Immediately after the word ‘Reilly’ in the Shorter
Oxford Dictionary comes the word ‘re-imbark’ (var.
of re-embark) smack bang in the place where you might expect to find
the word "re-imagine." You may be shocked to hear it does
not appear at all. I have to admit there is a deliciously subversive
pleasure in doing something the Shorter English Dictionary
has not yet imagined. But since there are those who believe that Ireland
is now enjoying the once elusive "life of Reilly" and there
are many who once left Ireland’s shores who have re-embarked on
the journey back to Ireland - precisely because Reilly’s life
is now more broadly distributed and more easily accessible – it
may be the words "Reilly" and "re-embark" have,
after all, a place in this undertaking of re-imagining Ireland.
The organisers, to whom I am indebted for the invitation to Charlottesville,
the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and, in particular, its President,
Mr. Robert Vaughan, Mr. Andrew Wyndham and Ms. Tori Talbot, have worked
with a passion to gather this impressive collection of Irish talent,
wit and wisdom. This has the makings of a seminal gathering and I wouldn’t
be surprised if there was the odd modest opportunity for a bit of craic
too. But the work comes first and if I don’t re-imagine Ireland
quickly, the dark clouds of hunger – such a familiar part of Ireland’s
historical landscape – may well be more than imaginary.
A French nobleman once observed that Thomas Jefferson had placed both
his mind and his famous house here in Charlottesville "on an elevated
situation from which he might contemplate the universe." Hopefully
we too will benefit from this "elevated situation" and from
the perspective that distance as well as discourse can create.
You would think that with all the Nobel-winning poets we have produced
they might between them have penned a helpful starting place with a
poem entitled "Re-imagining Ireland" but the closest we get
is Seamus Heaney’s "Seeing Things." This poem brings
us to the Ireland of the horse drawn potato-sprayer – a world
away from the convulsively changed Ireland we are conjuring to re-imagine
where you would quicker find a Jacuzzi than a spring well. In his poem
"Bean on tSleibhe," Cathal O’Searchaigh’s mountain
woman says "It’s not ageing I am but ripening!" It could
be Ireland talking, for the English words carry an ancient Irish syntax
which gives us our very colorful and unique particularity and the description
of "ripening" is as good as it gets of modern Ireland.
Many an Irish man and woman made the journey to Charlottesville before
us and in very different times. They carried a memory of an Ireland
of the goodbyes, not an Ireland of the welcomes. They formed and shared
with their children, images of possibilities of an Ireland without abject
poverty, without most of its population stacked on the narrow margins,
a fair and equal Ireland, a free Ireland. They sang laments for that
imagined Ireland, the one which, in its non-existence, presented them
with choices that were desperate and required courage beyond imagining.
And now things have changed and how they have changed. The third world
Ireland they left is now a first world country. So many feet have come
off the brake that used to be on Ireland’s development, that it
is not always easy to say which moved first or mattered most. One way
or another the door of Ireland opened and let the future in.
The little impoverished island off the West coast of Europe which became
an unremarkable member of the European Union thirty years ago, has become
the symbol of the Union’s potential, the place with the economic
success story that everywhere else wants to imitate. The country that
up to thirty-five years ago offered the liberating key of education
only to a small elite has felt the surging energy of its greatest natural
resource - the genius of its own people - empowered through widened
access to second level and third level education. The country that has
known outward migration for one hundred and fifty years has suddenly
become a place of net inward migration, coping with the complexities
of multiculturalism and the challenge of asylum seekers. The genius
of Irish women, once corralled into narrowly prescribed spheres, is
moving inexorably if slowly towards a yet to come flood tide. The politics
of peace are transforming the landscape of possibilities within Northern
Ireland, between North and South and between Ireland and Britain.
The old vanities of history are disappearing. Carefully hidden stories
like those of the Irish who died in the First World War are coming out
of the shoeboxes in the attic and into daylight. We are making new friends,
we are influencing new people, we are learning new things about ourselves,
we are being changed. If "imagining" carries always the hint
of something not yet formed, of a fantasy not yet real, today’s
Ireland is full of things not yet known with certainty but things which
are most certainly different from and mostly better than the past.
We cannot deny that there are casualties. The many excellent nuns, priests
and brothers who dedicated their lives to education and health care,
both in Ireland and around the world, contributed greatly to this ripening
Ireland with its network of friends throughout the globe. Now they are
visibly ageing and their future is far from easy to predict. And as
the mountain woman of O’Searcaigh’s poem might say "In
this country the hardest crusts are given to those with least teeth."
The widespread embrace of prosperity has been a wonderful and heartening
phenomenon but if you are still marooned on the beach and the uplifted
boats are sailing over the horizon, the space between can seem a frightening,
unbridgeable chasm.
More money in pockets has visibly lifted standards of living but it
is being badly spent too, on bad old habits that have never gone away.
The Irish love of conviviality has its dark side in the stupid wasteful
abuse of alcohol and its first cousin – abuse of drugs. They chart
a course of misery and malaise so utterly unnecessary that we need to
re-imagine an Ireland grown intolerant of behavior which it has too
benignly overlooked for too long.
Our expectations are now high indeed, driven by the successes of the
past decade. But we have shown ourselves capable of remarkable change,
to be adaptable, to be willing to learn and while there is still much
to accomplish there is a new found confidence in our capacity not simply
to cope as in the past but to transcend, to transform, to reduce the
imagined thing to reality.
I am probably in as good a place as any - if not the best place - from
which to judge the capacity for re-imagining of the Irish people. Day
in and day out I meet the people who are making the crucial differences
that are quietly layering up a better future. They are building hospices,
day care centers for the elderly, providing respite for carers, bringing
the Special Olympics World Games to Ireland, empowering the illiterate,
spotting and mentoring potential early school leavers, enabling the
disabled, welcoming the stranger, moving from conflict ridden marches
to community based festivals, breaking down sectarianism, building up
communities. I have mentioned only a small part of the voluntary effort
that is heaving us forward. The world of business, trade, tourism and
investment - for all the untidy capriciousness of the marketplace -
has shown a resolve and creativity which still make us one of the most
robust and stable economies around even though the giddy days of 8 per
cent growth are manifestly over. If "ceann faoi" is how we
used to imagine ourselves – today it is very definitely "can
do."
Who could ever have imagined that an Irish Government would purchase
the site of the Battle of the Boyne and develop there a heritage site
for all the people of the island of Ireland. Someone dared to and its
existence changes language and texture forever. Who could have imagined
a government in Northern Ireland with Sinn Fein Ministers working side
by side with the Ulster Unionists? Someone dared to and we fervently
hope it will move from the imagination to lived reality again soon.
Who could have imagined Gaelscoileanna flourishing right around the
country with Irish language nursery, primary and secondary schools a
growing phenomenon in Northern Ireland? Who could have imagined the
cultural exuberance which has made global icons of Irish names in every
field of the arts, many of them under this roof, or the technological
sophistication that has made Ireland the world’s number one exporter
of computer software, ahead even of the United States itself?
I should stop this list because there are many other spheres, too many
to mention here, which feed the dreams of our imagination. Post September
11th we became intensely conscious of the fragility of our globe, its
vulnerability and the urgency of its haphazard struggle against ignorance,
hated, oppression and poverty. Ireland was a member of the United Nations
Security Council during those heady days of 2001 and 2002, elected there
by an overwhelming vote, as a small island with a reputation for having
a large voice of integrity and a history of courageous peacekeeping
and considerable outreach to the suffering – truly a first world
country with a respected and real third world memory.
This year we celebrate thirty years of membership of the European Union,
a forum to which we have contributed much and from which we have benefited
enormously. The platform it has afforded us will be showcased to great
effect when we assume the EU Presidency, for the sixth time, on 1 January
2004 and when Dublin becomes the scene of the most historic moment in
the Union’s story since its foundation. Next May, ten utterly
unique countries from the Baltic and Eastern Europe will be welcomed
back into the European family of nations. We will have to stretch our
imaginations around these new colleagues and their stories and their
possibilities. The shape of the Union will change and so will we. They
will want to know their new neighbors better. They will want to know
who are the Irish, how should they imagine us? Our wandering saints
from the first millennium will already have left their imprints on most
of their countries but, that aside, they have been largely out of touch
with us for a long time.
There are also neighbors closer to home, the neighbors who share the
island of Ireland who need to get to know each other better, to build
the trust and friendships which alone can secure peace and partnership.
A big investment in friendship -building should be part of our imagining,
our planning, for the future. Nothing to fear in that for we are good
at that. Friendship building is our forte. Networks are our element.
No other nation holds on to its children and its children’s children
like we do. Five generations away from Ireland living in Chicago, Kuala
Lumpur or Canberra we meet them and we interrogate them until the parish
is found and the botherin their emigrating ancestors set out
from and the cousins of theirs we know back home in Ireland. We have
ties of family so extraordinary that when fifteen thousand of our young
people go off around Australia annually on their year long working visa,
they feel instantly at home in that land twelve thousand miles away
with its population that is one third Irish. We are a connecting people.
It is our strength and our global Irish family is today one of our greatest
resources, feeding our culture, expanding its imagination, opening doors,
keeping faith with our intriguing homeland.
The very strength of our connectedness, the very ease of our intimacy
can itself appear to be a powerful wall of exclusion for some of those
who look at us with doubt and mistrust. There can be no hermetic seal
on the Irish family and its circle of friends and neighbors, even its
reluctant neighbors North of the border. Like strands of a rope they
all take their shape from each other and they have an important voice
too in the Re-imagining of Ireland - for Ireland’s future is also
theirs. There is an onus on those of us who imagine a reconciled Ireland
to actively promote the culture of "failte."
Ireland is still unfinished business. The Ulster poet, Derek Mahon,
wrote:
"………….Spray-blind
We leave here the infancy of the race,
Unsure among the pitching surfaces,
Whether the future lies before us or behind."
There have always been pitching surfaces and given a choice I’d
settle for the mild turbulence of a modern jet over the stormy seas
of an emigrant coffin ship any day. If the men and women of Ireland’s
past could chose a time to live, there would be a long queue for this
one. It is far from perfect but it is as good as it has ever been. Even
more importantly it has a huge as yet untapped capacity to be better
still. Whether the future lies before us or behind us is our choice.
We have too often ransacked the past for ammunition with which to booby
trap the future. Now would be a good time to ransack it for the values
and memories that build us up humanly and pack them for the best journey
yet - to a ripened and mature Ireland, an island flying on two strong
wings. The bridge to that Ireland lies in the imagination and in the
courage it takes to step across it to something not known with certainty
but longed for with passion. Isabel Allende says happiness is achieving
something you have wanted for a very long time. We have longed for peace
and prosperity, longed for equality and justice, longed for opportunity
and reconciliation, longed for an Ireland standing tall in the world,
her children’s genius revealed and rampant. No other generation
has come as close to all those things as ours. A few more bridges and
we may well arrive at a happy Ireland. 21st century Ireland is at least
in part living the Ireland imagined in past centuries. Now is a good
time to sketch the imagined landscape of tomorrow’s Ireland and
inspire the champions who will take us to it. I salute you the artists
and the bridge builders and wish you well as your take us to that Ireland
via Charlottesville.
