Remarks by President McAleese at a Reception for the Polish Community in Ireland
Remarks by President McAleese at a Reception for the Polish Community in Ireland hosted by H.E. Witold Sobków
Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Good Afternoon, Dzień dobry.
Both Martin and I have been so looking forward to meeting you this evening in the Residence of Ambassador Sobków.
We thank him and his spouse Iwona for their hospitality, and for bringing members of the Polish community in Ireland together for this function.
As President, I am glad to be able to put on record my admiration and thanks for the huge contribution being made by immigrant communities to today’s Ireland. Poland makes by far the largest contribution by our immigrant community and so I welcome this chance to meet and get to know so many of you who have made Ireland your home.
During my time as President, I have been privileged to visit Poland on two memorable occasions. The first was in June 2003 when I had the honour of making a State Visit to your country which took me to Warsaw and Lublin. President Kwasniewski and his colleagues were wonderful hosts and I have many happy memories of that visit.
I returned to Poland in January 2005 for ceremonies commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz - Birkenau. All of us who were in Auschwitz that day were given a vivid reminder of the tragic history of Europe and of how much its people, not least the people of Poland, suffered throughout the twentieth century.
Out of the ashes of a devastated post-war Europe, and only freed a decade and a half ago from Soviet domination, the countries of central and eastern Europe have helped to re-create a democratic and free continent. This enormous achievement represents an apt, living memorial to the millions who died in the War, and to those who campaigned for political freedom during the bleak decades of the Cold War.
In celebrating Poland’s re-emergence as a modern and democratic European state we remember the outstanding contribution of the late Pope John Paul II, who lived to see that Day of Welcomes in Ireland when his country and nine others took their place among the family of nations that is the European Union. Ireland was proud to host that historic day in May 2004, for we who had benefited so much from joining the EU in 1973 in the first enlargement have always been champions of enlargement and indeed we were one of the three member states which immediately admitted citizens of the new Member States to work without restrictions. That decision was a recognition of the fact that immigration has been a key factor in our continued economic success.
The “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” enshrined in the EU Treaty cannot be achieved solely through increased economic exchanges. Bonds between people are also a vital part of the Union’s life blood and how better to achieve this than by living and working whether permanently or temporarily in another EU country.
Many thousands of hard-working and well-educated Poles have made the move to Ireland since May 2004. Your presence here is an opportunity for us to build real and lasting links between Ireland and Poland and to help give practical effect to the European ideal of solidarity between our diverse peoples who nevertheless share an intrinsic attachment to common values. In Ireland we have ensured that Polish people living here enjoy precisely the same rights, entitlements and protections as Irish people. It is not the case that there is one law for the Polish and one for the Irish. We believe in the absolute importance of respecting the individuality, the dignity, the rights of every person that makes up our society, no matter who they are or from what land they come.
This is probably the largest movement of any nationality into Ireland in modern times. Some will bring their experience and skills back to help build a new Poland, others will stay for the long haul, contributing their talents, skills, stories, their music, dance, cooking, language and history to the well from which Irish culture grows and mutates in each generation. All are Ambassadors for Poland here in Ireland and we will be the richer for your presence. I hope you will be the richer and the happier for being here though I know too, from our own experience of emigration as a people that the emigrant heart always carries the imprint of home in heartache.
Your presence here, and the profile your community has gained, means that Ireland’s connection with Poland has never been as strong or as tangible as it is today. This rich vein of Irish-Polish interaction is something that is well worth celebrating and a new generation of Polish Irish children will soon be growing up around us uniting our two countries in and through their lives and their love of two places, two peoples, two cultures.
I am told there is a saying in Polish that “a guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year”. I hope that those of you who have come here recently are happy with what you have seen in Ireland and how you have been welcomed. We are all of us fortunate to be living in times of greater freedom and prosperity than were ever contemplated by our parents or even by ourselves. It is even more fortunate that we can enjoy them deep in each others company.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir. Dziękuję bardzo.