REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF IRELAND PARK, TORONTO
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF IRELAND PARK, TORONTO THURSDAY JUNE 21, 2007
Is mor an pléisiúr dom bheith i bhur measc inniu ag an ocáid seo agus tá me buíoch díbh as an chuireadh a thug sibh dom teacht go dtí Toronto.
Minister Jim Flaherty, Premier McGuinty, Mayor David Miller, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
What a privilege it is not alone to be here today but to have the joy of officially opening Toronto’s ‘Ireland Park’ with its compassion in these sophisticated and prosperous times for another time and another era when men, women and children from the island of Ireland came here with the remnants of hope in their hearts, their bodies and spirits worn out and wearied by An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, the Irish potato famine.
Wherever their story is told whether here, or in Grosse Ile or along Dublin’s quayside, or in Sydney or in downtown Manhattan, all places where I have visited or opened memorials to that cruel era, it is almost impossible for a prosperous and free generation to get their heads around the sheer scale of the massive personal loss and Irish national loss caused by the Famine. Yet we can still get our hearts around it and that is a very reassuring thing. And here in Toronto a generous and caring generation has honoured those tragic, forgotten souls and that dark period in Ireland’s history with a magnificent, moving memorial that gives respect, real respect to their lives and their sacrifice.
To Aidan Flatley and his crew who built the Park, to all who supported its creation in any way, there is real passion and love in this place as well as skill and art. I congratulate and thank you all on a job beautifully done.
The location is stunning, the Rowan Gillespie sculptures are haunting and Jonathan Kearn’s landscape design is elegantly stark. Together they create a space of profound sensitivity and reverence in tribute to those convulsive times that changed the story of Ireland, Canada and Toronto, over a century and a half ago.
In his comprehensive research Professor Mark McGowan of the University of Toronto introduces us to the months from May to December of 1847 when a city of some twenty thousand inhabitants, as Toronto then was, experienced the tidal wave of misery brought to their streets in the hearts of thirty-eight thousand Irish emigrants.
They were destitute, sick, traumatised and terrified and they overwhelmed this city. Yet Bishop Power, Toronto’s first Catholic Bishop, who was in Dublin in January, 1847 signalled their arrival to the city authorities and urged the people of Toronto to prepare for the onslaught to come. To the city’s credit it did exactly that, building hospitals and sheds, constructing a coping structure that was simply heroic. By the year’s end over 1,100 poor souls were buried in the graveyards I was privileged to visit this morning – among the dead were many courageous public officials and the very Bishop himself.
In the presence of Mayor David Miller, I offer the heartfelt thanks of the Irish people for the selfless concern of this city for our tragic ancestors. These links hold Ireland and Toronto in a friendship that is in fact a kinship for, as a result of Toronto’s great goodness, many famine Irish survived to build new lives in Canada and the United States. The decision to rename this part of Bathurst Street, Eireann Quay is deeply appreciated and strong evidence of just how formidable is that bond between us. In the generations that followed that fateful famine the Irish became a scattered and scattering people with a well-worn track from its shores to Canada. Among those who came here were members of my own family, so numerous that I can safely say I am probably related to one in three people in Halifax.
So many of us have such links, including Terry Smith of the Ireland Park Foundation whose great grandmother travelled to Toronto in the summer of 1847, losing a brother along the way. Thanks to the humanity and decency of the people of Toronto, Terry’s great grandmother survived and raised a family in the city that had been so good to her. So today’s memorial is not just in memory of those who came but also those who helped them.
Ireland’s Naval vessel, the LÉ Eithne, is moored today alongside Ireland Park. Her name gives a clue to why she is with us for this lovely event. In Irish mythology, Eithne’s baby son was thrown into the sea only for the Sea God to take pity on the infant and have the waves throw him up on a distant beach where a kind and generous stranger took him in and raised him as his own son.
Today Ireland and Canada are two of the world’s most prosperous nations but also two with a strong sense of moral responsibility for ending the scandal of poverty and hunger in our world. That sense of outrage and responsibility has made both our countries into leading donor countries to the Third World. Today 800 million people, including 300 million children, do not get enough to eat each day to enable them to lead healthy and active lives. They need friends and champions as our Irish poor once did. That is the challenge and the message this Memorial Park offers to a new generation. Here the most overlooked, forgotten and neglected of the world’s 19th century poor have been restored to memory, not simply so we will be moved to tears but that we will also be moved to action.
The great city of Toronto is a not just a place with a heart but with an abiding conscience, captured here in a place that makes us humble, proud but also determined to do what we can, to ensure that this kind of avoidable suffering becomes a thing of the past right across the globe.
To those whose passion has given us this Park, this memory, this challenge a huge thank you.
Go raibh míle, míle maith agaibh.
Thank you all for being here today.