ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE COLLEGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
‘IRISH SOCIETY ON THE BRINK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
It is a great pleasure to return to my old, familiar haunt here in Trinity. My thanks to Paul Gleeson for the invitation and to you for the welcome.
I have been asked to speak on the theme ‘Irish Society on the brink of the 21st century’ – quite a challenge to cover that in a few minutes, but I’ll do my best!
Brinks are strange places. Have you noticed how we are always standing or more usually teetering on a brink, never sitting or lying down; always standing up with a slight wobble as if straining on tiptoes to get the best view of a virgin and unfamiliar landscape which lies ahead, as if having to be pushed reluctantly to embrace it.
There is something tentative and unnerving about a brink. Our feet are standing on the familiar, rooted in what is known, the brink is the threshold to that which is not yet known. This coming 21st century has as yet no shape, no lived lives to tell its story, no story yet written. Those who stand on this brink will write some of the script, tell part of the story so if we are a little tentative perhaps it is because there is no escaping our own individual and collective responsibility for the shape of things beyond this brink.
We are not the first generation in Ireland to stand on a significant brink, but as brinks go - and Ireland has had more than its fair share of them - then undoubtedly this generation has been given the best of brinks to stand on. Given a choice of brinks most past generations would join the queue for ours.
Go back a millennium. Now there was a brink. Brian Boru in a warring and faction ridden Ireland dreams of unity as he becomes the first King of all Ireland. The Battle of Clontarf ends the dream, returns the island to its familiar divisions and conflicts.
Shift forward a century and the annals of the Four Masters describe 1145 as a year of great war ‘so that Ireland was a trembling sod’. As historian, Professor F.J. Byrne dryly remarked, there was hardly a year in 12th century pre- Norman Ireland that would not qualify for the same description.
Three centuries later Ireland of the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords was still a web of fighting factions though Professor Art Cosgrove ( President of that other College!) with the insight of both a historian and a Newry man tells us:
“It would be mistaken to place too much emphasis on these conflicts. Warfare had limited objectives, was usually on a small scale and confined to the summer months.”
There is something vaguely familiar and contemporary about that description. Some aspects of brinks, it seems, are always with us!
Indeed for much of the last Millennium, Ireland has seemed to teeter on the brink of one momentous event or another, usually calamitous. Throughout the eighteenth century, famine was a recurrent tragedy, culminating in 1741, known as ‘bliadhain an áir’, the year of the slaughter, when anything between two and four hundred thousand died. A contemporary report described ‘want and misery in every face, mankind the colour of the docks and nettles they fed on’. It was to be but a precursor of the Great Famine of the 1840’s, that calamity sandwiched between the dawn, then dashing, of hope in the risings of 1798 and 1867. Hope was renewed in the generation of Pearse that they finally stood on the brink of a new world, that the seeds sown by past sacrifices were ‘coming to their miraculous ripening’. That hope withered in the atrocities of civil war and nearer our time, in the explosion of murderous violence in Northern Ireland. All too often, to stand on the brink in Ireland was to look down into an abyss.
Those experiences shaped our perceptions of who we are as a people. Those centuries of conquest, famine, war, emigration, poverty, unemployment, still-born hope – drained many of our people of confidence and energy, filtered into a self-perception of victimhood, coloured our self-belief in what we were capable of, set self-imposed limits on our ambitions, our preoccupations.
Yet there were always those who looked at the same landscape, who stood on the brink of the same calamities, and dared to take risks, dared to believe there was nothing inevitable about the misery, the doldrums, about economic mediocrity and social injustice. They imagined what might be, they dreamed of it, worked for it, even when they knew the fruits of their work might only be visible generations later. Often they were people who received little thanks, who got even less, who have been consigned to a footnote in history, if even that. We owe them our thanks, but more than that, we owe it to them to have the same sense of imagination, courage, involvement, in building the Ireland of the 21st century.
Today we are experiencing the fruits of their work. As we stand on the brink of the 21st century, the confident and curious outreach to the world which characterised the Ireland of the first millennium A.D., the so-called land of saints and scholars has been recaptured in our engagement with the European Union, our new position as one of the world’s largest per capita exporting nations, our expertise in the new technologies, our service with the United nations, our powerful and loyal global Irish family.
This generation of men and women presides over the turned the tide of emigration, the imminent approach of full employment, the global mainstreaming of Irish culture, the dismantling of the apparatus of misogyny, the healthy maturing of relationships with that other island and the well of support for a successful outcome to the peace process, itself a much more remarkably robust phenomenon than it is given credit for.
Almost 200 years ago, Robert Emmett told us ‘when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written’. Could we be on the brink of writing that epitaph?
But before descending into too much self-congratulatory back-slapping, we would do well to remember the principle which was espoused by another man, John F. Kennedy, someone who knew all too well what it was to stand at the brink - from those who have been given much, much will be expected.
Much is expected from this generation, because there is another type of brink in Ireland, one which is a world away from the dawn of a bright new century, which faces that future not with expectation but sheer dread. It is a brink in a different sense of the word, a brink which refers to the edge, the margins, the periphery. It is a world in which the reality of daily life is poverty, where the little energy each day brings is spent on basic survival, where the horizon of expectations is not a five year career plan, but how to get through the next week. Its inhabitants look on from the margins at the prosperity of this country, not as participants but as spectators on the sideline, unable to join in, knowing only that this confident Ireland on the brink of the 21st century is not their Ireland, their world.
And around us too are others who stand on the brink of this same century but if they are teetering or wobbling then maybe their fears are understandable- a ten-year old boy soldier in Columbia, a street child in Vietnam, a starving child in Somalia, a homeless child in Honduras. When we stride into this next century who will we carry on our backs?
There is an invitation on the Statue of Liberty which reads ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. And we did, we gave ours in their millions. Now a few of the world’s tired and poor make their weary way to our door. What invitation are we willing to offer them?
There are choices and it is you, the inheritors of our future, who will make them. They may not have the ring of momentous, historic choice made in a single moment, but in the countless small decisions that each of us takes on the pathway through life, you will craft a world of values and experiences which will be humanly decent or not. We have seen all too clearly in recent years the devastating impact which choices made selfishly can have.
But we have before us also many examples of how one life lived well, lived decently, can make a difference. How one person who puts his or her talents at the service of others, can act as a catalyst for change, can set off a chain-reaction which impacts on the lives of many. Those lives challenge us, each in their own way, to bear in mind that society is not merely a conglomerate of individual lives lived behind impermeable walls. It is a living, permeable entity, vulnerable today to warping by selfish materialism, conceit, cyncism and apathy just as it was vulnerable to warping yesterday by colonisation, elitism, poverty and despondency.
From this brink look back and see where we have come from. Some day this already lived history of ours will be described as an age of something or other and out of the unlived new century will come a new age.
In his famous “Ode” Arthur O’Shaughnessy says
“…each age is a dream that is dying
Or one that is coming to birth.”
Do we dare to dream of the death of hate, the death of poverty? What birth are we standing on the brink of? Stillborn hopes or a new reality to be profoundly proud of?
No other brink on this island has ever offered so much to so many.