REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY MC ALEESE, AT A DINNER IN SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY MC ALEESE, AT A DINNER IN SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, SATURDAY 10 OCTOBER 1998
I am told that New Brunswick has more unspoiled wilderness area than the rest of Atlantic Canada combined. Moated by seas, with tides and fogs that are world renowned, covered by forests, New Brunswick reminds me very much of the Ireland of which we read in the old Celtic tales. Elizabeth Brewster describes the wildness of New Brunswick in poetry:
“Pretend we belong to a Civilisation,
Pretend. Pretend.
But there are woods and the rivers and the wind blowing.
There is the sea. Space. The wind blowing.”
New Brunswick is a place where competing cultures have learned over time to find a peaceful co-existence. It is a bi-lingual land, a land of Acadian, of Loyalist, of Scot and, of course, of Irish. We know that there were Irish settlers in what is now New Brunswick almost 100 years before the arrival of the Loyalists and the establishment of the Province.
The timber trade, still of such importance to New Brunswick, is what brought many of the early Irish settlers to New Brunswick. Farmers followed, often moving onto the land from which the marketable timber had been cleared. The largest influx of Irish, however, was from 1845 to 1854, the years of the great famine.
Many of the ships that carried timber from New Brunswick to Europe returned with a human cargo, wretched souls fleeing for survival.
Hundreds of thousands fled the nightmare of crop failure, destitution and disease. If they escaped fever before leaving Ireland they often succumbed during the long ocean voyage, or after their arrival in the new land. The authorities in Ireland at the time were unable or unwilling to cope effectively with the situation.
The authorities in Saint John must have found the situation equally difficult when the “Coffin ships” began to arrive.
One official from Saint John wrote at the time that:
“no one could have possibly imagined that loads of pauper emigrants would have been shipped from Irish ports and Liverpool, worn out with poverty and disease and labouring under fever of a most infectious and malignant description. The difficulties came upon us like a thunderbolt.”
Still, many of the inhabitants of Saint John displayed exceptional bravery during that time: the carpenters who went to Partridge Island to build additional fever sheds despite the risk to themselves, and of course the small number of medical staff - Dr. George Harding, the Health Officer on the Island, his brother William and Dr. James Patrick Collins who died at the young age of 23, caring for the sick.
I was pleased and privileged this afternoon to be able to lay a wreath in their memory and in memory of all those who died on Partridge Island and in Saint John during that awful period. Somewhere in the region of fifteen thousand arrived in Saint John from Ireland during the famine.
When we recall that the population of Saint John was itself only thirty thousand at the time we can only wonder at the effect their arrival must have had. Although a great many of the immigrants moved on to other parts of North America, many remained in New Brunswick and in Saint John itself. By 1871 the Irish constituted more than thirty-five percent of the population, about a third of whom lived in Saint John and the vicinity.
More than sixty percent of the county were Irish. Saint John may be known to many as "Loyalist City" but it is certainly worthy of the name “Irishtown” as well.
Ireland and New Brunswick share a similar geographical characteristic, on the periphery of great continents. In the past this has made for a difficult economic situation in both places. Since the 1970s, however, both Ireland and New Brunswick have engaged in similar schemes to improve infrastructure and to diversify our economies.
Part of my job is, of course, to promote the trade and business interests of Ireland and it is with no small sense of pride that I am able to talk of Ireland as one of Europe's leading economies, with high growth based on a sound economic strategy.
We have highly skilled, highly motivated workers who are second to none.
They have taken Ireland to the cutting edge of the information technology market. They have attracted high levels of investment from abroad, including of course from Canada, and they have produced some of the best products in the world. At the same time we have continued to develop and expand older, traditional industries.
The food and drink we produce in Ireland are, I think, second to none and more and more people in the world are finding that out as we continue to expand our markets.
On 1 January 1999 Ireland will be there when a new currency, the Euro, is born, becoming overnight one of the world's most powerful media of exchange.
Guaranteed by a supranational central bank, protected by fierce legal independence, the Euro will sweep away one of the remaining barriers to trade within the European single market. It will bring currency stability, which I know has been an issue of interest to Canadians. It will make it easier and cheaper for tourists both within Europe and of course for the millions who visit every year from North America. It will be good for business and for consumers.
As we move ever closer to the end of this millennium we will, I feel, see the extension throughout the world of the sort of supranational co-operation in which Europe has led the way. We started because we were determined that Europe would never again be ripped apart by war, we continued because we wanted to see a Europe where human rights would be respected and guarded by a court that could look beyond the interest of national governments and see the rights of individuals instead.
We deepened our cooperation into all economic fields because we needed to survive in a world market. Forty three years after we joined the United Nations, forty nine years after we helped found the Council of Europe, twenty five years after we joined what became the European Union, Ireland is a strong independent and interdependent country.
By being part of a community of nations in Europe and the world we have not lost our identity, we have enriched it.
New Brunswick has been part of the community that is Canada since its foundation in 1867. May you continue to enrich and be enriched by that confederation.
ENDS