REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT LATVIA UNIVERSITY TUESDAY, 22ND MAY, 2007
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT LATVIA UNIVERSITY TUESDAY, 22ND MAY, 2007
IRELAND TRANSFORMED - OUR EU EXPERIENCE
Labrit, Valsts Prezidente, Excellences, Damas un Kungi:
Thank you all very much for joining me here this morning in Latvia’s premier and distinguished place of learning. Most of my working life before my election as President was spent as a University professor and so I always derive particular pleasure from visiting Universities in other countries. And of course I immediately feel at home. Campus life for both staff and students is a unique world and one, which offers a special kind of intellectual and social liberation in these days of freedom and optimism. The young people of today’s Ireland and Latvia are the best-educated generation of any before them. They are the freest of any before them, the most confident and of course the one from which the most is therefore expected. They have as their contemporary context the gift of peace, prosperity and partnership within the family of nations that make up the European Union. How many of our ancestors would have wished to be part of this most blessed of generations. How many of them were victims of the bi-polar century just gone past which on the one hand delivered unprecedented economic and technological advances and on the other let loose the havoc of war and destructive ideologies. What will we now make of this century?
The stories of twentieth century Latvia and twentieth century Ireland are quite different though they share characteristics which make it easy for us to empathise with one another and to befriend one another as we build Europe’s future together. Our small countries secured their precious independence from much larger neighbours at around the same time. Our paths diverged. Ireland was partitioned into two jurisdictions one part of which remained part of the British Empire and that division was to cast grim, violent shadows that have only just begun to lift. Meanwhile Latvia had the deep misfortune to fall prey to the 20th century’s two darkest, most malign dictatorships. In Ireland we struggled with endemic poverty and mass emigration but we believed passionately that over time the independence achieved for the largest part of Ireland would prove its worth and help reveal our true potential as a people. We rejoiced when Latvia’s courageous and long suffering people restored their freedom and our hearts were deeply moved when on a beautiful May day in Dublin in 2004 you joined the European Union and took your rightful place among our family of nations and peoples.
Having been unhappily colonised ourselves for centuries, Ireland, of course, never recognised Soviet control over your country and so yesterday, as I laid flowers at the Freedom Monument I thought of those brave people from Helsinki 86 who also laid flowers there, in very different circumstances, when in defiance of the State, they risked repression in order to assert the truth of freedom.
Today thanks to the gargantuan work of our people, both Ireland and Latvia have remarkable and uplifting stories to tell and it is my great honour to be a witness on this visit to the huge transformation that has taken place and is taking place here.
In the past twenty years, Ireland too has undergone a transformation in pretty much every aspect of life. We had been independent for more than 60 years, but emigration, unemployment and poverty remained stubbornly high. There was no magic wand, only fresh thinking and hard work. Because we had fought so hard for our liberty and our identity we had been inclined towards over protectionism, afraid to test ourselves in the wider world in case these hard won liberties would be diluted. That was the first thing to change, that and serious investment in education. Instead of educating only a small elite and therefore only realising only a tiny part of our potential, we started to harvest and harness our best natural resource above all others the brain power of all our people.
Their new thinking and fresh imagination carried us enthusiastically into the European Union. Their hunger for success, their ambition made them a problem solving generation par excellence. They created from virtually a blank page, the Celtic Tiger economy, attracting large numbers of foreign investors, creating a stable industrial climate, an attractive corporate tax regime, a strong indigenous entrepreneurialism, an openness to Europe and to the world. From these things we became one of the world’s most globalised economies, proficient and successful in the new technologies, Europe’s leading software centre and one of the three top software exporters in the world where our small country of a mere four million people ranks alongside giants such as the United States and India.
This openness to outside ideas and investment from abroad was central to our national development. Our capacity for innovation, for embracing new technologies and new ways of seeing the world has been at the heart of Ireland’s emergence as a successful European economy.
We are today a highly successful open economy. That brings its rewards and its risks. The rewards are everywhere evident in Ireland in the considerable growth in per capita income, the prosperity, the inward migration, the ending of outward migration and the growth in population, two phenomena not experienced for over a century and a half. The risks are clear too- it’s a very competitive global economy, so we have to remain competitive. It’s a world where innovation and knowledge are key elements in competitiveness and in staying ahead. So we may be proud of where we are today but we are anything but complacent or presumptuous about the future. The work just keeps going on. But today we have that elusive thing called confidence and if sentiment matters in the market place it plays more than a trifling role too in the national psyche. The fears some people expressed when we joined the EU, that we would be swallowed up by our bigger neighbours and bigger cultures, proved to be completely false. The union became our stage- a place where we sat voluntarily around the table with our neighbours, including our former colonisers, as equals. It was a place where our small country had a large voice and a chance to punch above its weight. Not only did our economic and cultural confidence grow but miraculously a new respectful friendship grew up between us and the “old enemy” next door to us, Great Britain. A new era of cooperation between us began. Its most successful project has of course been the Peace Process in Northern Ireland where forty years of violence directly related to the partitioning of Ireland along sectarian lines in the early twentieth century have at last come to an end.
There is an old Irish maxim “Ní neart go cur le chéile”: Together we are strong. And that is how we feel today - strong in ourselves and strong in Europe.
So for us being a member of the EU is not just about financial support, useful and very helpful though that is nor just about access to markets invaluable though they are. It is about belonging to a voluntary community of likeminded neighbours, sharing a common value system, underpinned by human rights and democracy and the rule of good law. It is about belonging to a problem-solving partnership - a good example of which is the recent decision of the European Council that Europe should take the lead in tackling the menace of climate change, one of the most pressing problems facing the world today. It is about belonging to a caring community that reaches out to the poor and forgotten of the world’s developing countries. It is about solidarity with all those who believe in the dignity of the human person and who work to lift all of the world out of conflict, disease, poverty and oppression. It is about liberating our collective brainpower, our collective moral power and putting them to work in the service of Europe and the world.
At the very heart of Europe’s future will be its educated young men and women. It was education that opened Ireland up to its own genius, to the world and to this amazing confluence we enjoy today of prosperity, peace and partnership. It is investment in education, in research and innovation that will allow us to complete the ambition of our nation’s founders- to have a country where no human being is on the margins but rather one where all are in the mainstream contributing their best and enjoying a true republic of equals and of equality of opportunity.
Today we are very fortunate that among those building this new Ireland are a number of your countrymen and women. They have come to us in recent years full of curiosity and adventure. Most will return to Latvia and some will stay among us. They are our friends, neighbours, colleagues and partners. They love Latvia and are learning to love Ireland. They are an important part of our success and they are off course well-educated, ambitious, hardworking and all round great ambassadors for their native home. We hope some of you may come to do post graduate studies among us, for in the fields of science and technology especially, we are anxious to attract the best brains. Or maybe you will come as Erasmus scholars. In these human connections lies the key to Europe’s best and truest future. This toing and froing, living among one another, working with one another, visiting each other as tourists, studying each other ‘s history and literature, dancing to each others music- it is in and through these things that we will grow together as Europeans- proud to be Irish – of course, proud to be Latvian of course but proud too to carry a vibrant and evolving shared identity as European Union citizens- participants in the greatest adventure in democratic consensus building every undertaken by human kind.
Our great Nobel winning poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a poem to mark the historic enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. He said it was a time of ‘homecoming’ when newcomers ‘move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare’. We are between us crafting new meanings- we are indeed a blessed generation to have this freedom, this confidence, this friendship. Enjoy it.
Thank you.