REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE REFORM CLUB, London Tuesday, 20th APRIL, 1999
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE REFORM CLUB, London Tuesday, 20th APRIL, 1999
I am grateful to the Political Committee of the Reform Club for giving me this opportunity to reflect on modern Ireland in such an appropriate setting.
The great Irish leader, Daniel O’Connell and his supporters were of course among the founders of the Reform Club. Ireland was at the core of Liberal politics, and of the activities of this Committee, for much of the nineteenth century. To come to the Reform, to Charles Barry’s wonderful Clubhouse, in the footsteps of Daniel O’Connell, the Gladstonian Liberals, and Herbert Asquith, is a thought-provoking opportunity for a President of Ireland.
The Ulster poet, Louis McNeice, like me born in Belfast, left Spain at the beginning of the Spanish civil war
‘Not knowing that our blunt
Ideals would find their whetstone, that our spirit
Would find its frontier on the Spanish front’ ... (McNeice,Autumn Journal)
If I may say so, British progressive politics in the nineteenth century found a frontier in Ireland. It is worth asking why London, at the centre of empire, was so risen by the prospect of Irish Home Rule? Why did feelings about Ireland run so deep that this Political Committee was only able to continue functioning in the 1880s on the understanding that Ireland would no longer even be debated?
I recently came across the curious piece of information that on 11 November 1847, the Oxford Union - a reliable barometer of opinion in a certain section of society - voted overwhelmingly for the following motion: ‘That the memory of Mr. O’Connell is entitled to no great respect at our hands, but that he was the greatest enemy Ireland ever had.’ Fifty years later, on 6 March 1890, Oxford students voted by a similarly decisive margin in favour of the following motion: ‘That this house ... is of the opinion that the great prevalence of crime and outrage in Ireland from the year 1878 to the year 1888 was chiefly due to the wicked and criminal acts, speeches, and conduct of Mr. Parnell and his associates.’
These reactions to men like O’Connell and Parnell might nowadays be called, at best, defensive. It seems that within the 19th century political establishment, change in Ireland opened up an intolerable vista of further change, affecting all those other issues on which Liberals and Radicals were engaged. My list of such issues may not be complete, but it includes the treatment of wage-earners, the extension of the franchise, the hereditary principle in politics, whether slavery should be tolerated in the colonies the slave trade having been abolished, the status of Roman Catholics and Jews, corporal punishment in the Army and the Navy, prisons issues of the kind so compellingly raised by Oscar Wilde exactly one hundred years ago, and of course the principle of empire itself – all issues which one way or another leached into public consciousness in spite of the expostulating huffers and puffers whose fingers were stuck in dykes but not heroically.
What strikes me as I look back is that the type of person who could empathise with Ireland and form an intelligent assessment of the causes of destitution in Ireland was also the type of person who was open to change in all the other areas I have listed.
Is it not the case that in any society what might be called the dominant orthodoxy is composed of a number of inter-related assumptions? To challenge that orthodoxy, as the Reform Club was established to do, requires exceptional courage.
I have come by this roundabout route to the birth of modern Ireland, because I want to suggest - standing here in the Reform - that the State that it is my privilege to represent is itself the product of a challenge to a dominant and arguably false orthodoxy.
Let me illustrate this further by quoting a passage from Roy Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone. Jenkins describes a speech made by Lord Salisbury on 15 May 1886 in the St. James’s Hall, Piccadilly (Roy Jenkins, Gladstone, page 552). Salisbury, who shortly afterwards became Prime Minister, pronounced that ‘democracy was suited only to those of Teutonic race, which category he certainly did not see as embracing the Irish.’
In Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the characters imagines himself in ancient Egypt listening to someone very like Lord Salisbury addressing the youthful Moses:
‘Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our gallies ... furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.’
Joyce’s fictional Nationalist responds to the Egyptian Salisbury in these terms:
‘But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition, he would never had brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage ... . He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down ... bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw (Ulysses, Aeolus)’
Not for nothing is Ireland blessed with four Nobel Laureates in literature and in the English language – mirabile dicta – a reverse colonisation some might say, a harbinger of the Irish talent which would blossom when the straitjackets of orthodoxy were removed. Despite such colourful thoughts, the viability of the Irish State at independence in 1922 was perhaps not self-evident. The island was partitioned. A civil war had broken out in the South. Ireland’s economy was largely agricultural and dependent on the British market. We needed to find a new balance in relation to the language, outlook, culture and traditions of our neighbouring island.
Now that the better part of a century has elapsed, some results of the Irish political experiment and experience are available. Politically, economically and culturally, the passing of time has shown that the prejudices of the Victorian establishment were wrong and the “young Moses” as imagined by Joyce was broadly right.
An important factor in bringing this about has been our political moderation. The early years of our State witnessed peaceful changes of government, a gradual approach to social change, and a focus on institution-building. As to partition, which arose out of the pressure of events and gave rise to a range of new problems, every Irish government committed itself to using only non-violent means of seeking redress, to accepting the shades and varieties of Irish identity, and to a vision of reconciliation among different Irish traditions.
I believe that history will also give successive Irish governments credit for cherishing the positive aspects of our British heritage, whether in politics, the legal system, the civil service or other parts of our culture. Successive Irish governments have postulated a process of reconciliation in which a rebalancing of society in Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland would lead to a new quality of friendship between the two islands. Crucial to our self-identity too was, and is, an unshakeable commitment to the equal right to respect of each human person, a commitment which dictates happily that the State’s elected first citizen is no more and no less than a first among equals.
In the first half century of independence, we laid a foundation. We were fortunate to establish our sovereignty, an egalitarian society based on the rule of law, and respected institutions, in a way which many other new States have found it difficult to emulate. I find an illustration of this in the response of our great writers: Joyce corresponding with Il Piccolo of Trieste about its coverage of Irish issues; Yeats in the Senate; Samuel Beckett slipping into the Embassy in Paris to renew his passport. None of this is what Lord Salisbury had in mind.
This background, what I might call our political gene-pool, gave us in due course our economic opportunity. Like a racehorse being tried for the first time over the right course and distance, Irish government and society have shown markedly improved economic form since becoming part of the European project a generation ago, in 1973.
This is of course an oversimplification. Many commentators would argue that the real breakthrough in Irish economic management occurred not as we joined the EEC in 1973, but in moves to open the Irish economy in the late 1950s. Other commentators would emphasise the widening of access to education in the 1960’s or point to the 1980s, when decisive steps were taken to correct imbalances in the government finances and the first of a series of multi-annual agreements was concluded between government and the social partners. And in truth all of these have been and are crucial ingredients. But speaking in broad terms the European Union has been the making of the Irish economy. Our access to the European marketplace underpins all the other factors that have contributed to our economic revival. These include major investments in education and training, a steady increase in the size of the workforce combined with a reduction in the dependency ratio, assistance from the European Structural Funds, taxation policy and a business environment favourable to foreign direct investment, macroeconomic stability, and the practice of social partnership to which I referred a moment ago.
The Celtic Tiger that has arrived in our midst is usually painted in a flurry of statistics. Among these, the figures for GDP growth from 1990 to the present are among the most impressive. These figures, which today leave us roughly on par with Britain, obscure a number of persisting problems, including the effective social inequality of the disadvantaged and marginalised and the underdevelopment by European standards of parts of our infrastructure. Nevertheless, we can speak of a solid achievement. Unemployment peaked at sixteen percent in 1993 and is now below seven percent and falling. Emigration was still at critical levels in the 1980s but has given way to a pattern of net inward migration. Our achievements in terms of growth and employment are “counter-cyclical”, as economists put it, in a European context. We were confident enough to enter EMU this year as Britain hesitated.
I am fascinated by what seems to be a cultural correlative of our economic progress. Just as the 1890s saw a literary revival in Ireland that gave early warning of the political progress of the following decades, the coming of age of the Irish economy at the end of the 20th century has been accompanied by a remarkable flowering in many other aspects of Irish life, such that the economic self-assurance is matched by a strengthening cultural self-confidence.
Seamus Heaney and the Chieftains, Riverdance and U2, a whole raft of young playwrights, and, dare I mention them in the Reform Club, the Corrs, Ballykissangel, B*witched, Boyzone - Irishness is in. Even critical portrayals of our society are attractive to a wider audience. I am thinking of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan’s Crying Game, the novels of Roddy Doyle, and Father Ted and the satire of the much-lamented Dermot Morgan.
Our cultural revival is wider than the arts. Think of the burgeoning of history- writing, our love of the Irish language, our deepening interest in places and buildings of historic significance, the knitting together of our diaspora in Britain, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. Think even of theme pubs, Irish cheeses, tidy towns.
An area in which the new vitality in Ireland is clearly measurable is the greater scope available to women. I have a particular pride in saying this as the second woman in succession to be elected President, something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. As half of our society for the first time engages in a full range of public roles, a dividend will flow for society as a whole, including of course a direct economic dividend. We have observed for too long that a country which artificially inhibits the full blossoming of the talents of large pockets of its people whether through gender bias, social deprivation or any other cause, is a country flying only on one wing. Release the talents and you impact directly on the country’s well being. The sheer integrity of the process of wider and deeper inclusiveness has been vindicated coherently in Ireland. Seamus Heaney’s famous cohort of ‘intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars’ – young people, once given access to decent education, have indeed transformed the thinking, doing, feeling landscape of Irish life.
Not least of course has that been true in Northern Ireland where those articulate intelligences confronted the last remaining outpost of the old orthodoxy. Civic life in the North of Ireland over the past thirty years has been marked not by celebration and creativity but by a correlative of a very different kind, the long suffering that my own family, among so many others, knows only too well.
We are fortunate that courageous and visionary people like John Hume, who, drawing on the European experience, have kept before us through all that time a vision of how things might be different - of how the dominant skewed orthodoxies in that unhappy situation might give way to something better. Their certainty that old enmities could give way to new friendships, the visible evidence of the redemptive process at work among those who had opposed each other in bitter world wars – these fuelled hope and slowly challenged received wisdoms.
The gradual change of outlook in the South encouraged by EU membership, and of course our growing prosperity, prepared the way for the Irish government’s participation in the structures of the Good Friday Agreement. Dispositions changed in Britain too, as evidenced in a series of steps culminating in the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement itself. The inclusiveness proclaimed by David Trimble matches the new thinking among northern Nationalists and Republicans. All sides have yielded something of the orthodoxies of the past in order to release new energies under new structures.
What has proved most difficult to agree on is the emblematic issue of beginning disarmament. For some, what is at stake is a crucial test of the good faith of paramilitaries. But the paramilitaries themselves have taken the view that to initiate disarmament under the wrong conditions would be to accept a false characterisation of their struggle, a lop-sided historical analysis, and to take on more than their own share of responsibility for the past. I pay tribute to the two governments for their continuing efforts to create a context in which widely differing preconceptions can be reconciled, and to those politicians who are struggling to build a culture of consensus out of the ruins of a culture of conflict. To move from contempt to trust is a long and hard road but we are already well down that road.
Irish people of my generation have longed for the lease of prosperity that we now enjoy. We have longed for an end to violence. Those of my background have longed for the engagement with our Unionist neighbours that is now beginning to happen. We have longed for the new quality in British-Irish relations that is finally within our grasp.
But in the long view that I have tried to take this evening there are reasons for watchfulness about future trends in society, as well as for the rightful satisfaction of which I have spoken.
I do not propose to enumerate the temptations and difficulties, the Siren voices, the passings between Scylla and Charybdis, that we may encounter as we face into the future. Not every issue is new. If we are surrounded as I speak by the friendly ghosts of the founders of the Reform Club, they will not be astounded to hear that at the end of the twentieth century we are still perplexed by the absence of law or consensus in areas of dangerously opposed interests, enormous disparities in wealth and influence, the deployment by some of supposedly superior religious or political values to account for enmities and exclusions.
But instead of treating of one subject or another, I propose a general methodology: beware the dominant orthodoxy. It would be greatly to be regretted if we in Ireland, having come out from under the harsh assumptions of another century, were to develop a new complacency of our own.
A dominant orthodoxy is made up, I suggested a few moments ago, of linked assumptions under the guise of which we pursue what is to our own advantage and not to the advantage of others, while feeling good about ourselves and worse still, smugly self-righteous. To borrow a phrase from J. K. Galbraith, we ‘develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate’. This can happen in our private lives, but it can also affect the way we run our economy, our political policy.
The first antidote to such mental atrophy is of course generosity. When we respond to the real needs of others, for example during a humanitarian catastrophe, we remain in touch with ourselves. But again and again, as individuals, associations, parties, communities, we need more than this, a tougher virtue of discernment and courage, an imperative to listen, to include, to balance the voices which inform our thinking, to stand occasionally and maybe even humbly in the shoes of ‘the other’!
We are often in a situation in which our immediate self-interest, what seems to be “necessary” or “realistic”, is vying with a second option about which we feel more tentative. The advantages of the second option are usually longer-term. The person who recommends them, if she appeals to justice, runs the risk of being described as impractical – even idealistic, God help us!
Another common situation, as every whistleblower knows, is that one and the same action can seem selfless to some observers and egotistic to others.
I was struck by a recent newspaper article by a Church of Ireland Canon Ginnie Kennerley (Ireland on Sunday, 11 April). Canon Kennerley describes “responsible help-me-to-discern-and-do-your-will prayer” and goes on to say the following:
‘There is no way I can run a parish, a bishop can run a diocese, a civil servant can run a department of State, or a politician conduct delicate negotiations in an optimum manner, without this sort of prayer.’
I think Ginnie Kennerley is right. Faced with difficult practical or political decisions, we should strive for a spirit of disinterestedness, of distanced reflection, of in-dwelling before plumping or posturing or even prosleytising.
This brings me to the one outstanding aspect of modern Irish life on which I have not yet commented: our religious faith.
Perhaps a sociologist would approach this subject by counting the number of people in churches, by rehearsing the distressing scandals of recent years, or by demanding to know why a society with such a high rate of religious observance is troubled as Northern Ireland is by so much denominational mistrust and manifest sectarianism.
For those of us who are close to our faith, the starting point of discussion is different. If we are from the North, as I am, we may recall acts of violence, even attacks on our own home or our own family to which we have tried to respond with forgiveness. We recognise the same struggle in others, whether Catholic or Protestant. We recall our family life and the habits of sharing and loyalty that seem to grow directly out of the sacrifices our parents made on our behalf. We compare our reaction to death and bereavement to that of more secular societies. If we are lucky, we may have the gift of knowing how to waste time. If we are more lucky still, we discover in our young people a warmth, a humour, an idealism that is perhaps not replicated in circumstances where spending power and consumer choice provide a paradigm for all human activity. We see metaphysics where others see messes. We strive for redemption in chaos, and through chaos. Some of us even admit to praying as well as politicking.
My hope for Ireland as we enter the new century is that we learn the very difficult job of relating our experience of faith to our political conduct, so that we acquire instead of an easy orthodoxy, the suppleness of thought and action that makes a difference. To learn that God has no favourites – that we are all first among equals in his/her eyes would be an awesome start. To leave behind in this tired, straggling millennium the baggage of an army of tin pot Gods made in the image and likeness of tin pot bullies, however well-dressed or bred, that too would be a generous gift to the third millennium.
Seamus Heaney’s poem From the Republic of Conscience, written for Amnesty International, includes the following passage:
‘At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office -
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.’
But allow me to end not on that relatively presidential note but with one of Seamus’s quieter poems, The Haw Lantern. The haw, a bright berry on a twig, is portrayed as a lantern that serves in and out of season as ‘a small light for small people’.
‘But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man ...’
To rephrase my hope for Ireland: let us remember the haw lantern and seek the just men, the just women who will give the world children who thirst for justice and who might just possibly live in a world where you can touch it as well as talk it.