REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE RECEIVING AN HONORARY DOCTORATE OF LAWS FROM THE UNI ON EDINBURGH
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON RECEIVING AN HONORARY DOCTORATE OF LAWS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SATURDAY, 10TH FEB
Vice Chancellor,
Right Honourable Lord Gill,
Judge Sachs,
Ambassador and Antoinette O’Ceallaigh
Consul General Manahan
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is a privilege to be counted among the Honorary graduates of this eminent and venerable University and so I thank the University of Edinburgh for its kindness to me and to the Irish people in conferring on me the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws. As a former lawyer and a former university professor of law, I take a special delight in being part of the renowned School of Law’s tercentenary celebrations and in having this opportunity to congratulate both the University and the School of Law for the profound contributions for good they have made nationally and internationally.
The curious might wonder, since the University was already one hundred and twenty-five years old when the School of Law was founded, why did it take so long to embrace such a splendid bunch of people, as lawyers generally are, notwithstanding the occasional and underserved, disparaging comments that are made of us as a profession? God himself is said to have invented lawyers in order to have someone else to blame for all the bad things in the world but I am sure that in this university there is a much better reason than that. After all, the first campus was built on the site of the infamous murder of Lord Darnley and that nasty, notorious duo Burke and Hare, regrettably like me from Ulster, feature somewhere in the annals of the University’s fascinating history, so I am sure the University saw with great lucidity the enormous benefits that would accrue to civic society and to local and global intellectual discourse from a first class School of Law and that is precisely what Edinburgh has had since that first Regius Professor of Law was appointed in February 1707.
Ireland and Scotland once shared a common name - Scotia, the land of the Gael and in fact in one 6th century commentator’s eyes Scotia eadem Hiberniae - Ireland and Scotland were the one place meaning they were the home of the one tribe. Today we are good neighbours, sharing both a Gaelic heritage and a common English language. Our peoples have to-ed and fro-ed, married and intermingled for centuries and though today our legal systems operate within the common European Union framework they have their own distinctive character and personality, none more rich and fascinating than Scotland’s.
Students of intellectual property law will know that it was started by an Ulsterman with strong Scottish links, St. Colmcille. When he lost the first recorded copyright case he took off in a huff to Iona vowing never to set foot again on Irish soil. He did in fact return to Ireland but kept his vow by using a ploy that some might think was invented by a lawyer, for he filled his shoes with Scottish soil! He forged a reputation as an arbiter and facilitator of peaceful solutions to the many disputes between the chieftains of Ireland and Scotland. Our world, even a millennium and a half later, still needs such people to vindicate rights that are trampled on, to be the confident voice of those who are fearful and vulnerable, to help redress the damage and the injustice that human beings inflict on one another, to make laws and legal systems correspond to and bear witness to the highest human values. You have been doing that for three hundred years and today we meet in remarkable times for, in both Ireland and Scotland, we are watching the unfolding genius of the best-educated and most liberated, most peaceful generations ever in our respective histories as they build the best Ireland, the best Scotland. I hope they will have many shared stories of success to tell from this incoming tide that is their future - “am an dochas” as the poet Padraig de Brun once wrote - a time of hope.
I have often said that in over forty years of coming to Scotland I leave home in Ireland and arrive home in Scotland for that is how it feels. It is especially true of Edinburgh, the city whose Gallic name is Dun Eidin. When I return home this weekend to my own family home, it is to Dun Eidin I will go, for that is the name of my home in the west of Ireland. Thank you for deepening the link in such a lovely way.
In our shared languages, let me say once again:
Go raibh maith agaibh
Tapadh leibh
Thank you.