REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT SATURDAY, 22ND MAY, 2010
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY COMMENCEMENT SATURDAY, 22ND MAY, 2010
Distinguished honorees and guests, members of the class of 2010, congratulations!
It is an honor to be here today as President of Ireland in a place that has meant so much to Ireland and the Irish in America for 170 years. It was, after all, a Fordham alumnus Thomas Cahill who wrote a book of depth and insight on the Irish love of learning and then, with a modesty that only the Jesuits can teach us, called his book “How the Irish Saved Civilization”. We of course always knew that but we are grateful to him for telling the rest of the world!
When my countryman, the poet Seamus Heaney, addressed the Fordham commencement class in 1981, he did so in verse. I am going to stick to the more traditional prose and beg your indulgence for these few minutes when I stand between your years of study and graduation.
Your studies were long and your lecturers many and no matter what your discipline, somewhere along the way, you will have picked up the fact, possibly from the other Irish President here, Fr Joe McShane that the Irish love words. The poet Peter Fallon wrote that the islanders who dwelt on the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland had:
A word for every wave
that ebbs and flows,
and wind that blows
Every day’s memento mori.
Everybody has a story.
Even more than words, we Irish love stories for words are just gateways to stories. We all could tell some stories, the parents and guardians and the faculty members as well as the graduates gathered this morning on Edwards Parade. Today we celebrate your stories. No two the same. Each one utterly unique, a little of what you were given at birth, a little of what you learned and did, what you remember and what you aspire to – and then some ingredients that nobody but you can fully know or understand. And each story is even now a work in progress.
As you write fresh post-Fordham chapters in your stories, you will write the future of this city, this country and the world your children will grow up in until they too stand – as one day all too soon they will – in a quadrangle much like this.
But more of quadrangles later. First I want to share a few stories that I hope will have some resonance for your future lives.
Take the story of John Hughes. He was the son of a tenant farmer, born in Annaloughan in the parish of Clogher in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1797. Ireland was then a colony of the British Empire with a wealthy, powerful ruling Anglican elite whose oppressive Penal Laws bore down appallingly on Catholics and Presbyterians who were denied equality before the law. Like many of his neighbours to whom the State offered nothing but perpetual poverty, John soon left for America, arriving in 1817. With little formal education he took any work he could get. He was a manual labourer, then a stone-cutter and finally a gardener before entering a seminary after a year of remedial instruction.
By 1838 he was appointed bishop in the diocese of New York where he served for 26 years. Through his life, John Hughes retained a strong sense of outrage at the injustice he had experienced as a child. “They told me” he later recalled “when I was a boy that for five days I was on a social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire. These five days would be the interval between my birth and my baptism.”
In John Hughes, outrage was a spur to action, not just a once off anger, not a raging self-pity but rather a life of action in which he made common cause with the poorest of the poor and set about providing a good education to New York’s poorest. His was a radical project of transformation, a leaven that started in the empowerment of the individual and galvanized the potential of whole communities. The results of his labour, his vision are everywhere around us. He laid the foundation stone for
St Patrick’s Cathedral but, much more important, he built the foundation for Fordham University and – dare I say it at a Fordham commencement, Fr McShane? – for Manhattan College too.
We are all here then, in part because of the foresight and passion for education of a poor and unschooled immigrant from Tyrone. As you leave Fordham take a part of John Hughes story with you – the part that was outraged to his very core at a world of gross inequality where the talent and potential of so many was allowed to go to waste. And take with you the passion he had for being himself an agent of change.
In 1846, as the first of one million deaths from starvation occurred in Ireland from what we now know as “An Gorta Mór” or the Great Hunger, a young French Jesuit, Henri du Merle arrived at Fordham. Just as Fordham received its charter and the Jesuit community settled in, famine took hold in Ireland, changing forever our history and the history of the United States. Within a very short few years a quarter of the population would be either dead or forced into an emigration of despair which brought them in tattered rags and poor health to New York in their hundreds of thousands.
The Irish poet Eavan Boland writes movingly of a famine road built by the starving on the borders of Connaught in 1847. The rough stone road peters out in ivy and scutch grass and is forgotten, recorded on no map.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is……….
….to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
Even here in this country, the land of desperate hope, the road petered out for many Irish victims who contracted typhus either on route or on arrival. How many of them wondered was there anyone out there who gave a damn, who cared enough to care for them. In 1847 Henri du Merle left the relative comfort of Fordham to work among the Irish famine victims then arriving in Canada. There he survived an epidemic of typhus that took nine priests and 13 nuns that year and returned to New York. Then, despite all he knew, despite all he had seen, he went back, back to the place he knew spelt more than the possibility of death and in 1851 as he ministered to Ireland’s famine immigrants he contracted typhus and died at the age of 32 – one of two Jesuits from this community to die working among Irish immigrant communities.
With such selfless sacrifice and heroism embedded in its earliest years, it is no surprise that Fordham remains committed to training students in humanitarian work through its Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, today under the guidance of Dr Kevin Cahill and that empathy with the poor is an abiding part of this University’s ethos, the imprint it hopes you will bear and bear witness to throughout your lives.
In 1847, Jacques Judah Lyons served as Hazan or prayer reader to the community of Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish community in the US. Today that community is found only a few short blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. In March 1847 the community of Shearith Israel held a special service and charity appeal for famine relief in Ireland. They were not fundraising for friends or family. They had none of the familiar links to Ireland which might have prompted such an interest in Ireland’s suffering. However Hazan Lyons pointed out there was indeed one
“all-powerful and indestructible” link between New York’s Jewish community and the Irish famine victims: “The link, my brethren is humanity”.
As you leave Fordham remember the stories of these men who put their gifts at the service of suffering strangers and who saw in each stranger a brother or a sister.
In 1845, as the first signs of future famine emerged in Ireland, Charlotte Grace O’Brien was born in Cahirmoyle, Co Clare. She heard disturbing reports of the conditions experienced by young emigrant women arriving from Ireland through the Port of New York at the turn of the last century. She was neither young nor healthy and yet she booked passage to New York to see for herself just how dreadful things were. It was an act of extraordinary courage and it changed not only the course of her life but it changed the fortunes of countless emigrant women to this country. Her efforts inspired the establishment of a Mission for Irish Emigrant Women in Battery Park. Over 100,000 Irish women found advice, shelter or in many cases work through the Mission’s efforts between 1883 and 1908.
So many disadvantages still bear down on women especially in today’s world. In the developing world, hunger and poverty have a disproportionate effect on women and in so many cultures they live lives little short of slavery and certainly well short of access to their full potential. In our world where women have the chance for education and their choice of fulfilling careers, it is important to remember just how much work remains to be done in the full liberation of women from centuries of exclusion. We are still only in the opening chapters. When I began law school way back in the last century, the first text book on my reading list was “Learning the Law” by the eminent Professor Glanville Williams. It included a chapter ominously entitled “Women.” There he opined that since women’s voices were too weak to be heard in a courtroom, the only conceivable function of females in a law school was as a source of suitable spouses for their male colleagues. I married a dentist for spite and never regretted it! To the women graduating from this class, into a financial world compromised by macho driven super-hubris, I say that the world really needs the balancing intelligence of your genius. We need to maintain the momentum created by pioneers like Charlotte Grace O’Brien who yearned for a world that flew on two wings instead of limping along on one. We need male and female champions of that world that flies on two wings.
What of the story of Ireland? The 18th century Ireland that John Hughes left was ridden with political and religious oppression violence and sectarianism. The 20th century Ireland I grew up in inherited that toxic narrative and then free second level education and electricity arrived and with it as Seamus Heaney says in From the Canton of Expectation – “suddenly this change of mood./Books open in the newly wired kitchens./ Young heads that might have dozed a life away/against the flanks of milking cows were busy/paving and penciling their first causeways/ across the prescribed texts. The paving stones of quadrangles came next and a grammar/ of imperatives, the new age of demands.”
The story of the Northern Ireland peace process which is a story of struggling for justice and equality is the story of that generation, of those educated young heads who had according to Heaney “intelligences, brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.” They used the crowbars of their confidence, their education to begin bit by bit to construct an end to the centuries old elitist culture of conflict and to replace it with an egalitarian culture of consensus.
As well as a unique confidence and determination, this generation of peace-makers had huge external support especially here in the United States where our emigrant children, grandchildren and great grandchildren had advanced to become so influential and respected. They are co-owners of the peace that is today growing ever deeper in Ireland, North and South. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have nurtured the Peace Process, friends of all political persuasions in the US Congress, State Legislatures and City Halls have united in their commitment to our peace. And among our best friends and greatest champions is one of your own, Bill Flynn, Chairman of Mutual of America, who with a busy agenda and plenty of other things to be busy with, made peace in Ireland his passion and his priority. Through his efforts and the efforts of others, men and women who could see no other road to justice than through violence were persuaded to try dialogue and democracy.
Today the Irish Peace Process may be one of the best examples of successful peace-building available to us as we set about similar challenges across the world. You have shares in that story for the innate hope and optimism within the American DNA kept insisting even through the darkest times that we could trudge through the sludge to a rational and equitable solution. So make that story yours too. Especially on a day, sometime up ahead when things seem intractable and you are almost ready to stop trying; remember you have crossed the great quadrangle of Fordham and with every step you have been prepared to be “the crowbar”, to face courageously the “new age of demands.”
You exit into a chaotic old world. It needs leaders. It needs men and women of integrity, who are determined to do their best to make things better and at the very least not to make things worse. Ask yourself whose names do you want to be counted among? The givers or the takers? The carers or the careless? The courageous or the cowed? It is after all simply a matter of choice. Your choice.
John Hughes, Henri du Merle, Jacques Lyons, Charlotte O’Brien all chose what was right in the face of so much that was wrong. May each of you never ever swerve from doing what is right in big things and in small, in private and in public and in the service of all God’s magnificent and messy creation.
Go n’éirí libh.