VISIT BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON TO THE UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE, FRIDAY 5TH JULY, 1996 BICENTENNIAL
VISIT BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON TO THE UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE, FRIDAY 5TH JULY, 1996 BICENTENNIAL ADDRESS: IRISH IDENTITY
May I say how pleased I was to accept your invitation to give the Bicentennial Lecture in the splendid and historic surroundings of Baroney Hall.
This invitation represents a special opportunity to pay tribute to the University of Strathclyde and all that it has achieved. We gather together at a significant moment : the celebration of 200 years of learning, 200 years of teaching and endeavour by the staff and students of this great University. The pursuit of excellence within these walls goes beyond the life of the University itself : it is woven into the fabric of Scottish society and its noble intellectual achievements.
Those achievements are mirrored in all aspects of Scottish life and in the lives of many more who have spent time as students and teachers here. The University's five faculties have helped to develop skills which are used in education, business, technology, and science. All have flowed into the bloodstream of Scotland's schools, workplaces and businesses. Beyond Scotland's shores, that learning and achievement is utilised around the world : it is, as the Coat of Arms promises, useful learning.
It was a particular pleasure to accept this invitation from my former colleague at Trinity College Dublin, Professor John Arbuthnott. He has shown a personal commitment to developing in a modern context the ancient bonds of kinship and friendship between our peoples and I should acknowledge the work which he and others have undertaken to produce the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative, linking the Universities of Strathclyde, Aberdeen and Trinity College in Dublin. This has proved to be an initiative of real worth - a truly practical effort which has already borne fruit. I am aware that the origins of this project lie in conferences of Scottish and Irish historians going back twenty years, culminating in the initiative launched last year.
One of the results of this initiative was that it provided the dynamic, the meeting place, as it were, for focus on vital dimensions of the Scottish and Irish identities. And nowhere is it more appropriate to reflect on those identities than in Glasgow. Here in this city you have a first hand knowledge of some of the complexities involved in the sense of identity on the island of Ireland, and we in Ireland follow with close interest the current debate in Scotland. We can truly say to and of each other; "Yes, I understand. I know what you mean". We may not have the answers, but we understand the questions. And so, I have chosen this occasion to give you my sense of an emerging modern Irishness.
In doing so I am conscious that next year will mark a very special link between Ireland and Iona, the 1400th Anniversary of the death there of St. Columba, also called Colmcille. He was born in Donegal in 521, and studied under St. Finian at Bangor, Co. Down. You will recall that he made a copy, without permission, of one of St. Finian's Psalters. St. Finian asked for it back and Colmcille refused, so that the matter was referred to the High King of Ireland. The King ruled "that as a calf belongs to the cow, so a copy belongs to the book", and that it must be returned. Colmcille again refused, and a battle was fought at Drumcliffe - where W. B. Yeats is now buried. The O'Donnells backed Colmcille and secured the book, which they subsequently carried into their battles. Colmcille, however, left Ireland after that first battle, somewhat ashamed of his warlike manner and settled in Iona where he founded a monastery and worked for the Christianising of Scotland until his death there in 597. A number of poems are attributed to him, and he is known as the patron of poets who was prepared to take action if the "filí" should be deprived of their traditional privileges.
This reminds me of a happy occasion last year when I welcomed to my residence in Dublin a group of Scottish and Irish poets who were celebrating twenty-one years of an annual poetry exchange by the filí of Ireland and the baird of Scotland. They presented me with an anthology of Gaelic poetry from Scotland and Ireland, Sruth na Maoile (The Sea of Moyle), which bears witness to a modern coming of age of a cultural fellowship. As the editors explain: "The annual Scottish-Irish exchange has not been merely an enjoyable literary occasion. For us it represents a reunion of clans, cousins long separated by Sruth na Maoile. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have not only survived the ravages of history but have experienced in the last twenty years something of a common renaissance in the fields of literature, education and radio/television. Crossing Sruth na Maoile twice a year continues to extend our definition of "Gaelic" across national, social and religious divides.... Courts of poetry and poetry readings are now a common feature at gatherings and festivals throughout both countries. There is a deeper appreciation of the wider aspects of our common culture, including its past and contemporary literature, its history and its music."
With such roots in common, is it any wonder that we have a particular empathy with one another today? I know that in both countries, the issue of identity is very real and at the core of the societies in which we live. Those identities have found expression, often on the common ground of our distinctive languages, literature, folklore, and music, for example. We share too other common experiences : the presence of a larger neighbour, the strains in our history of nationhood and conflict, the ties of emigration, the influence of the sea on climate and economy, the complex interaction of urban and rural communities:
In this century, these various strands of national life have been questioned and challenged as never before. They co-exist with the challenges presented by our membership of the European Union over the past twenty years or so. One of the greatest challenges presented by our partnership in Europe is that of national identity, a concept held very dear by both our peoples. For some, it evokes concern, anxiety for our future and nostalgia for our past. I believe, however, that in Ireland we have now reached a point where we have the confidence to grasp this opportunity and to see it in the most positive way. As citizens of Europe, we need not be fearful. Far from submerging or clouding our identity, it can be enhanced and enriched on the European stage, a stage which facilitates the renewal of that identity.
This mood is, I believe, reinforced in Ireland by the fact that we have just taken over for the fifth time the responsibility of Presidency of the European Union over the next six months. Despite the very real pressures this exerts on Ministers and civil servants, the opportunity is welcomed, and, in itself, is a vindication of the sense of modern Irishness which is strengthened by our involvement at the European level.
Our membership of the European Union has undoubtedly helped us to rediscover and to reassert our identity. The origins of our places of learning lie in Europe; the earliest recognition of our great writers lies in Europe; much of our economic success flows from Europe; our political identity has been irrevocably shaped by Europe: it is, quite simply, where we belong.
But there are other important strands shaping the sense of modern Irishness. At present we are commemorating the Great Potato Famine, An Gorta Mór. We are retrieving the detail of that darkest time in our history, when over a period of five years from 1845 to 1850 it is estimated that a million of the poorest Irish died of starvation and attendant diseases, such as dysentery and typhus, because of the failure of the potato crop. During the same period another 2 million emigrated. The process of retrieving the detail of what happened and how it happened is not one of reopening old wounds. Far from it. In this commemoration we are fortunate to see a real treasure of retrospect, from books of scholarship to schoolchildren's drawings, to a renewed interest in folklore, to the establishment of the Famine Museum at Strokestown, which allows us to look back at an event which more than any other shaped us as a people. It defined our will to survive. It defined our sense of human vulnerability. It remains one of the strongest, most poignant links of memory and feeling that connects us to our diaspora. It involves us over several years in an act of remembrance which, increasingly, is neither tribal nor narrow.
In fact, I think it marks our maturity as a people that our remembrance is becoming an act of self-awareness. It marks our maturity that we are able to break the silence on the disaster that overcame us in ways which are both rigorous and challenging. That silence has been broken in this commemoration by scholars and writers with concerns about both Ireland and the Irish diaspora. For that reason we have a unique chance to look at the connection of the two. And in this context I have learned with great interest of the research jointly by this university and Trinity College Dublin on the Great Famine, which I link with projects being undertaken throughout the world where there are significant Irish communities.
This detailed study and analysis of the circumstances, causes and complexities of that Great Famine bring home to us what I believe is a very significant factor in our self-knowledge. Professor Robert Scally puts it well in his book "The End of Hidden Ireland". He writes of the emigrants' last sight of their homeland:
"That backward glance at the incongruous palms and gaily painted houses along the shore near Skibbereen was not only their last sight of Ireland but the first sight of themselves."
That self-knowledge should make us realise that the Irish people have endured a combined experience which is also the experience of a significant number of third world or developing countries: the combination of being a colony, of suffering a devastating famine and of enduring a huge dispersal of people through mass emigration.
And yet, how ready are we to realise that whereas what happened shaped our Irish identity, it is not intrinsically an experience confined to us as a people? How ready are we to see that the bailiff and the workhouse and the coffin ship have equally terrible equivalents in other countries for other peoples at this very moment?
For every lesson children of Irish heritage learn about the Famine relief of 1847, they should learn an equal one about the debt burden of the 1990s. For every item of economic knowledge they gain about the crops exported from Ireland during the Famine years, let them come to understand the cruelty of today's markets, which reinforce the poverty and helplessness of those who already experience hunger. As they learn with pride how the Irish as a people clung to education - the folklore of the hedge schools - let them become acquainted with the declining literacy rates of the most vulnerable countries in our modern world. Let them learn too, from the influence the Famine has had on contemporary Irish poets. When Eavan Boland reflects sadly on the limitation of the science of cartography, because the Famine road does not show up, or the Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney writes:
"And where potato diggers are
You still smell the running sore"
they are drawing inspiration from that dark moment of our past. They remind us that Famine in our contemporary world also silences the culture of peoples who are portrayed to us all too often as mere statistics.
The other dimension to commemoration of the Famine is that it reminds us of the diversity and range of an Irish diaspora of some 70 million people throughout the world. Just over a year ago, when I addressed both houses of the Irish Parliament on cherishing the Irish diaspora I emphasised that, after all, emigration is not just a chronicle of sorrow and regret. It is also a powerful story of contribution and adaptation. The emigrant story is our story too, so that the relationship with the diaspora beyond our shores is one which can instruct our society in Ireland on the values of diversity, tolerance and fairmindedness. It can help us realise that Irishness as a concept is not simply territorial. And that Irishness is broad enough to reach out to everyone on the island of Ireland, and show itself capable of honouring and listening to those whose sense of identity and whose cultural values may be more British than Irish. And, if we do so generously the Unionist community, while affirming their Britishness, might find it easier to acknowledge the elements of Irishness within them, not least from living on the island of Ireland which we all share.
I have a sense that here in Scotland where you are asking searching questions about the components of your own identity, there is a particular understanding of the need on the island of Ireland to adopt an open and generous approach. Seamus Heaney in his final lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford urged the importance of what he calls "two-mindedness": I would end with his words:
"There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. If, for example, there was something exacerbating, there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture. My identity was emphasised rather than eroded by being maintained in such circumstances. The British dimension, in other words, while it is something that will be resisted by the minority if it is felt to be coercive, has nevertheless been a given of our history and even of our geography, one of the places where we all live, willy-nilly. It's in the language. And it's where the mind of many in the Republic lives also. So I would suggest that the majority in Northern Ireland should make a corresponding effort at two-mindedness, and start to conceive of themselves within - rather than beyond - the Irish element. Obviously, it will be extremely difficult for them to surmount their revulsion against all the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Ireland, but everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, if not constitutionally, through the northern point of the quincunx".