Address by the Mary McAleese, at the Centenary Dinner of the Queensland Irish Association
Address by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at the Centenary Dinner of the Queensland Irish Association
President Pat Brennan and Judy Brennan, Lord Mayor Jim Soorley, Members of the Queensland Irish Association, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Ta áthas orm a bheith anseo i bhur measc agus muid ag ceiliúradh céad bliain ag fás agus ag dul chun chinn. Ócáid mhór stairiúil í seo a thúgann deis daoibh, agus dúinn uile, ár gcultúr agus ár n-oidhreacht a cheiliúradh go bródúil agus go poiblí.
I am delighted to be with so many wonderful people at this enormous and historic celebration marking one hundred years of the Queensland Irish Association. Our foremost contemporary Irish poet and Nobel Prize Laureate, Seamus Heaney, once said that the Irish were sometimes cautious about been seen as too Irish, but he thought that we should risk it. Tonight you have risked it - tonight you have thrown caution to the wind - and you are entirely right to have followed the advice of Seamus - for you have so much of which to be proud - you have so much to celebrate on this splendid and historic night of your Centenary.
There is the rich history of the Irish in Queensland. In the beginning, there was John Finnegan - from County Wicklow - who was among the first of the three Europeans to set foot on the soil of this Sunshine State. He was the one who, sometime later, would guide the famous John Oxley to what is now the Brisbane River. Then there was the incomparable Bishop James Quinn who sought to establish here a tropical paradise filled with the most talented from his native land. Indeed he succeeded in inspiring many courageous Irish women and men to build their lives together right across the Darling Downs, and under his enterprising spirit, Queensland was to become the only place in the tropics where the Irish would settle in large numbers. There was Patsy Durack, immortalised by his granddaughter Mary in “Kings in Grass Castles”, who drove his cattle here before he set out for the Kimberleys - and into the annals of the history of Western Australia. They were all remarkable people - and for them their life’s ambition was not just about personal freedom or the advancement of self-interest - it was about much more - it was about family and community - it was about a sense of place and purpose - it was about the enduring values of an ancient civilisation. For their ability to build strongly and to act courageously grew from a great faith and a firm commitment to the virtues of endurance and inventiveness as they worked together - to make here a new society in a new nation - where there would be equality and friendship - what you call “mateship” and “a fair go”. The values they cherished, the stories they told, the responsibility they took for each other, and the dreams they set out to achieve - all contributed to the society they hoped to establish and the nation they helped to fashion.
The contribution from those early days we can celebrate tonight - for across the generations and down the decades those early immigrants and their descendants never forgot who they were. They brought their culture and their traditions with them and they shared the experience of an ancient land with their new found friends in what has become an impressive multicultural society. They established clubs and societies to celebrate their heritage and to guarantee that its splendour and vitality should be passed to succeeding generations. In Brisbane in 1871, Kevin Izod O’Doherty - the only leader of the Young Ireland Rising of 1848 to have developed a substantial career in Australia - founded the Queensland Hibernian Society. It soon established branches in most of the major towns across this State and inspired the foundation - twenty seven years later - of the Queensland Irish Association with its own premises and its own character, on 25 March 1898.
That year of 1898 was indeed an auspicious one for the Irish community across Australia. It was the year in which those of Irish birth and heritage remembered the Centenary of the Great Rebellion of 1798 which led to the first major transportations to the newly established colony of New South Wales. It was also the year when they remembered the Young Irelanders of 1848, whose rebellion was closely linked to the Great Irish Famine which saw the migration to Australia of so many who fled from devastation and fever, in particular the thousands of young orphan girls, the first group of whom arrived from Belfast in 1848.
All of those events, on both sides of the world, were to leave profound and indelible marks on the character and identity of the young and emerging European settlement as well as on the burgeoning Irish community within its ranks. However, in the closing years of the 19th century, theirs was a community not simply content to look to the past, stirring as its history already was, rather it was a community determined to continue to build its own future. Indeed it was that determined sense of optimism and of confidence which led to the establishment, in the memorable year of 1898, of your own Queensland Irish Association.
In the hundred years since its foundation, the Queensland Irish Association has continued to expand and to embrace all of the pre-eminent excellence in the vibrant traditions of the Irish in Queensland. Its outstanding successes, and indeed its prosperity, through periods of tremendous change have demonstrated the Association’s ability to evolve and to respond to the needs and to the aspirations of the Irish community which it so generously serves. Today, the Queensland Irish Association is widely respected across Australia and is deeply esteemed by its own members and by the citizens of Brisbane. The Association’s magnificent premises in Elizabeth Street, which I visited earlier today, provide a great family home for the celebration of a culture and a heritage which it has always profoundly cherished.
The character and the spirit of the Queensland Irish Association has, since the earliest days of its foundation, echoed in a special way those poetic words of Arthur O’Shaughnessy:
We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams,
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams,
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
And across the world there are some 70 million people of Irish descent who contribute, as you do, to the identity and reality of being Irish. In Ireland we take an enormous pride in your outstanding achievements. Indeed I am here in Australia because your President, Pat Brennan, invited me. I accepted his invitation because I wanted to tell you personally how treasured and how cherished are all the members of our global Irish family in contemporary Ireland.
Ireland today - contemporary Irish society - is full of hope and confidence for the future. We are achieving today what, only a generation ago, few might have dared to dream of. We have one of the strongest economies in the developed world. We have reversed the emigration trend of over a century and a half - today more are returning to work in Ireland than are leaving it in search of employment. Our musicians and dancers - and I am particularly grateful to your Lord Mayor, Jim Soorley, for inviting Sharon Shannon to be with us this evening - together with our poets and authors, our dramatists and our actors are making an enormous impact around the world. I know how warmly and enthusiastically they are received in Australia - this most Irish country in the world beyond the shores of Ireland itself. Our cultural energy is not all generated on the island of Ireland – its roots are in every part of the world where members of our global Irish family live. These roots are carefully nourished far from Ireland by people who care about their Irish culture and identity while caring deeply about their new homelands too.
I know also how deeply you care about Northern Ireland and I can assure you this evening that those courageous women and men who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement, and the people who endorsed it, will not be deflected from the historic opportunity of implementing it. Far from weakening the Agreement, the Omagh outrage has deepened our determination to make it work; the depths to which its opponents have sunk is a measure of their desperation. We will build together and we will achieve peace and prosperity for all those living on the island of Ireland.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This, the first State Visit of my Presidency, comes to an end tomorrow morning and this great celebration is the last Irish Community Function of my wonderful journey across Australia. I will take back with me to Ireland lasting memories of my time here, of a great nation, of an open, friendly, generous people, of scenery of extraordinary beauty, of a massive continent richly endowed by its Creator. We entered through the picturesque city of Perth, on the River of the Black Swans, and we leave from beautiful Brisbane, Capital of Queensland, the State which treasures the Great Barrier Reef - a precious part of the wonderful natural heritage of our world.
I am most grateful to all those who made possible my journey across Australia: your Governor General and Prime Minister, your State Governors and State Premiers and the many officials at Federal and State level who have contributed so much to the success of my mission.
Members of the Queensland Irish Association,
In this your Centenary year I wish your President and your Committee, the Management and Staff, as well as each and every member of the Queensland Irish Association every joy and good fortune - on into a new Millennium. The spirit of your enthusiasm has never been shining so brightly - nor indeed has the presence of Ireland across this bountiful land.
May God continue to bless Australia and all its wonderful people. May he guide Australia’s sister island of Ireland to a peace and prosperity that will make our Australian Irish family proud and may there be between our two countries the closest of bonds and the continuing gift of deep and special friendship.