary part of the good polis or society. It may be time to revive it within this society and others. In so many situations, particularly difficult ones, we have to rely on our friends. Reliability generates trust. Trust requires reliability. These are essential components of all good societies as of true friendships. What friendship, personal or civic, does not demand is total agreement. A frequent and easy test of the depth of friendship is the ability to disagree, even on important issues. Without disagreement, and the independence it implies, friendship degenerates. Without friendship, disagreement in civic matters becomes division which may further degenerate into hostility. The cultivation of civic friendship at local, national and international levels is a contemporary challenge which must be tackled.

What has been said about the origins and development of tolerance and its further fulfilment in mutual enrichment and friendship is closely intertwined with the history of religions and churches here and elsewhere. Religion's role has been ambiguous, inspiring some of the most savage repressions and some of the most liberating ideals and idealists. In a very thoughtful address to the Irish Association entitled "Religion on the Defensive", Fr. Gabriel Daly reflected on an article in The Furrow by Fr. Enda McDonagh, and I quote:

`Although Professor McDonagh is writing in the context of the crisis in the Irish Catholic Church, his words have a wider application. Irish Christianity has had little or no practice in living with a hostile, or more likely, indifferent, secularised modernity of the type that most European countries have known for the best part of two centuries. It now has to face modernity and post-modernity simultaneously. We are passing from a conformist and often uncritically possessed faith into an era of fairly extensive lapse from active church membership. In many instances the rejection of religious faith shows signs of being as uncritical as its previous practice had been.'

Fr. Daly's conclusion is a hopeful one:

`The Christian Church of the future will be much smaller than it is today and will comprise members who are such by positive personal choice and not by social convention. It will play its part in society without seeking to have its moral convictions embodied in civil law. It will present its moral convictions with the radical intensity of the gospel it professes, but it will also exercise understanding of, and express compassion towards, those who fail to achieve the fullness of the ideal. It will include Catholics and Protestants living, praying, and acting within a loose framework of reconciled diversity.'

The tolerant society and its fuller realisation aim to combine unity or community with diversity. Only such a society enjoys the resources and dynamism which can enable it to continue to grow in its economic, social, cultural and even religious life. Community in diversity must be the aim in all dimensions of human living. We grow up in a series of overlapping communities, familial, political, cultural and religious. We come to maturity and continue to develop as persons who combine a whole series of influences and aspirations commitments and needs. There is a plurality in ourselves which we should recognise and cherish and develop. A plural society which is - as it should be - mutually enriching, requires plural citizens who maintain a dialogue with others because of the dialogue internal to the community of their selves.

In conclusion, I would like to divert slightly and emphasise a very precious Irish gift - the gift for the abrasive recognition of difference. Believe me, I would not wish in the name of tolerance to smooth out the rough parts. The last thing I am contending for is a bland society. Nor should we lose the eccentricities: that colourful, witty, unpredictable, self-mocking - and yes, sometimes abrasive - side of us. When Patrick Kavanagh wrote the poem 'Epic' in 1951, about the 'great events' of the disputes between neighbours over land in the year of the "Munich bother", he began to doubt which had been more important:

"Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind

He said: I made the Iliad from such

A local row. God make their own importance."

The move from tolerance to acceptance to enrichment and celebration has an internal personal history as well as an external social one. Community in diversity is a personal as well as a social goal.