REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ‘DUBLINSWELL’ EVENT
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE 'DUBLINSWELL' EVENT
Dia dhíbh go léir. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
Ladies and Gentlemen I’m delighted to join you here this evening to mark and to celebrate our capital city’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. Dublin’s literary credentials need little rehearsal if any either at home or abroad for this is the city mapped and immortalised in one of the greatest literary masterpieces of the twentieth century.
It is the city in which three great Nobel Laureates in Literature first saw the light, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. It is the adopted home of our most recent Nobel laureate in literature, Seamus Heaney. It is home to a litany of world-class writers and to an educated audience of readers of literature and after yesterday’s St. Patrick’s day parade through O’Connell Street, we all know thanks to Roddy Doyle, that Dublin and Ireland are quite simply “Brilliant.”
Stories matter to the Irish. Our literature probes without ever exhausting the experiences and imagination drawn from our dramatic past and present, our landscape so ridiculously diverse and marvellous for such a small island, our centuries old culture of scattering across the world and planting Irishness of one sort or another in so many places, our emerging new culture of integrating immigrants in to Ireland, from the endless well of the Irish language, the unique fluency we have in its younger sister the English language….. the sources and streams that fill Dublin’s literary imagination are so phenomenally diverse that they are reminiscent of the sage who said that you never step in the same stream twice and the even greater sage who remarked that in fact you never step in the same stream once.
This evening we are privileged to step into the stream in the company of some of the most exciting exponents of Dublin’s Literary tradition and we are doubly privileged that we do so in celebration of UNESCO’s recognition of Dublin’s love affair with literature.
I congratulate everyone concerned and look forward to the many good things that will be accomplished through this focus on Dublin as a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. With the sun shining on O’Connell Street yesterday and all day today, it was tempting to believe that maybe literature, maybe Dublinswell can after all teach us to believe how brilliant our city and our country truly are.
Comghairdeas libh arís agus go raibh maith agaibh go léir.