Remarks at a Reception and Ceremony by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland
Dublin, 30th January 2012
A chairde, is mór an onóir dom a bheith anseo libh anocht, mar Uachtarán.
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am delighted and very honoured to be with you all this evening.
I would like to thank Maurice Cohen and the Jewish Representative Council in Ireland for organising this wonderful event.
There can be no greater honour than to have been elected Uachtarán na hÉireann, and as I said in my inaugural speech, I enter the ninth Presidency with a sense of humility, but also with confidence in the great capacity of our people, the people of Ireland, not only to transcend present difficulties but to realise all of the wonderful possibilities that I believe await us in the years ahead.
In these early days of my Presidency, I am keen to meet as many people as possible, to form new relationships and to achieve my goal of an inclusive citizenship where every citizen participates and everyone is treated with respect. This evening, I have been honoured with an opportunity to meet you and speak to you for the first time as Uachtarán na hÉireann. I hope we will have further opportunity on many occasions throughout my time in office to meet and become better acquainted. I recognise that the different churches and faith communities have an important role to play in helping us to understand our current society, and to appreciate the significance of the spiritual and philosophical dimension of the problems and opportunities which we face.
Ireland has a long tradition of Jewish settlement. Although your community here is small you make a significant contribution to our society in many different ways; a contribution in fact that is out of all proportion to your numbers. Your involvement in public service, in the Arts, in sports, in the professions, in the business community and in so many other areas of society has played an enormous and valuable role in Ireland’s national development and social progress.
As an academic and a person who has come out of a tradition of the Left I wish to place on record too my appreciation for the extraordinary and disproportionate contribution to philosophy, science, culture and particularly music made by your community at international level.
The Jewish community’s journey into the heart of Irish society has
not, of course, always been an easy one. One writer assessing the situation at the beginning of the 20th Century had a wry view of the times.
In 1906 the author Edward Raphael Lipsett, a Jew residing in Dublin wrote “You cannot get one native to remember that a Jew may be an Irishman. The term 'Irish Jew' seems to have a contradictory ring upon the native ear; the idea is wholly inconceivable to the native mind…" It may be somewhat ironic to some, therefore, that one of the best loved and most famous characters in Irish literature is a Hungarian/Irish Jew living in Dublin in the early part of the 20th Century. Leopold Bloom, whose own odyssey around Dublin on the 16th June 1904 so beautifully mapped and immortalised our capital city is symbolic of the ‘perennial outsider’ status that many of the earlier members of the Irish-Jewish community experienced.
They were, of course, terrible moments in Irish history at a time of distorted versions of true religious belief when through ignorance, abuse and violence, Jewish families were forced to migrate within Ireland. But then too we must also remember great Irish people like Michael Dault who half a century earlier defended the Jewish population in Russia and condemned anti-Semitism in all its forms.
Like Mr Bloom, however, we have travelled a long way and today Ireland aspires to and mostly succeeds in being a vibrant multi-cultural society where many different religions are respected and represented and many different cultures and traditions have become part of the tapestry that is our Irish heritage.
I would like to conclude by thanking you all, once again, for honouring me here tonight with this traditional ceremony which four of my predecessors were also privileged to enjoy. It is wonderful to know that the strong connection between the Irish Jewish Community and Uachtarán na hÉireann continues into the 21st Century.
Go n-éirí go geal libh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.