President of Ireland at Tablet Open Day 2000

Some 400 people packed the Congress Centre in central London on Friday 1 December to hear the Irish President, Mary McAleese, give the address at this year's Tablet Open Day. Her speech is reproduced here.

Reconciliation: the Millennium Faith Challenge

I am delighted to have this opportunity to attend this Open Day of The Tablet, and am grateful to its Editor, John Wilkins, for his patience with the vagaries of Presidential diaries. It is a particular privilege to be here in this year of the Great Jubilee and in this month of December when we approach the true centre of gravity of these Millennium celebrations, the stable at Bethlehem with its infant Jesus and his message of peace, goodwill and the radical call to love one another.

It was that most acute observer of human nature, Dean Swift, who said: ‘we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another’. That observation made almost three hundred years ago has an embarrassing ring of authenticity in our contemporary world where the very birthplace of the Prince of Peace is itself the site of a grim and tightly-knotted conflict.

“Blessed be the Peacemakers” said Christ; “for they shall never be unemployed” add the cynics. Already in these early days of the new Millennium, history’s toxic legacy is poisoning the unlived future of so many men, women and children across the globe, in all those places where that heady mix of religion, ethnicity, politics, greed or territoriality have conspired to waste so many lives, so many hopes.

I was born and raised in Belfast so I know at least a little of what happens when hearts harden, fired in the oven that is fuelled by sectarian hatred, political oppression, territorial disputes and a culture of endemic violence. The Ulster poet, the late John Hewitt, described Northern Ireland’s bleak landscape in this poem Winter day in these two terse lines which seemed to write off all hope of change in perpetuity:

"...the past persists in every knuckle and sinew... the future can find no crevice to enter by"

Yet for all the paralysing fatalism in those words, which gave no comfort to the peacemakers and no comfort to the afflicted, there have always been those who believed so passionately in the possibility of change from conflict to consensus, of transcendence from hatred to love, that they would work inside any space, no matter how small, take any risk no matter how unpopular, to let a fresh new future enter. And so Northern Ireland has slowly but surely been easing itself out of the canon of conflict zones and into the new canon of witnesses to hope. And maybe more than that.

In The Cure at Troy, Ulster’s Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney challenged us to:

"hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And Cures and healing wells."

And looking back across the sweep of history, at all the failures, all the crucifixions along the way, it is tempting to believe that we are indeed witnesses to nothing less than an unfolding miracle. It may not have the capacity to soften hearts, to nudge people out of the bolt holes of history, to confound the jeremiads, it has the quality of the miracle about it.

This remarkable journey that Northern Ireland is on, is no spectator sport, though to some people in Britain, the conflict there may seem a distant phenomenon that has little to do with them. But the roots of the conflict in Northern Ireland are not neatly contained within its borders. They are to be found in the broader web of historic relations between these two islands, and so like it or not, we too are part and parcel of the same journey, we are all being changed by it and crucially we each of us have a reconciling power in our own hearts and hands, a power which used well can energise and quicken the journey.

The gift of peace, this very Peace Process itself, born of so much hurt, crafted out of the chaos of distrust and fear is like the child of Bethlehem himself. It is an infant, with all the fragile vulnerability of an infant, with all its need for nurturing and care yet with its surprising tenacity, its powerful hold on life. Like every child, its future is to a large extent in the hands of those who do the caring, or indeed the neglecting, as the case may be. Some are called to play major roles, other minor roles, in the task of helping this infant Peace grow strong, robust and healthy. One thing though is sure: custody of this child that is the Peace Process is shared by all the peoples of these islands, not just the politicians but the peoples too and to the extent that we commit to that guardianship and take it seriously, we will be rewarded many times over. The old energies that were drained away by conflict can now go into building something worthwhile. Old prejudices and hurts that stood in the way of the blossoming of true friendship between these islands, can give way to new partnerships and a culture of mutual respect. We are indeed a privileged generation, for we are the first in centuries who have the chance of living to see peace grow on the island of Ireland and true friendship flourish between all the diverse peoples who make up the tapestry of life on these two neighbouring but not always neighbourly islands. We are the first to witness the transformative, transcending power of love, to witness its victory over hatred, and to understand the huge demands love makes, to have had revealed to us the strength, the courage, the stretching discipline that is love. We have seen how the struggle for peace is, how easy and ultimately disastrous, the descent into enmity and violence. We know that every anti-Irish sentiment, every anti-British sentiment whether uttered in a ghetto in Belfast or a gentleman’s club in London, has kept the pot of misery bubbling and if we are to arrive at the humanly decent landscape we deeply desire, then there is work for the peacemakers in all sorts of curious places and spaces. As Cardinal Hume put it:

The President meets Tablet readers

“We so often distort the concept of love. We caricature the reality; we deface it; we think of it as a weak, rather insipid, emotion. But the love of which Our Lord speaks is demanding. It is a giving experience, selfless and generous”.

The scandal of Christians hating Christians has always hung like a mocking shadow over these islands and in particular in recent years over Northern Ireland. Yet when the chance came to reveal what was truly in their hearts the people of Ireland, North and South, voted overwhelmingly in support of the Good Friday Agreement. In doing so they engaged in that giving experience so well described by Cardinal Hume. The hugely encouraging outcome of the referenda held to test the will of the people, had significance far beyond the obvious and indeed important, political dimension; it was a remarkable demonstration of belief in the power of hope, of the possibility of change, of our capacity to set a new trajectory for the future of relationships on these two islands. Every person who ticked the box and said ‘yes’, no matter how fearfully, no matter how tentatively, made a profound commitment to going on a journey into the future with strangers, with old enemies, a journey that would make considerable personal and community demands, but would in the end bring the reward not of victory or supremacy of one side over the other, but of victory over hatred and conflict.

The Agreement in itself, of course, is only part of the jigsaw. Through its implementation, which is at times fraught and at times headily exciting as we scent the possibilities for good created by new partnerships and new synergies, the politicians are helping to create the conditions in which lasting peace and reconciliation are possible. Here is a generation of people who would mostly describe themselves as Christian, trying their best to turn those words of Dean Swift on their head, so that religious belief, our belief in a loving God, becomes a source of reconciliation and healing rather than division, in this new Millennium. Just as the towering witness of Nelson Mandela in South Africa inspired the peacemakers in Ireland, I know the peacemakers in many other areas of conflict across the world take hope and encouragement from Northern Ireland’s difficult pilgrimage to peace.

It is of particular significance that the Good Friday Agreement provides the blueprint for a new set of relationships not just within Ireland, but also with England, Scotland and Wales. This Jubilee year provides an invitation to change the tired and unedifying ways in which we have regarded each other historically, both at the level of the individual and the community. The story of these two islands has been shaped, or more accurately distorted, by centuries-old attitudes of mutual antagonism, misunderstanding and resentment. Overlaying all of that, we have the more recent legacy of violent atrocities visited upon so many innocent people: the victims extending in an awesome ripple effect from the families of the dead and the savagely wounded, to the broader Irish community who had to bear the brunt of anger, discrimination and, in some cases, the horror of wrongful convictions and imprisonment.

The President and John Wilkins

In The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney says:

“Highlighting old scars,
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it. I always hated it. I am
A part of it myself”.

His image is simple and familiar. We have a choice to stay mired deeply behind our own barricades, seeing on all sides only our own story, our own pain, our own woundedness - or we can begin to move on to a place where healing can start.

Cardinal Hume told us: “Right down the ages we can say that history is the story of our failure to love” There has been little love lost between these two islands until recent years. But now, at this time of evolving relationships between these two islands, we have an unprecedented opportunity for beginning that journey of renewal. The dialogue and co-operation which our politicians are pursuing can only bring us so far. We need to get to know each other better to know each other’s story better, not the skewed versions of history which blinded us to each other and suppressed truth or repressed it to suit the politics of the day. We have presumed to know too much about each other and that presumption has been the breeder of ignorance, prejudice, stereotype, and alienation. Now we need to listen to each other with joyful curiosity and genuine interest. The invitation which The Tablet extended to me is just one small example of the possibilities for greater dialogue that all of us can help create, and which helps build up mutual knowledge and respect.

Speaking in Armagh Cathedral on St. Patrick’s Day this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury put it well, when he quoted these words of the poet, Maya Angelou:

“History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again”.

That future is built not with grand gestures, but with the small acts of friendship between people, that are built up, layer by layer, into the mutual respect and a deep enduring peace that comes from the realisation that diversity is the very essence of humanity, it is the most extraordinary manifestation of God’s presence in this world and his ambition for the world.

Oscar Wilde, whose life I am also in London to celebrate, remarks in The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

“… who can say by what strange way, Christ brings his will to light…”

How right he was. Five years ago, who would have predicted these times of great hope for peace in Ireland, for a maturing friendship between Ireland and Britain? But those who believe in a loving God dare to see in this, His will coming to light, at last. We see nothing strange in it, for we believe in those “miracles and cures and healing wells” - they are the peacemakers’ secret tools, they chip away at history’s toxic sediment and chisel out the space through which the future creeps in, one person at a time, one heart at a time.

An innkeeper in Bethlehem once said no to a young couple seeking accommodation, but was moved to change his mind, not a lot but just a little - enough to create a space in a stable for a child whose name would span two millennia, who would inspire Christians, and invoke respect from the other great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam. All over the world Christians are preparing for this special birthday. Cribs and cards carry the words Peace on earth, Goodwill to all, but we now need to write them indelibly on the heart.