REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTIONCOMMEMORATING THE NORTHERN IRELAND CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION IN ÁRAS AN UACHTARÁIN COMMEMORATING THE NORTHERN IRELAND CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
Dia dhíbh a chairde go léir agus fáílte chuig Áras an Uachtaráin inniu.
I extend the traditional welcome – céad míle fáilte – a 100,000 welcomes to you all to this house and this reception which marks the 40th anniversary of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Campaign. This anniversary sees us not at the end of anything or the beginning but somewhere in the early chapters of a significant culture change which is, even in this week of awful violence, already showing a cross-community, cross-border and east west solidarity that is deeply reassuring.
For each one of you, these past forty years are the story of your lives woven into the long, long struggle to transform Northern Ireland from what Lord Trimble described as a “cold house for Catholics”, into a dynamic, post-conflict homeland with a warm embrace for all its citizens. The decades in between brought dreadful sadness to many homes and left a legacy of heartache and bitterness that make the progress, so fa,r of the Peace Process all the more remarkable and miraculous. Many a time, a just and lasting peace must have seemed to you a dim and distant prospect and yet you found the strength to believe its possibility and to work for its realisation. We know, because two referenda held in 1998 told us, that this peace is the democratic will and wish of the overwhelming majority of the people who inhabit this divided Ireland - on this subject there is no division, no difference of opinion. No-one on this island has a mandate for so-called political violence. There is only a mandate for politics and it is a mandate supported not only by those who were always wedded to constitutional politics but those who by their own admission were not but who have changed their minds.
The evidence has been mounting of the dynamism, optimism and opportunity which have been opened up by the politics of peaceful partnership, underpinned by an infrastructure which upholds and vindicates the civil rights of every single citizen. The evidence tells us too that the politics of partnership are not easy, require careful, patient nursing and eternal vigilance. Not everyone has been persuaded, as is evident from the ongoing campaign of violence of republican dissidents and the dilatoriness of loyalist paramilitaries to decommission. Yet, for all that, in this week of all weeks we need to remind ourselves that we have seen the construction of a new narrative inside Northern Ireland, between North and South and between Great Britain and Ireland.
These huge and positive changes are real and they are a thorough vindication of the work of civil rights activism born in much more difficult times. It was work underpinned by the legendary scholarship and fact-gathering of Dr Conn McCluskey and his equally legendary wife Patricia and I pay particular tribute to them today in the presence of their daughter, Margaret. They are a vindication too of the fresh thinking unlocked by the advent of wider access to second-level and third-level education. Brain-power eventually won out over brawn. Dialogue, persuasion, internationalisation of debates, innovative thinking all helped shift the deadweight of history off our shoulders. A new culture of partnership and trust began to grow in the unlikely soil of bitter division.
In the wake of the dreadful events in Massereene and Craigavon, we have seen a spontaneous and reassuring solidarity among people of all persuasions and politics. The plant of peace is clearly not yet a full grown oak tree but neither is it the fragile sapling it once was. A lot more people tend to its health and it has a lot of committed, watchful, careful gardeners. It is right that we should remember those who did not need to be persuaded of the inalienability of civil and human rights, who knew intuitively the inhumanity of sectarianism, who saw the wastefulness and the dangers of systemic oppression. You dreamt of a country which would cherish its citizens equally, you worked for it long and hard and you faced down, at considerable personal cost, the many obstacles between the widespread injustice of forty years ago and the widespread hope of today. That hope is no mere false optimism; it is safeguarded and driven by the Good Friday Agreement as well as a raft of rights-based legislation designed to vindicate the dignity and equality of all and to create a vehicle through which the competing ambitions of continuing membership of the United Kingdom and membership of a United Ireland can be thrashed out decently, verbally, democratically, peacefully.
This week is one of the worst for violence in many years. That violence was designed to rock the Peace Process and to rubbish all that has been accomplished these past forty years. It is an attack on the civil liberties of everyone who shares this island and we need champions like you to keep us firmly on the path beyond the paralysis of history and the ghastly futility of violence.
I thank the Committee which organised last year’s commemorations for their kind invitation to me to participate in that great occasion in Derry in October. This reception is my thank you to each of you for making us and keeping us part of a worldwide impulse for the full liberation of humanity that is still transforming the mixed fortunes of life on this planet.
Go fada buan sibh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir. Thank you.