REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MC ALEESE, AT A DINNER/RECEPTION HOSTED BY RUSSELL MAC LELLAN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MC ALEESE, AT A DINNER/RECEPTION HOSTED BY RUSSELL MAC LELLAN, PREMIER OF NOVA SCOTIA
It is a great pleasure for me to join you this evening as part of my State visit to Canada, and I am very grateful to you for your warm words of welcome to this special part of Canada – a place with strong links to Celtic Europe. On seeing the beauty of Scotland, Samuel Johnson wrote: “A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth”. Having seen a little of the beauty of Cape Breton, I can only say that the same must apply to New Scotland.
Nova Scotia wears its badge of Scottishness very proudly. A sign near Iona in Cape Breton reads proudly “Failte Gu Cridhe Gaelach Albainn Ur” - Welcome to the Gaelic Heart of New Scotland. The spelling and pronunciation would be a little strange to Irish people - and we might wonder at what you did to the language we lent to you - but the sentiment would be understood.
Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton in particular, brings together the people and history of a small part of Europe - the Irish and Scottish - Celtic cousins with ties of language, kinship and sometimes faith - the French, who had ties with Scotland as part of the “Auld Alliance”, with Ireland through faith and learning, and occasional military enterprises - and of course the English, neighbour and sometimes adversary of all three.
Before the Great Famine of the 1840s, those Irish who came to Canada were not always impoverished, but they were rarely wealthy adventurers. Many were indentured servants or poor farmers who realised that rural Ireland at that time had little to offer them with its remnant of penal laws, absentee landlords and tiny plots that could not support them.
Paralleling the Irish flight from poverty - and from a political system based on inequality which reached its awful culmination in the Great Famine - the Highland Scots were coming to Canada in increasing numbers. While the Famine is imprinted deep in our folk memory, the Highland Clearances carry a similar resonance in the mind of Highland Scots. Many of you are descendants of those people, people who could not live in their own countries but who flourished here instead.
Nova Scotia has an important place in the history and development of democracy. In 1820 when Cape Breton became part of Nova Scotia the people had the good sense to select two Irishmen to represent them at the House of Assembly. One was Lawrence Kavanagh who was a Catholic and unable to take his seat because of the restrictive laws at the time. Several Protestant members of the Assembly championed his cause, and in 1823 Kavanagh was permitted to take his seat and the Nova Scotia Assembly became the first British legislature to allow a Catholic to take a seat - six years before Catholic emancipation at Westminster. Nova Scotia went on to form the first responsible Government in British North America in 1848 - half of whom were Irish.
The sort of co-operation between Protestant and Catholic at that time was a feature of life in Ireland also. In my home town of Belfast, the first two Catholic churches were built at the end of the 18th century with significant contributions from Protestants. Of course, co-operation between Protestant and Catholic was not limited to church building. This year in Ireland we mark the 200th anniversary of the Rising by the United Irishmen, a rising which aimed to unite Protestant and Catholic.
In the last quarter of the 18th century Ulster was the fountainhead of a liberal movement of Protestant nationalism that aimed at winning a greater degree of independence for the Irish parliament and making it a more genuinely representative assembly. This was to be achieved by removing civil and religious disabilities both from Protestant dissenters, mostly Presbyterian, and from Catholics. Inspired by these aims the Society of United Irishmen was formed in 1791 in Belfast. The Society moved towards more militant methods which culminated in the ‘98 Rebellion, during which many Belfast Protestants were imprisoned or hanged for their attempts at establishing a republic.
The Rising of ‘98 reminds us that equating Protestant with unionist, and Catholic with nationalist is not always appropriate. Of critical importance in our peace process – and indeed central to the progress that has so far been made - has been the need to understand and to take account of the complex matrix of relationships involved. Too often in the past we have tended to see things from only one point of view, to focus too exclusively on our own part of the picture. Our view of history has been fragmented. The Ulster poet, John Hewitt, points to this when he writes:
History is selective, Give us instead
the whole mosaic, the tesserae,
that we may judge if a period indeed
has a pattern and is not merely
a handful of coloured stones in the dust.
When the people of Ireland, North and South, endorsed the Good Friday agreement in referenda, they voted for a future that would be more than “stones in the dust”, they voted for the whole mosaic. The terrible atrocity in Omagh - an attempt to smash the mosaic of the peace process and return to the days of stones and dust - in uniting the community in grief, failed signally to do that. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Canadian people for the strong messages of support given at the time of the Omagh bombing. I know that a number of memorial services were held in various parts of Canada which I think reflects the level of concern and support for the peace process in Ireland among the Canadian people. For your untiring support throughout the peace process, I thank you in the name of all the people of Ireland.
ENDS