ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE 19TH ANNUAL DR. DOUGLAS HYDE CONFERENCE
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE 19TH ANNUAL DR. DOUGLAS HYDE CONFERENCE “MANY SMALL STREAMS - ONE BROAD RIVER”
A chairde uilig, is onóir dom bheith anseo libh inniu ag ócáid speisialta seo.
Good evening everybody. I am delighted to be here with you all and to officially open the 19th Annual Dr. Douglas Hyde Conference. My thanks to Roscommon County Council and John Tiernan, County Manager for inviting me to participate this evening.
Those of us fortunate enough to live beside the Shannon, at least some of the time, find a particular comfort in waking up each morning to its stately pace and timeless beauty. It has seen many Irelands in its time and though it has flowed through them all, we should of course not make the mistake of thinking that it is always the same. As the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said ‘You can never step in the same river twice.’. Its waters are changing by the instant. There is constant churning, constant motion. Without that change it would stagnate and die. What is more, its great size and strength belie another truth, that the Shannon would be nothing without the myriad of small, often unremarked rivers, tributaries and streams which feed it. We can compare our nation's great culture to the life of a great river for both dominate our landscape; we created neither but in each generation we assume a stewardship of both and we also make our own mark on both.
The Shannon is quintessentially Irish in one sense but not exclusively so. Her waters come to us from the skies above, borne on winds that have their origins many thousands of miles away in circumstances over which we have little or no control. Whatever those winds bring to us we have to manage and manage responsibly.
Looking back more than a century to the time when Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League, we can see a time when outside influences threatened the very survival of our national culture and indeed firmly intended its extinction. In the closing years of the 19th century, not only the Irish language was in imminent peril of extinction; at mortal risk along with the language was the whole panoply of a nation's soul – its music, its storytelling, its customs, its entire way of life. There was nothing accidental or inevitable about the imminent death of Irish culture; instead, it was a deliberate element in the colonising process, an element that had been at work with slow and relentless effect for many centuries.
It is very difficult for us, the children of a very different Ireland, to appreciate the exact nature of the situation that Douglas Hyde set out to confront. But perhaps one way of closing the gap between now and then is to consider the attitudes of Irish people at the end of the 19th century. According to Hyde, the predominant attitude of the Irish to all things Irish was one of shame. As he said:
“It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.”
What Hyde was protesting about was not a benign, outside influence that would mix with the native culture and enrich it. Instead he was witnessing a cultural tsunami that was in the process of destroying everything it met in its path.
This process was so advanced by the time Douglas Hyde began his campaign against it that any objective observer must have given him little chance of success. He would certainly have been encouraged by the support he received in remote places, in distant Butte, Montana, for instance, which I visited when I was in the United States this year, but that encouragement would have been balanced by the knowledge that up to a third of the people in that mining town were native Irish speakers who would probably never come home. The odds certainly were that his attempt to hold back this tide would have little effect, and that his protest would become just another footnote in history.
Instead, as we all know, the actual march of history proved very different. And there is perhaps no better way of judging its effect than to glance at the attitudes of the Irish today – the attitudes we have, and particularly that our young people have, to our country, to our culture, and to our place in the world. In place of the universal shame which so upset Douglas Hyde, there is a palpable pride in being Irish and in things Irish. Today, perhaps more than ever before in our history, the self-esteem and self-confidence of the Irish people is now a powerful driving force in a nation now defined increasingly by success and of “can do”, in marked contrast to decades of failure and “ceann faoi”. That self-image has rapidly also become, in a few short years, not only broad enough and robust enough to fully embrace all the sources that fed Ireland’s character and personality historically including the Anglo along with the Gael, a phenomenon in its own right but the global Irish family abroad and the new Irish, all emigrants from abroad.
The peace process, and the engagement in building new relationships within the North and with the North and with Britain have also changed the cultural context dramatically and have the potential to enrich the whole spectrum of the arts in Ireland, not to mention politics, economics, tourism and a few other things besides. There is a feeling in Ireland that we are at the start of something big and, importantly, something good - for ours is a time when the best-fed, best-educated, most liberal and most liberated generation of Irish men and women have come of age and are putting their genius to work on their own soil for the first time. If the Shannon looks roughly the same to me as it did when I first saw it over fifty years ago from my grandparents’ cottage, I can safely say nothing else around me looks or is the same. The schools once threatened with closure are building extensions, the bleak towns that adolescents emigrated from to even bleaker building sites in Britain, are now buzzing with new homes, new jobs, new life. The citizens of many far-off nations from whom history and geography estranged us are now our colleagues, friends and neighbours. Their stories, their food, their music and dance, their languages, poetry, literature are spores now in Ireland’s fertile ground just as the strong plant that is Ireland’s culture and identity is already shaping anew their lives.
Our traditional Gaeltacht areas may be shrinking, yet more Irish people can speak their own language than at any time since the foundation of the Gaelic League and our young parents are voting with their feet for educating their children through Irish, as is shown by the remarkable growth in the number of Gaelscoileanna throughout the country including in Northern Ireland. TG4 was a pipe dream only a short time ago and now it is a stunning success.
Interest in Irish traditional arts has more than kept pace with the mushrooming and indeed democratisation of the arts in Ireland in general and they have a huge global audience. Already the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann is one of the biggest cultural festivals in the world. With 10,000 performers it attracts attendances of up to a quarter of a million people. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí na hÉireann has 400 branches in 15 countries on four continents, servicing some two million people. St. Patrick, that legendary Irish patron and incomparable marketing tool, opens doors to the Irish around the world that are simply not opened to anyone else. He can close New York’s Fifth Avenue and Tokyo’s Omotesando Street. He has parades in his name in Moscow and Beijing and an amazing array of places in-between.
And our global Irish family has also come into its own right across the world. The children of hodsmen, labourers and navvies are now corporate America, intellectual Britain, political Australia. They work for Ireland in a dizzying multiplicity of ways from supporting the peace process to running the Asian Gaelic Games. They write plays, novels, music. They rewrite Irish dance. They learn Irish in Milwaukee and Missoula. They are scholars who research and reveal long-overlooked parts of the story of the Irish and they help us to a new consciousness of just what an incredible nation we are and have been. They push out the boundaries of Irish culture. They are tributaries flowing ever more strongly into our river.
And what of our membership of the European Union, reconnecting us powerfully with the monks of the first millennium and connecting us powerfully to the most exciting adventure in consensus-based partnership politics in the history of humankind? Around the European table our small nation has a large voice. Around the world the name of Ireland has become synonymous with success against the odds and crucially with empathy with the underdog, especially the poor of the undeveloped world. Our young people’s futures are now inextricably linked with the futures of their peers in twenty-five and soon to be twenty-seven European member states. Through Erasmus and Socrates programmes, low-cost travel and money in their pockets they are getting to know each other and which of us can say with certainty what ups and downs they will face together, but one thing we can already be sure of is this, that while they meet as Europeans, the Union gives each a phenomenal platform on which to showcase what it is to be Irish, Polish, Hungarian and all the rest.
Are there battles still to be won? Of course there are. Douglas Hyde's belief that faith can move mountains is still needed in our Gaeltacht communities and we have still in front of us the ambition set out in the proclamation of 1916 to create a country where all the nation’s children are treated equally. Yet we are considerably nearer than Hyde was or ever dreamed we could be and we can say with some good reason that the amount of progress that has been made since the founding of the Gaelic League has been astounding.
So the strongly-flowing tide of Irish culture has today no need at all to be on the defensive. It is no longer fighting for its survival but trying to manage its success. This is a generation which respects tradition but is not averse to ringing the changes. It is making fresh, confident, new, connections between Irish and Scottish languages and music, commemorating the once-forgotten dead of two world wars, prising open old suitcases of memories from which to build the shared memories that will in time heal the human divisions that led to partition. It can commemorate the Rising with enormous grace and dignity and within weeks reverently commemorate the Somme.
These are the first steps of the first generation who did not live their lives as if they were drowning. The fast flow of the river does not frighten them. They are white water rafters, water-skiers, rowers, kayakers, jet-skiers, cruisers, fishers, and while they know they have not tamed this river, they know it well and they are joyfully curious where it is bringing us. This Ireland of many faiths, many identities, many nations, has many hands and hearts from which to feed its artistic soul and its civic life. It has a powerful and educative history of outward migration. It has the lived contemporary experience of the migrant in Ireland. It has the chance to do properly and with pride what so many other countries failed to do or did with ill-grace, to make good neighbours of strangers and fully-committed, fully-contributing citizens of all, an Ireland of many small and lovely streams feeding a mighty, powerful and happy nation - a place that Hyde can be proud of.
Thank you very much indeed.
Gura fada buan sibh.