REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH ASSOCIATION FOR CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RELATIONS
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH ASSOCIATION FOR CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RELATIONS RAMADA HOTEL, BELFAST
Thank you Pauline for the invitation and for the welcome to a Conference that is hitting a timely note. Maybe for the first time in a very long time we can use words like Irish, British, Northerner, Southerner, Cross-Border, All-Island, All-Ireland in a much changed context where the old barriers of mistrust have lowered sufficiently to let in curiosity if not, yet, comfort. I hope that through your deliberations we can extend the growing comfort zone, making it easier for people of different and once-hostile perspectives and identities to deal with one another in ways that consolidate the peace, build prosperity and enhance partnership in every sphere and in every corner of this island.
The launch of the new Northern Ireland Executive Government on 8 May this year was without a shadow of doubt a watershed event. A Government led by First Minister Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness simply has to be recognised by any standards as a triumph of hope and optimism over division and rancour. It has released into the body politic and civic society a mood of dispensation to talk with fresh openness and much reduced fear about things that were in some quarters, taboo. For those of us who have grown up through the Troubles, the reducing negativity and growing generosity of spirit has been little short of miraculous.
When the First Minister declared in Dublin last April that he was proud to be an Ulsterman and proud also of his Irish roots, it gave a fresh focus to those thorny issues of identity which have in the past closed us off to one another rather than opening us up to one another. Whereas the past was characterised by the ransacking of history for things to separate and differentiate us from one another, the future has at least the possibility of becoming a place where we can not only grow new relationships but revisit old stories with a view to extracting the shared memory that history conspired to forget or neglect.
Perhaps the best example of the retrieval of memory is the story of Ireland’s contribution to the First World War. As the Irish Government’s website says,
The virtual disappearance of the First World War from the version of Irish history taught to the first few generations of the new independent Irish state had the result that few are aware of the extent of the Irish participation in the actual fighting. The concentration on the experience of the 36th (Ulster) Division at the
Battle of the Somme in Northern Ireland overshadowed the sacrifice of the Nationalist community.
The Island of Ireland Peace Park opened at Messines in Belgium, nine years ago by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and King Albert of Belgium and myself marked the reintroduction of this story, in all its fullness into the contemporary narrative. It led to the first ever post - partition official commemoration of the Somme in Dublin last year, and has helped “to put those forces to positive use by allowing people from the two major traditions to meet on common ground”.
We may yet fulfil the prophetic words of Thomas Kettle, the former Nationalist MP for East Tyrone who served and was killed as a Lieutenant in the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He believed that:
Used with the wisdom which is sown in tears and blood, this tragedy of Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain.
The 82,000 people who attended the GAA’s flagship Croke Park in February for the Six Nations rugby encounter between England and Ireland could also feel the shift of history’s sands towards a much broader and more inclusive narrative than ever before. It was underscored recently when DUP Minister Edwin Poots attended a major GAA Conference and called on the GAA to increase its community outreach programme to reach out to the one million people in Northern Ireland who would have no interest or knowledge of the games and work of the GAA.
Could there be a time coming when the games our children play do not comprehensively define their identities, their religion, their politics? Could there be a time coming when we live easily and comfortably with multi-stranded identities, complex and compound?
Other things are changing us too as much as we are changing ourselves.
Seven years ago Rotimi Adebari, a young Nigerian man arrived in Ireland with his wife and young children. Last July he was elected Mayor of Portlaoise. In Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral a few days ago an African priest welcomed an American choir to “our country”. A Harvard-educated Guatemalan heads up the biggest support network for the Travelling Community in Ireland and talks about “our Travellers”. Over 160 nations now co-habit in the Southern part of this island, their children growing up with twin identities, Irish-Polish, Latvian-Irish just like the people I meet around the world, the American-Irish, the New Zealand-Irish, the British-Irish, all carrying the imprint of multiple identities and none compelled to live in a false either-or world where you have to choose utter fidelity to one alone, but carrying a deep sense of pride and conviction about all elements of their heritage.
It is of course easier to be generous, to be curious about the otherness of others, to make friends across historic divides when there is peace, when the sabres have stopped rattling and the language of hatred has given way to the language of engagement. And we know, for the poet told us that “peace comes dropping slow”. So much has been invested in this peace, so much cruel waste and loss and grief, so much courage and risk taking, so much sheer heavy-lifting of hearts and minds. It has been hard-won and it still has its sceptics, its detractors and those who have not fully signed up. Yet as first steps go, these first steps have been remarkably surefooted. The Irish Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and their respective Civil Services are working well together across a wide range of areas co-ordinating policy and planning for the benefit of communities north and south of the border.
The Irish Government is investing some £400 million pounds, or €580 million, towards the upgrading of roads to Derry and Letterkenny, and from Belfast to Larne. It is investing in the restoration of the Ulster Canal from Clones to Lough Erne. An all-island electricity market was launched at the beginning of this month, and very soon southern doctoral and post-doctoral research grants will be opened up to the brightest minds north of the border. The bad news from Seagate in Limavady which has an economic impact on both sides of the Border provokes a shared response and a promise of collaborative action. These are definitely exciting times.
Seven all-island bodies continue to take forward work in important areas such as tourism and food safety, trade and inland fisheries, and Ministers now meet to discuss practical co-operation in areas like education and health, agriculture and the environment. This means that Ministers like Michelle Gildernew and Mary Coughlan - two women, it’s worth pointing out - can get together and discuss their joint response to urgent issues like foot and mouth disease, and successfully co-ordinate a plan to keep our island safe. And it means Ministers like Michael McGimpsey and Mary Harney can meet to discuss how cancer and GP services can best be delivered to the people of Donegal and Derry. At the end of all these partnerships, collaborations, discussions and initiatives Unionists are still Unionists, Nationalists are still Nationalists but now they are good neighbours doing what good neighbours do for one another and with one another.
It is these practical possibilities for fluent everyday co-operation that excite so many of us fortunate enough to have spent significant amounts of our lives on each side of the border. We have been significantly shaped by the lived actuality of each place. Too many people have been shaped negatively by images or impressions of that part of this island which they did not know or did not want to know. Old images if they were ever true may no longer be true. South of the Border, life has altered beyond recognition as the old days of mass emigration and underachievement have given way to one of the wealthiest and most successful economies in the world. Some of the changes are subtle, others are sweeping, but we have a job to do in helping our neighbours to comprehend those changes and the extent to which they are making Ireland a place of true inclusion and respect for difference, a place of common ground.
In essence, what is happening here is that for the first time ever, peace and prosperity are aligning on the island of Ireland. It is a remarkable phenomenon, a remarkable alchemy, outside the ken of any of us. It has set us on a journey for which we, in truth, have few compass points. But we know with all our being that it has the potential to be a journey of wonder and hugely exciting possibilities. I mentioned earlier the remarkable events here in Northern Ireland in 2007 and the opportunities it has opened up. Well, add two years of that spirit, three years, five years, ten years. Instead of the generations - centuries even - that we have spent on this island, and in this part of it, blocking each other, negating each other, cancelling each other, we now face into an era in which we put our respective genius to work FOR each other, WITH each other.
There has never been an Ireland like that. And so now we must get ready to harvest. To harness. Not for a moment am I suggesting that all the problems are solved. There remain huge challenges before it can be said that equality’s day has fully come on this island. But my goodness we are in a better position to tackle those challenges now than we have ever been before.
Here in Northern Ireland, that new era of opportunity and potential opens up for us one particular possibility that has never credibly presented itself before: to work together to construct a common vision for a new society. After all the years of them and us, of two utterly polarised world views that did not recognise each other’s validity, what an amazing thing it would be if we could actually begin imagining and dreaming together what a shared vision for this place and space would look like for us and for our children. Listening to and watching Dr. Paisley and Martin McGuinness work together as they have this past six months, that seems to me now an entirely credible proposition, and one that I think holds enormous potential. Of course, just as history and geography have intertwined everything on these two islands of ours, so such a journey here in Northern Ireland would centrally involve your neighbours to the South and East of you and we would participate in it with all our hearts. But its centre of gravity would surely rest here. Exciting times ahead unquestionably.
In closing, let me make the case for culture as another key binding force in the remarkable journey that we are on. One of the richest cultural heritages in the world is right here under our noses. It draws from many wells, from Celt and Gael, from Anglo and Irish from Scottish and Planter from native and newcomer. I believe the artist has much to tell us and teach us as we seek to make sense of the, at times bewildering, pace of change. Their insights and ability to see the essence of things can be of huge benefit. There is all around us one of the world’s most beautiful and varied and accessible physical landscapes.
With the fair and honourable settling of the Constitutional question under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the old suspicions that kept us from fully exploring both that heritage and those landscapes are draining away. Behind us at last are the wasted years. Ahead of us are the years of exploration of the once feared otherness. I predict we will like each other much more than we ever thought possible and perhaps in time to come, the friendship we establish North and South may inspire those who inhabit Dublin’s Northside and Dublin’s Southside to take the risk and look across the Liffey and see what they have been missing.