REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ST. PATRICK’S CENTRE, DOWNPATRICK TUESDAY, 15TH MARCH, 2010
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ST. PATRICK’S CENTRE, DOWNPATRICK TUESDAY, 15TH MARCH, 2010
Good morning and thank you very much for the kind invitation to St Patrick’s Centre, close to the saints final resting place and to the day that worldwide is associated with his name and celebrated in his name and in the name of Ireland.
This conference focuses on peace and reconciliation. I am relieved that it does for it indicates strongly that there is here an intrinsic understanding that peace and reconciliation on our island far from being done deals are live, active ongoing processes that command our attention and our commitment now and for long into the future. I am glad too that while peace and reconciliation are being discussed in our contemporary context we are not afraid to turn to the story of Patrick for insight and inspiration as we work to comprehensively end the old wasteful culture of conflict and replace it with a culture of good-neighbourly consensus.
Who is Patrick to us, this immigrant, this slave from another country and culture? Who is he to an island where Christians of diverse denominations have spectacularly failed to love one another? He is our common patron, a unifying force if we allow him to be, a crucial part of our dim and distant shared inheritance which even today we can valuably revisit, for lying dormant, fallow in that far off heritage of Patrick are tools with which we can forge the happier future we dream of.
Given that Patrick walked the hills and valleys of Ireland fifteen hundred years ago, it is no surprise that the story of his life has at times taken on such mythical proportions that we could lose sight of Patrick the human being, with emotions and beliefs, experiences and options. Patrick’s personal story makes of him an ideal role model and mentor to all of us on this island wherever we are and whatever our circumstances, whether we are enthusiastic supporters of the peace process, whether we are too ground down by suffering to have faith in the future, whether we are still wedded to old ways of thinking, whether we are struggling to adapt to the new civic and political landscape that is emerging as the architecture of peace, spirit and law reshapes our immediate world. Patrick was once in all those spaces too.
Let’s consider for a moment the sheer horror of Patrick’s experience. He was kidnapped, taken from his family to a strange land by strangers whose only interest in him was his material value to them. Today we would say he was trafficked by slave traders. He was treated with cruelty and callousness, despised by those he lived among, describing himself as “the outcast of this world.”
The years of his teenage which he should have enjoyed were blighted by immense spiritual and physical suffering. This land we love was the land of his captivity, a place of hardship and loneliness. Seamus Heaney has written “Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and they get hard.” Patrick was hurt enough to get hard, to want to get even, to thirst for revenge. We know he yearned to escape and eventually succeeded, arriving home to the freedom and personal safety he had yearned for. Safe in his own comfort zone he could have lived the rest of his life cursing this island and its people and we would in all likelihood have never ever heard the story of Patrick. But that is not what happened. Just as this generation has broken the cycle of getting hurt and getting hard, just as this generation has made history by refusing to repeat history, Patrick did the unpredictable thing, the remarkable thing, the miraculous thing. He returned to Ireland not because he wanted to, not because he had to, but because he chose to. He made the choice with great reluctance. He describes being “quite broken in heart” for he knew he was heading back to danger and difficulties.
But as he himself tells it the “voice of the Irish” kept beseeching him to “come and walk among us once more,” just as in our hearts the voice of peace kept nagging at us to let it walk amongst us.
Patrick’s choice, like the option for peace, meant turning his back on easier options. Now he had to prove to himself and to the people of Ireland that love of one’s enemies and forgiveness of one’s enemies were not only personally possible but were capable of bringing the light of hope where there had only been the darkness of fear. It was his success in bringing that message of transcendence and transformation that gave his name a shelf life of fifteen hundred years and counting, not alone in Ireland but all over the world.
Today we are grateful to those who helped lead all of us out of history’s morass of hatred and hurt, of tit for tat violence, of fear and aggression. They are not all household names though there are household names among them. Mostly they are men and women who in their homes, workplaces, churches, communities and organisations, found a strength in themselves to begin to challenge the embedded culture of conflict wherever they found it doing its toxic work.
Patrick’s words: “I arise today through a mighty strength” will resonate with many of them – the strength that comes from knowing that what you do is right, that it is good, life-enhancing and life-affirming. For some people, strength is evident only in the punch, the gun, the cudgel, the bullet, the bomb, the bitter word, the threat, the hardened heart. For others, strength is evident in the word that builds a bridge between enemies, that neutralises the toxic spores of sectarianism, that tries to understand the otherness of the other and wants to build a future for all free from fear, full of hope.
St Patrick tells us that when he told his family and friends that he was returning to Ireland they “sincerely besought me that now at last, having suffered so many hardships, I should not leave them and go elsewhere”. He wrote “many tried to prevent this my mission; they would even talk to each other behind my back and say: Why does this fellow throw himself into danger among enemies who have no knowledge of God?”
He clearly conveys to us the isolation, even from loved ones, of those who take risks for peace and reconciliation. He above all people tells us that it is alright to be afraid and unsure. He wrote that “daily I expect murder, fraud, or captivity.” Those who forged the path of peace in our time were no less immune from similar fears and threats. And so often their goodwill was tested by violent acts that drove people back into their separate bunkers. Yet now as we look at the emergence of the beginnings of a shared community, and of much healthier relationships North and South, East and West, we can see at last the vindication of the peacemakers’ vision. There are still different traditions, different identities, different jurisdictions but there is a manifest solidarity gathered around our shared determination to hold on to this peace and to make it work – because we who lived through the alternative know it was awful, heartbreakingly awful.
Some people still feel excluded. Some still see violence as a way of achieving their ambitions or of simply managing difference in a divided society. Some are not impressed by the accomplishments of the peace-makers and some still pose a threat to that peace. So there is still a huge job to be done, away from the spotlight, away from the drama of the big iconic days like the signing of the Good Friday and St. Andrew’s Agreements, or the formation of a power-sharing Executive or the devolution of policing and justice. Each of those great events was and remains of seminal importance for they have created a new and sure roadmap to the future. Now we have to walk the journey – like the pilgrims who come here. We have to brave the elements, the tiredness, the problems because the destination is so worthwhile and so utterly essential to our well-being and the wellbeing of all who come after us.
Each one of us is now a pilgrim on the path to peace, the path to Patrick’s vision for the Ireland he came to love though it broke his heart many times. And because all traditions on this island revere St Patrick and relate to St. Patrick he offers us in this generation the chance to gather the scattered fragments of a once shared past and in his name travel together towards a shared future.
All over the world this week the name of St Patrick will be associated with parades, music, green beer, leprechaun hats, fun and friendship. Our challenge is to grow that same spirit of spontaneous friendship and solidarity throughout this island so that it shines 365 days of the year, year in and year out in places and spaces where there was once estrangement and enmity.
This Conference at St Patrick’s Centre will, I hope, help us to do that. I wish the Centre well and hope its newly launched St. Patrick’s Trail will entice more tourists to travel northwards to this beautiful part of the country. When they come, I hope like us they will see that they are not coming to pay homage to a vague figure from ancient history but to a man whose work is today continuing in every heart and hand that invests in peace and reconciliation, in building trust, and in building the bridges of love that will take us from a problematic past to a future Patrick can be proud of.