Media Library

Speeches

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY ROBINSON, AT DINNER HOSTED BY THE IRISH IMMIGRATION CENTRE

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY ROBINSON, AT DINNER HOSTED BY THE IRISH IMMIGRATION CENTRE IN BOSTON

I am delighted to be here this evening for the Irish Immigration Centre's Annual Awards dinner. I am particularly pleased to be back in Boston where, like most visitors from Ireland, I always feel a sense of 'homecoming'.

I know that many of you here tonight were born in Ireland, and that many more of you are descended from Irish men and women who arrived in this great land in far less auspicious circumstances than did the most recent emigrants. The common thread that unites us all is our pride in and affection for Ireland. This has not deterred those born in America or those who, through choice or circumstances, are now living here, from dedicating their loyalty and energies to the United States.

Why did so many Irish people come to America? Why do they still come? For the mesh of reasons and impulses that condition any crucial decision in life. In the past, the most powerful reason was one common to most of the immigrants from the 1840s, namely the hardship and very often the hopelessness of life at home. They chose America because by the early nineteenth century, Europeans, especially if they were poor, had heard that the Americans had a revolution that successfully overthrew the old orders of society. As early as 1817, Madame de Stael could tell a Boston scholar

"You are the advance guard of the human race".

Whenever life could hardly be worse at home people came to believe that life was better in America. In Ireland in the mid 1840s, a combination of famine and disease had rendered life insupportable for the vast majority of its inhabitants.

The Famine lasted five long weary years - during that period an estimated one million died and some two million fled the country. For many their first destination was Liverpool, from where thousands crossed the Atlantic in truly awful conditions. Countless ships queued up to disembark their cargoes of human misery and hope at Grosse Ile on the St. Lawrence, the destination of the cheapest crossing. Many died en route.

Those who were not able to get a direct passage to America walked into the United States from Canada and made their way to East Coast American cities, particularly Boston and New York.

In common with the multitudes of other emigrants from Africa, Asia, but predominantly from Europe, the Irish brought with them their religions and folkways and their national culture. Many of these immigrants also brought their individual national perspectives with them, which for a time recreated in the cities of the North East and Midwest the distrust and suspicion that had existed in the "old world". But with time even the most clannish of them learned to integrate.

They also learned a new kind of politics in which the dominant power went to those who knew how to balance the needs of one group with another: to those who learned tolerance.

Many of the elements traditionally associated with Irish identity, such as the importance of family and home, a strong sense of place, the value of religion, an awareness of history, compassion and support for the underdog, are equally cherished in the Irish communities in America as they are at home. Your presence here this evening and the active involvement by so many of you here at the Centre, on behalf of Irish immigrants, testifies to the accuracy of that thesis. I commend the excellent work of the Irish Pastoral Centre in supporting so many Irish immigrants.

I also salute all of those Irish-American legislators, particularly Senator Edward Kennedy and former Congressmen Brian Donnelly and Bruce Morrison, and of course the late Tip O'Neill, who again because of their ties with "the old country", worked so hard to improve the lot of the "new" Irish immigrants during the 1980s. The 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act gave thousands of young Irish the opportunity to pursue their dreams in the U.S. and relieved them of the burden of being undocumented. The willingness of all of these true friends of Ireland on Capitol Hill, to work on behalf of the present generations of Irish men and women, is a further endorsement of the inclusive nature of "Irishness".

The concept of 'Irishness' is not defined by territorial boundaries. Nor is there a singular definitive variety of Irish identity. Our own history, like that of so many other people's, is a veritable patchwork of ethnic influences - Celts, Vikings, Normans, Huguenot, English and Scottish to name but some of the groups that have inhabited Ireland for more than five thousand years. Now, the term "people of Ireland" is supplemented by up to seventy million people worldwide who claim Irish descent.

Last week I had the privilege of attending hte opening of the International Book Fair at Frankfurt, Germany. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest book fair in the world and this year's theme is "Ireland and its Diaspora". I welcomed the opportunity to explain why this theme has a particular resonance for the modern Ireland.

I have been conscious for some time of the significance of the Irish diaspora in helping to define Irishness, and to renew our sense of Irish identity as we approach a new millennium. As the Irish diaspora takes shape throughout the world it is also shaping a broader sense of Irishness. This shaping occurs in different ways.

At present, and continuing next year, the 150th anniversary of the great Irish potato famine is being commemorated. Commemorative events are taking place and local histories being published not just on the island of Ireland, North and South, but throughout the world where there are Irish communities who cherish their heritage.

This commemoration also has a moral dimension in linking Irish people and people of Irish descent in a more conscious involvement with those who suffer famine and deprivation in developing countries today.

Another factor which has strengthened the development of the Irish diaspora is the ease of communication available in this information era. The internet, e-mail and the world wide web, have provided accessible links for those who wish to be in touch with Ireland, and have brought home to those living on the island of Ireland the diversity of the array of some seventy million people around the world who treasure their Irish heritage.

And so, in turn, this diversity of the diaspora shapes our sense of Irishness by instructing us in the values of openness, tolerance and fairmindedness.

It also brings home to us that Irishness is not simply territorial. It includes the bond with Ireland felt by those who are not Irish born, who are citizens of other countries, but are proud of their Irish roots. This wide spectrum helps those living in Ireland to realise that Irishness as a concept is not exclusive. It is broad enough to reach out to everyone on the island of Ireland, and to show itself capable of honouring and listening to those whose sense of identity and whose cultural values may be more British than Irish.

And, if this is done generously, they too - the unionist community - while affirming their Britishness, might find it easier to acknowledge within themselves a component of Irishness, of living on the island of Ireland and of respecting their nationalist neighbours for whom that Irishness is the dominant identity.

As Seamus Heaney put it so well in his last public lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, "there is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds".

One of the most crucial aspects to the concept of Irishness is that of conscious identification with Ireland as an integral part of one's own self-definition.

One has only to consider the work of a number of Irish American writers, some of whom have detailed the fortunes of the Irish in America, but all of whom display the depth of the influence of their ethnic roots in their writing, to appreciate the diversity of the Irish experience. James Farrell, William Kennedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, whose father left Kilkenny during the famine years, John Steinbeck, whose mother's people - the Hamiltons - left Derry in 1851, Thomas Wolfe whose mother was also born in Northern Ireland and Henry James, grandson of an immigrant from a tenant farm in County Cavan.

James Connolly formulated a central question for us when he asked "Who are the Irish?" The question still remains with us, challenging us to find new answers to the complex realities of the modern world, while holding on to what was best and most distinctive in our past. The greatest tribute we can pay to the concept of Irish identity is to ensure that Ireland and its people are both a place and a state of mind, where the diverse traditions in which we have our origins, memories and hopes, are treated with tolerance, understanding and respect.