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Speech by President McAleese at the Tom Dunn Scoil Samhraidh Annual Dinner

Narrow Water Castle, Warrnepoint, Co. Down, Thursday, 30th June, 2011

Distinguished Guests,

Even though its your 20th anniversary, it’s never exactly ground hog day at the Tom Dunn Annual Dinner - yes many of the faces are the familiar faces of old friends and neighbours but when you are asked to speak at a Tom Dunn night it can be a bit terrifying to know that this company has had learned discourses on topics as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Mozart and Ireland in Europe. The Society perhaps can only be rivalled in its global perspective by the famous Munster newspaper, the Skibereen Eagle, which in 1897 reassured its West Cork readers that it was keeping a close eye on the expansionist ambitions of the Czar. Clearly the Czar took due note and never did manage to pose a threat to Bantry or Bere Island or Warrenpoint either come to think of it which only goes to show how far the reach of the Skibereen Eagle extended!

Anyway I am hoping that my contribution to this evening’s event will be received with the kind of wry graciousness my father encountered on a visit to a church in Donegal many years ago where he got into conversation with a lady tending to the grave of a recently deceased parish priest whose headstone revealed that he had been a distinguished dogmatic theologian, cosmologist and biblical scholar. When my father remarked how fortunate the parish was to have had such an erudite parish priest, the lady fixed him with a stony stare and declared “Well a far stupider one would have done us.”

I am no historian and admit right up front that in preparing for this brief verbal interlude that is coming between you and your dinner I went straight to that most scholarly and accessible of sources - Wikipedia. It may come as a shock to you to know that whether it is Tom Dunne with an e or without an e, the Tom Dunn in whose name we are gathered doesn’t merit a mention.

There are any number of footballing Tom Dunnes, Lord Lieutenant Tom Dunnes, Tom Dunnes who have been knighted, Tom Dunnes who were old Etonians, musicians, politicians, broadcasters, actors and even one who did the world of romance some service as the inventor of the breath freshener Sen Sen - but of our heroic Tom Dunn there is no mention. So we have work to do to keep our Tom Dunn’s name known and his story told.

Why do we bother?  Dunn’s fight was for liberty, equality and fraternity. Today after years of conflict that go back to Dunn’s time and beyond we have a raft of laws and international treaties, we have education and opportunity that secure liberty and equality but the thing that no law can create and the thing that eludes us still is fraternity. Fraternity we build ourselves through talking, listening, befriending, through tackling the sectarianism that divides, the racism that excludes, the distrust and contempt which foster violence and estrangement even among near neighbours.

That is why we meet here. That is why all over this island and particularly here in Northern Ireland a meitheal of men and women build cross-community relationships, painstakingly, relentlessly. That is why politicians of very different perspectives and ambitions have decided that working with one another is more productive than working against one another. That is why former paramilitaries, having seen the futility of violence, have decided to try dialogue. We are living through a time of fraternity building like no other on this island and we are discovering from first principles that Tom Dunn’s belief in the power of fraternity was well placed for although there is a long way yet to go, we are already seeing and feeling the transformative benefits of a young and growing culture of fraternal good neighbourliness.

We have stopped being hostages to history but if we have it is thanks to people like Tom Dunn who in every generation refused to accept as immutable the wrong-headed structures and attitudes that made perpetual strangers of people who should have been, could have been friends and neighbours. We are the first generation to come anyway close to Dunn’s Ireland. Some generation up ahead, not ours more is the pity, will live in that island of Ireland where liberty, equality and fraternity are fully realised, where everyone regardless of politics, creed, colour, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity can walk the streets of their homeland confident and unafraid.

To get to that “further shore” that Seamus Heaney writes of where “hope and history” might at last rhyme, we need people to keep on dreaming of what life could be and will be like where all are free, all are equal and all are friends. Yeats said “in dreams begins responsibility”. Tom Dunn in his day stepped up and took responsibility. We in our day do the same thanks to the investment he and others made in the future they could not see but that we are now living. We have moved from a tentative peace that was a mere cessation of hostilities to a deeper and more enduring solidarity that comes from respectfully sharing everyday life and politics with one another.

And as Tom Dunn’s nights have shown year after year, we are discovering that fraternity is fun. Thank you for the fun and friendship that marks this evening. Thanks to Siobhan and her team for the imagination and effort that underpins this event and everything else she undertakes. Thank you for the support these past fourteen short years during which I have been privileged to live to see the gift of meaningful fraternity begin to flourish on this island and between these islands. Tom Dunn’s gift.