REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE ARCHIVE AND RESEARCH CENTRE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE ARCHIVE AND RESEARCH CENTRE, CASTLETOWN HOUSE 13 NOV
Dia daoibh a chairde.
This is a day of great celebration and pride for both NUI Maynooth and the OPW as we gather for the inauguration of the Archive and Research Centre at the historic and magnificently refurbished Castletown House.
Thanks to this very productive partnership between a state body and a major university, Ireland now has a wonderfully housed new national resource for the storage, conservation and study of many of our most valuable historical records, particularly those to do with landed estates and the decorative arts. Even the brief tour I have just had confirms the righteousness of the effusive praise I have heard time and again from recent visitors to Castletown House. This really is a place to make us all very proud, for at every turn we can see the care and craftsmanship which has restored this magnificent part of Ireland’s Palladian heritage. The story, of course, started with that great champion of Georgian Ireland, the Honourable Desmond Guinness whose early restoration under the auspices of the Irish Georgian Society and later the Castletown Foundation laid the essential groundwork on which the OPW was later able to build. Then came a very committed OPW team led so passionately by the late David Byers, architect and commissioner of the OPW. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dhilís. That team deserves enormous credit, praise and gratitude.
Now the house takes on a very special new life in its association with NUI Maynooth. As Patron of the famine museum in Strokestown House and as someone whose family lived and died through the famine in that part of County Roscommon, I take a very special pleasure in the fact that the first major undertaking of the Archive and Research Centre will be the archiving and cataloguing of the priceless famine documents from Strokestown Park House. With access to those documents made considerably easier there is no doubt that we will be able to interrogate that convulsive and cathartic period much more closely, comprehensively and effectively than ever before.
At the base of a statue outside the National Archives in Washington, a plaque reminds us that "the heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future". I suppose it is another way of saying that what we sow we also reap and our present is full of very telling reminders of the very long shelf-life of toxic seeds generated by oppression, conflict, sectarianism, plantation, colonisation and famine.
We have worked hard in this generation to clear away as many as possible of the debilitating weeds produced by that toxic harvest. Ransacking the past for edited highlights with which to distort history has been commonplace and damaging but in a thorough and scholarly archive such as this we have a chance to have the stories of the past probed deeply and told accurately. The seed sown here is part of the new landscape we are trying to nurture to a much healthier and better harvest, an island comfortable with its uncomfortable past, no longer held back by the divisions it caused but energised by the partnerships that flourish among its richly diverse people. The old days of them and us in which so much energy and hope was wasted along those formidable demarcation lines of catholic and protestant, of landlord and tenant, of Irish and Anglo, have manifestly begun to give way to a shared purpose and shared identity as shapers of a shared future. This archive, in its care for that complex past will surely help us to grow that shared future; underpinned by curiosity about the truth, about all of who and what we were and are and this lovely place in which to pursue it.
This was once a big House, a place of and for privileged elites, its demeanour less than welcoming to the masses. Today it belongs to the people and is at their service. It will hold, protect and tell the stories of privileged and poor alike fo,r without all sides to our many stories, we remain in danger not just of misrepresenting our past or having it misrepresented to us but we remain in danger of knowing our neighbours only as incomprehensible strangers. Thanks to Desmond Guinness, to the OPW and to NUI Maynooth, this big House now has a very big heart and a culture of respectful care for the source materials which bring our past to life in the present. I wish every success and fulfilment to all who have worked so hard to prepare for this inauguration day and to all who will be the hands of the work of the Archive and Research Centre.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh.