REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CONFERRING OF THE AOSDÁNA TORC ON ANTHONY CRONIN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CONFERRING OF THE AOSDÁNA TORC ON ANTHONY CRONIN 70 MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN 2
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá lúcháir orm bheith anseo libh inniu ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
Eminent members of Aosdána, I am delighted to join you today to honour Anthony Cronin.
It is not twenty years since Aosdána was formally inaugurated in 1983 and since then it has honoured and encouraged Ireland’s men and women of the arts recognising those of outstanding merit and assisting Aosdána’s members to “devote their energies fully to their art”.
In ancient times the Aosdána formed a superior social class just below the nobility and way above the commoners. Thankfully today’s ranking is one of esteem rather than caste. Quality of achievement matters more than commercial success and in its very existence Aosdána sets the tone for the relationship between the State and the Arts. The award of the Cnuas is itself a remarkable counter to the canard that Ireland censors rather than celebrates its artists.
There is something very special about having the distinction of membership of Aosdána conferred by ones peers but election as one of the five Saoithe is a rare honour, a cherished accolade. The gold torc signifies a person of exceptional merit, a true leader whose contribution to the arts in Ireland has been outstanding. It goes today to Anthony Cronin, Ireland’s leading man of letters, playwright, teacher, critic, novelist, biographer, cultural commentator, poet and smiling public man.
Over the last three quarters of a century Anthony’s achievements include the novels; The Life of Riley and Identity Papers, important works of criticism like A Question of Modernity and Heritage Now, biographies of Samuel Beckett, and that Trinity of Irish literature Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. His input into The Bell, both literary and editorial, and later to the Irish Times and the Irish Independent form important contemporary annals of the cultural compost by which the blossoming of modern Ireland was fertilized. His books of poetry RMS Titanic, Reductionist Poem, The End of the Modern World as well as The Minotaur and Other Poems, have surely added glory to his achievements. Anyone who aspires to an understanding of modern Ireland’s embodiment of the human condition in all its absurdity and vivacity, its possibilities and implausibilities, will find in Anthony Cronin a sure guide.
As a critic, Anthony strongly rejected that sort of analysis that demands the decoding of texts through the search for abstruse interpretations. His wonderfully subtle account of the life of literary Ireland is not only colourful and witty, it is also a clear-eyed and astringent account of a time of great achievement with its ravaging enemies of promise from excess of drink, social rigidity and insecurity, poverty and the ever-present begrudgery which is so often deplored and practised in the same sentence. His reflections on culture are as acute today as they were back in the 1950s when they first began and those biographies of Brian O’Nolan and Samuel Beckett dazzled with their mixture of irreverence, affection, carefully distilled knowledge and scholarship.
And besides brilliance as a novelist, critic and biographer, he is also a beguilingly approachable poet, as comfortable writing a poem of commemoration for Vinegar Hill as he is in taking the reader from the apparently straightforward world of a child’s football match to the exploited children of the third world and a meditation on the bleak side of the global economy.
Critics and cultural historians have a huge impact upon the way we see and interpret out world but it is the poets who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. As a poet, Anthony has played his full part as one of our unacknowledged legislators but more than that, he has also played a stellar role in Public Affairs as a cultural adviser. In that role he played a leading part in the institution of Aosdána, and in garnering public recognition and respect for the Arts and for artists. It is entirely right that he should receive Aosdána’s greatest accolade, the Gold Torc.
In recognition of what he is – statesman par excellence of the arts and what he has helped Ireland to become, it gives me great pleasure to proclaim Anthony Cronin a Saoi and to confer upon him this Torc as a tribute to his golden words and golden deeds.
Go raibh maith agaibh.