REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE AT IRISH COMMUNITY RECEPTION, SEATTLE, WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY, 2005
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE AT IRISH COMMUNITY RECEPTION, SEATTLE, WEDNESDAY, 25 MAY, 2005
Tá áthas orm agus ar mo fear céile, Maírtín, bheith i bhúr measc tráthnona.
I would like to thank all those members of the Seattle Irish community who have given us such a warm Irish welcome. I am also delighted to welcome members of the Irish communities from other parts of Washington State, from Spokane, and from Portland, Oregon, and from as far away as Missoula and Butte, Montana. The Consul General tells me it should really be called “Butte, Ireland”! All these many thousand miles away from Ireland you bring the strength of two welcomes, one Canadian, one Irish to tonight’s reception.
I bring greetings from the Emerald Isle to the “Emerald City” with its magnificent natural beauty that I have heard about and read about for a long time and now at last have the chance to see. The first stories I heard about the great Pacific North West came from that remarkable book by Donegal man Mici MacGabhann, “Rothaí Mór an tSaoil”, known in English as “The Hard Road to Klondike”. He was driven from a famine ravaged Ireland by a mixture of necessity and curiosity and his travels took him to what was then a tough 19th century frontier land where only the strong survived. Today that indomitable spirit of enterprise and creativity, of resilience and determination is evident in the modern landscape of progress and prosperity. We are proud of the Irish emigrants who came here for over a century and a half and who contributed in no small way to that spirit and that progress.
Originally, the Irish came to work in jobs such as railroad construction, coal mining, logging and farming. To quote an excerpt from a letter sent in 1883 by one such Irish emigrant in Puget Sound to his family in Ireland:
‘To speak in truth, my last thought going to bed at night and first arising in the morning are of home. The thoughts of it everlastingly haunt my mind. I often think if I were back in the Atlantic States I would be home to ye every Christmas, but we are so far West here that if we attempted to go any further, we would walk into the Pacific Ocean!
But then I still think I am in as good a country as there is in the world today for a poor man. ….and any man here that will work and save his earnings, and make use of his brains can grow rich.’
The wonderful letter tells of the familiar conflicts in the emigrant’s heart, the unbearable loneliness and isolation, the longing for family and for friends, the dread of never being able to go home again, the courage and stoicism in the search for opportunity and advancement in life, the ambition so often thwarted in Ireland by poverty and oppression but never obliterated. So they came to Seattle and made it their home and the home of their children but if they loved this Pacific State they also kept alive the love of that far off Atlantic island.
Now a flight connects us in less than half a day and technology keeps us in touch around the clock and a new generation of talented and educated Irish men and women come from a very successful Ireland, as confident professionals to work in the North Western Pacific’s cutting edge industries. They bring not just their technical expertise but their country’s language, literature, music, dance, its character and its values, putting them at the service of their adopted city and their homeland. I thank all those who work so hard to promote Irish heritage and culture here and in particular, I wish great success to the Seattle Irish Community’s forthcoming Joyce exhibit and to Portland’s planned famine memorial, a hand-carved replica of the High Cross of Clonmacnoise.
Even Joyce would have difficulty recognising Ireland today. In a few short years it has become one of the most prosperous and productive societies in the European Union, with an unemployment rate lower than that of the United States and half the rate of the Euro zone average. Ireland has low inflation, high growth and one of the lowest debt to GDP ratios of any of the developed countries. We are now a country of net immigration and for the first time in one hundred and fifty years our population is growing.
But some things remain despite all the changes of recent years. Our ties to our family throughout the world are as vibrant and vital today as they were in the days when their hard-earned dollars kept the home fires burning. Today they feed and nourish our culture, allowing us to draw from deep and varied wells of imagination and experience. They also create as you have done a delightful feeling of being among old friends and not strangers. Thank you for your wonderful ambassadorship for Ireland here in America’s North West. You make Ireland proud.
Go mba fada buan sibh.
Thank You.