REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL P.J. MCGRORY HUMAN RIGHTS LECTURE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL P.J. MCGRORY HUMAN RIGHTS LECTURE ST MARY’S UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, BELFAST
Ladies and Gentlemen, and in particular, family, friends and former colleagues of Paddy McGrory, I am delighted to be here this evening.
My thanks to Barra for the invitation to give this annual lecture in commemoration of Paddy McGrory, a fearless advocate and a true advocate of peace. Like most of you, I find it hard to accept that almost fifteen years have passed since Paddy’s death but it is very reassuring that his memory, his legacy, his values and his uncompromising witness to those values are held sacred by those who knew, loved and respected him and are placed not in the past but through this lecture they are kept at the centre of contemporary dialogue where they can help all of us to intuit the steps we need to take, the connections we need to make, the views we need to review, the compromises we need to make, the stands we need to take, to keep alive and growing the hard-won peace that was his hope and his dream.
I am particularly struck by the fact that this annual lecture which has generally dealt with tough and thorny issues to do with politics and justice is held during a lively and vibrant arts festival, Féile an Phobail, where music and politics, comedy and soul-searching, drama and dance are not a series of discrete bunkers but a rich and robust warp and weft of everyday community life and entirely consistent with Paddy’s own great personal interest in Irish culture and music along with his abiding passion for human rights.
Over the thirteen years since this memorial lecture was inaugurated, Paddy’s memory has been inserted into a series of lectures and debates on issues to do with justice, human rights and the evolution of the Peace Process. Audiences have been reminded of the importance for stability and democracy of rights, of laws, of accountability, of public vigilance, of credible systems of vindication of rights. They have been reminded that human rights are not concessions begrudgingly given but rather an innate part of the birthright of every single human being that arises simply by virtue of being human. The quality of our lived lives often rests on the presence or absence of respect for those rights at every level of society, from the political and legal systems within which we live to the streets and families within which we live. Our individual respect for others or its absence can make or break their lives just as their respect for us or its absence can make or break ours. Tonight I want to look at the basic building block on which all these essential things rest and depend and that is the critical importance of the single, individual human person who is unflinchingly committed to building a safe and humanly decent world where all have the chance to flourish and where all are held in equal regard and dignity.
Such individuals are not as plentiful on the ground as we might like but Paddy McGrory was such a man. In an Irish Times report which appeared at the time of Paddy’s death, he was described as “… one of the North’s most distinguished criminal lawyers whose professional career spanned almost half a century … a perfectionist held in the highest respect throughout the legal profession”. Born and raised not far from here, Paddy’s commitment to his profession, his place and the people he came from was all-consuming. A lovely quote from Seamus Heaney’s speech at his 70th birthday party a few months ago in Dublin would seem to be perfectly apt also as a summary of Paddy McGrory’s philosophy of life - “We should keep our feet on the ground to signify that nothing is beneath us, but we should also lift up our eyes to say nothing is beyond us.”
Paddy’s love of this divided city and society, his passion for its reconciliation and healing was summed up for me in a chance encounter with him on Ormeau Avenue one day where he had just given an interview to the BBC in the wake of his successful, personal action against certain newspapers which had defamed him. It had been a bitter battle for this man who abhorred political violence and for this superb lawyer whose professional advocacy on behalf of certain defendants had led to him being accused of sharing their perspectives. When he took that action, he took it not just on his own behalf but on behalf of all lawyers and indeed on behalf of the supremacy of the law itself. He believed in the right of all to a fair trial and to first-class representation before the courts. These things are the very hallmarks of civilised societies, of advanced democracies. They rest on standards that are timeless and on the unbiased integrity of police, prosecuting services, judges and lawyers. Paddy was, above all, a principled and unimpeachable officer of the court, his win a vindication of himself and of the law. I stopped to congratulate him and could see just how tired he was, how drained by the sheer struggle of it all. I suggested, half jokingly, that he should use the money to buy a holiday hideaway in the sun. His answer has stayed with me since. ‘Sure’, he said, ‘it would be only one more place to go and I am happy where I am’.
That victory made the work of human rights lawyers and advocates today that little bit easier and better understood. It is an important part of his remarkable legacy, as is his commitment to the law as a tool, in fact the tool par excellence for the resolution of conflict, the pursuit of truth, the protection and vindication of civil and human rights, the sine qua non of any society yearning for peace and stability, for lives beyond ghettoes and sectarian divisions. Last autumn it was my great pleasure and privilege to speak at a conference held in Derry to mark the 40th anniversary of the civil rights movement here in the North, a movement which had a much wider international context. Paddy, of course, worked as a voluntary legal adviser for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and so is rightly counted among those on the roll of honour of all those people who set out forty years ago, and at considerable personal cost, to create a much happier Northern Ireland - a shared homeland where every man, woman and child, whatever their religion, politics or identity could experience the richness and fullness of life, the liberation of potential and energy that would come from a society based on mutual respect and full equality of citizenship and an island of Ireland based on good neighbourliness and partnership. These things were then a very tall order and in some quarters thought to be an unlikely eventuality given the longstanding and seething nature of the mutual distrust which held relationships on this island and between these islands in such a tense and troubled mess.
Yet today a new narrative is evolving along the very lines that Paddy would have wished. That it is evolving is down to the power of individuals to become advocates of change in their own heads, hearts, homes, streets and communities. The self-critiquing, the willingness to think again, to think anew which underpins the mass movement which is now the Peace Process sits on the courage of each one of those individuals. They do not agree on everything and may disagree on many things but all agree on the basic essentials without which peace remains elusive. They disagree profoundly on whether Northern Ireland’s future is best served within the United Kingdom or within a united Ireland but now agree to debate that issue with one another, to attempt to persuade one another by words and not force. They have been persuaded to this powerful and morally intelligent new dispensation, with the mutual compromises it has entailed, by the powerful and insistent advocacy of courageous men and women who like Paddy McGrory stood right on the parapet when it was a dangerous and lonely place to be.
Paddy was the archetype of a human rights defender, one of those frontliners described so well by Amnesty International as those who “on their own or with others take action to ensure the promotion and protection of human rights for all. The important thing is not who they are, but what they do. Human rights defenders take peaceful action and believe everybody has equal rights.” Paddy was never afraid of the consequences of making his voice heard, however messy or complex, because he knew that only through speaking out and speaking up could the debate be generated which would underpin this new dispensation through which all of us on this island have a unique and miraculous chance to craft a future which is marked by a new culture of generosity and graciousness, the engine of which is driven by justice, equality, fairness, tolerance and dialogue.
That new, emerging culture which is now well beyond the mere cusp of change is supported by a number of important pillars, some of which have been much discussed in these lectures, the Institutions and processes of the Good Friday and St. Andrew’s Agreements, the political leadership across these islands, the constancy of support from the United States and the European Union, and the one best represented by Paddy and people like him, the pillar that is civic society. All these elements and more keep the dynamic for peace strong even in the face of those who would wish to weaken and destroy it. The work of politicians is what generally makes the headlines and the difficulties they face should in no way be underestimated for, as the poet John Hewitt put it, “they build to fill the centuries’ arrears”. That is a task of formidable proportions and one which this generation has done more to redeem than any past generation. It is a task fraught with difficulties as they try to gather the fragments of a society which has suffered so much and whose members are not all at the same point on the journey. That is why the work of civic society is so important. It is the work that rarely makes the headlines but it is the lifeblood of reconciliation and healing for it is in the civic space that people stop being strangers to one another and build the bridges of mutual respect and friendship which make streets safe to walk for everyone’s children. There are old forcefields of enmity and distrust to be crossed and though the journeys may be short geographically from one side of a road or village or town to another, the journey of the heart is much much longer. The Good Friday Agreement has helped set the scene which facilitates those journeys of the heart and more and more people are making them. I have met many of them here and in Áras an Uachtaráin and it has been a particular privilege to sit around the table and share a meal with men and women whose profound sense of estrangement from the things I hold dear would in past times have kept us at arm’s length as people who lived cheek by jowl, not as neighbours but as strangers, in a festering and dangerous mutual incomprehension. We are not challenged to create peace with our friends but with our enemies and we on this island have reason to know the hell on earth that arises from the enmity of neighbours who see themselves as strangers to one another.
The context for all of us has changed radically just as Paddy knew it would when justice and equality took their place in the mainstream of the new political and legal framework now operative within Northern Ireland, between the two jurisdictions which share this island and between these neighbouring islands. As the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka put it, “justice is the first condition of humanity.” Paddy believed that and he believed in the law as the conduit to justice. He did not live to see the Good Friday Agreement but he knew he merely carried a baton for a length of days and carried it in the hope that when his hand could no longer carry it there would be another hand to lift it. The same is true for all of us. In our lifetime we will probably not fill in all those centuries’ arrears but we will do what we can to make the work of the next generation a lot less difficult. Sooner or later we will find ourselves or some generation will find itself out of this large hold of history’s making, walking on an even surface, on a solid terrain, looking at a new and open landscape. In that world beyond the centuries’ arrears, this island will be a place of many races, faiths, mixed nationalities and combinations of identities. It will be a place where parents take great pains to teach their children from their earliest days to be proud of who and what they are, to be enthusiastic about living in a comfortably diverse society, to be respectful of all others especially those who are different, to be aware of the human need, the human right to be included in the mainstream, to have equality of opportunity and dignity and to assume equal responsibility for sustaining this still-fragile peace and its potential which no other generation has ever known. The old twisted knots of history that kept hell going for so long and brought devastation to so many are being untangled and straightened out, not by accident but by design, not by doing nothing but by doing something. The more hands there are to the work, the quicker the progress.
All of this represents an enormous transformation of the situation that prevailed in the 1940s as Paddy began his career as a young lawyer and human rights activist. It is still a far from perfect picture and there has been plenty of heartache in the events at Massarene, Craigavon and Coleraine, to say nothing of the disappointment that the legitimate hope and desire for a completely peaceful Twelfth of July were not fully realised despite huge efforts. But it is precisely in those huge efforts that success will eventually come. It is in not giving up, in refusing to be cowed into giving up, in holding on to the vision of a just and peaceful society and committing to that vision through thick and thin, that the small steps of progress will accrete to what history will one day judge to be giant leaps forward. This place is worth the effort. Its people are worth the effort. Its future will be a story worth telling. In the telling there will be a chapter on Paddy McGrory – Fearless Advocate and True Advocate of Peace and on all those who lifted the heavy baton that fell from his worn hands almost fifteen years ago.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.