REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY MCALEESE AT THE UNVEILING OF THE NEWRY MILLENNIUM MONUMENT
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY MCALEESE AT THE UNVEILING OF THE NEWRY MILLENNIUM MONUMENT ON FRIDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER ,2001
I am delighted to be back in Newry and close to home this afternoon. Thank you for such a lovely warm welcome and for involving me in this very special occasion. For that I owe particular thanks to Senator Dr. Edward Haughey and to the Newry and Mourne District Council. I feel privileged not only to be here but to find myself numbered among the names of those honoured on and by this wonderful Millennium Monument.
Newry and its hinterland have many a tale to tell of sons and daughters from every walk of life, from every period of history and every historical perspective, whose lives brought pride to this place.
The list of people is so long it is no wonder that it took such a substantial monument to accommodate them. Some of them will be enormously surprised to be spending this new Millennium in each other’s company. The legendary revolutionary John Mitchel would have little problem in the company of Frank Aiken, former Tanaiste, Minister for External Affairs and also a bit of a revolutionary himself, though from another century. Imagining one or both of them in conversation with that eminent jurist Lord Charles Russell of Killowen makes me wonder that, maybe if history had let these men converse, perhaps the work of another great son of the area, Seamus Mallon would have been considerably easier today. Putting Seamus beside the actress Julia Glover can only be so he can introduce her to his extensive experience of drama and theatricality.
And of course my good friend Dr. Art Cosgrove, President of University College Dublin will be in his element with such easy access to that revered sporting figure, Pat Jennings. Quite who the referee among them all is to be I am not sure. I would volunteer myself for the role but my credentials are very poor for I have a long history of giving referees free advice, which they have regrettably, consistently ignored. Too late for this poacher to turn gamekeeper.
The remarkable diversity, which this Millennium Monument celebrates, is itself very telling and very reassuring. It is not easy to find monuments which take people as they find them, which take pride in achievement across such a spectrum. Often we use monuments to remember only those who agreed with us, thought like us, replicated our world view. But not this monument. This is a town and a people acknowledging that human diversity is a cause for celebration, that from such diversity come the fragments of memories which we store and which give us our identity as a community and our story as a people. Importantly too, because we have always ransacked that store of memories to find stories which we liked or revered better than others, this monument reminds us in a very timely way that the whole story is our legacy and our heritage and in the future we are trying to build, there is space for all, hope for all, opportunity for all. The Monument is as much about the future as it is about the past. There is here an unwritten message about who will make the future.
We who gather here are a privileged and blessed generation. We have known the awesome damage the politics of contempt and hatred have visited upon us, the wasted opportunities, the cruelly wasted lives. And because we know that and are sickened by it, we have each freely offered a little bit of our ambitions as our gift to the future in the compromise, the honourable compromise, that is the Good Friday Agreement. That extraordinary act of individual and collective generosity is the greatest natural resource this island currently possesses. It has the power to change history, to change minds, soften hearts, to seed-bed partnership and friendship in place of enmity.
We have this incomparable opportunity, a vital opportunity for all of us, and like all opportunities of a lifetime it must be grasped during the lifetime of the opportunity. I look forward to a day when we will be celebrating the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, describing it as a turning point in Irish history and acknowledging the peace, partnership and prosperity it brought, as the best monument of all.
As that story unfolds, I have no doubt that at home and around the world the future sons and daughters of this place will carve their names with pride in ways we have not yet begun to imagine. On behalf of those of us who are alive and inscribed here today, and the ancestors of those long gone but still remembered, a resounding thank you.