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ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, AT GROSSE ILE ON 21st AUGUST, 1994

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, AT GROSSE ILE ON 21st AUGUST, 1994

Islands possess their own particular beauty and Grosse Ile is no exception.  But Grosse Ile - Oileán na nGael - L'Ile des Irlandais - is special.  I believe that even those coming to this beautiful island knowing nothing of the tragedy which occurred here, would sense its difference.  I am certain that no one knowing the story could remain unaffected.

This is a hallowed place.

We are here not to honour an island, however beautiful, but to recall a human tragedy of appalling dimensions.  The relics of this tragedy are all too visible.  The mass graves marked with the small white crosses assume an added poignancy in their obvious anonymity.  And yet we know that each one represents not just the untimely death but the collapse of dreams, not of one person but of many.

It is proper to reflect on what inspired or drove those ordinary men and women, most of them of limited means, many of them on the brink of destruction, to leave their homeland and set out, many with young children, on a hazardous journey.  For too many the alternative to death by starvation was a choice between the workhouse, where families would be split up, or a landlord-sponsored passage to the New World.  In either case the cabin would be unroofed and the tenancy surrendered.  It was a poor choice.

There is no single reason to explain the disaster of the Great Hunger and the diaspora to which it contributed greatly.  The potato failure was a natural disaster which affected other countries in Europe at the time.  But in Ireland it took place in a political, economic and social framework that was oppressive and unjust.  The results were devastating in Ireland itself but, abroad, they resulted in the creation or strengthening of Irish Communities in many countries including in Canada.

Tá dínit le haireachtáil san áit seo más dínit an bhróin féin í.  Is ceart agus is cóir dúinn comóradh a dhéanamh ar ár muintir atá faoin bhfód anseo.  Ní miste a mheabhrú dúinn féin na coinníollacha uafásach a leag a ngaolta agus a gcáirde ar lár anseo.  Sháraigh siad gach constaic.  Chuaigh siad i ngleic leis an saol, d'fhás siad agus d'fhorbair siad.  Tá sliocht a sleachta faoi bhláth i gCeanada.  Is de dhlúth is d'inneach an chomhluadair i gCeanada an mhuintir de bhunadh na hÉireann.  D'fhag siad rian nach beag ar gach gné don saol.  Nuair a thugann muid chun chuimhne míbhuntáistí na linne, faigheann muid léargas ceart ar a n-éacht.  Go fírinneach tá údar againn leis an mórtas o chíne a airíonn muid.

On se rend compte de la vérité de l'inscription en français sur la croix celtique : "Ceux qui sément dans les larmes moissonneront dans la joie."

Il est juste de réflechir sur le passé, aussi amer qu'il soit.  Il est juste de pleurer la tragédie humaine qui a eu lieu ici.  Mais cela ne peut suffire.  Il faut également en tirer des leçons.  Il y a les faits penibles de l'époque, les expulsions, la misere, les maladies, les carences de la justice, la négligence, et jusqu'a la responsabilité des pouvoirs politiques, qui illustrent le côté noir de la vie, mais il y a aussi de quoi nourrir notre espoir.

Parçe qu'en dépit des difficultés et du danger réel qui mettaient leur vie en jeu, l'action des Canadiens et des Canadiennes a été magnifique.  Ailleurs, sur le continent, on fermait les portes contre les Irlandais.  Au Canada, le peuple - et en particulier le peuple de Québec - a fait preuve d'une compassion tout à fait extraordinaire a l'égard des Irlandais, hommes et femmes, indigents et malades.

Le clergé, tout autant protestant que catholique, a apporté soulagement aux malades et soin aux survivants.  Parmi ces prêtres se trouvait Elzéar Alexandre Tascherau, qui devait devenir le premier Cardinal-Archevêque du Canada.

A Montréal se fûrent les Soeurs Grises qui ont soigné les malades dans les "hospital sheds" (abris de secours) spécialement construits pour les immigrés irlandais.  Et quand à leur tour elles sont tombées malades, ce furent les Soeurs de la Charité qui les ont remplacés.  Il faut également se souvenir du Maire de Montréal, Mr. John Mill, qui lui-même a trouvé la mort en soignant les malades.

To all of those brave and compassionate people, lay and religious, anglophone and francophone, Catholic and Protestant, in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, who at great personal risk aided and cared for the sick and destitute Irish, and gave homes to Irish orphans, we owe a debt of gratitude.  I pay tribute to their memory on my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Ireland.  In the words of Máirtín Ó Direáin, a poet from another beautiful island:

"Maireann a gcuimhne fós i m'aigne

 Is mairfidh cinnte go dté mé i dtalamh."

In this place of memory and regret I think we have a chance to reflect on our relation to the past. The men and women who came here in the 1840's and died were helpless before an historical catastrophe of enormous proportions. It is their very helplessness which can mislead us into believing that we also are helpless in our attitude to a past we cannot control and can never change. But we are not. We have the chance to choose today between being spectators or participants at the vast theatre of human suffering which unfolds throughout human history.

If we are spectators then we will choose the view that there are inevitable historical victims and inevitable survivors. And from that view I believe comes a  distancing which is unacceptable and unmoral.

If we are participants then we realise there are no inevitable victims.   We refuse the temptation to distance ourselves from the suffering around us - whether it comes through history books or contemporary television images. And then, although we cannot turn the clock back and change the deaths that happened here, at least we do justice to the reality of the people who died here by taking the meaning of their suffering and connecting it to the present day challenges to our compassion and involvement. If we are participants we engage with the past in terms of the present. If we are spectators then we close these people into a prison of statistics and memories, from which they can never escape to challenge our conscience and compassion.

Earlier this year I opened the Famine Museum at Strokestown House in Roscommon. There, also, were images of suffering and desolation. There, also, our sense of horror was tempted towards a sense of fatalism. Ironically, many people from Roscommon took ship for Canada. In each case the story is the same.  What is variable is our determination to do honour to those events by an active relation to them.  And therefore, as President of Ireland, and in memory of so many who died here, I think I can say that what is particularly Irish about this occasion is not simply the nationality of those who died here. It is also our sense, as a people who suffered and survived, that our history does not entitle us to a merely private catalogue of memories. Instead it challenges us to consider, not just little Ellen Keane, the four year child who was the first person to die here in 1847, but the reality that children are usually the first victims of famine and displacement.   It challenges us, in her name, to consider with compassion and anger those other children to whom we can give no name who are dying today in Rwanda and whom I saw in the camps in Somalia.

Next year commemorates the 150th year since the famine which devastated Ireland. No one then could have foreseen, or even hoped, that a modern European state would emerge, with a powerful identity and a confident culture. It is very important to me  that within that culture the voiceless, desolate dead of such places as Grosse Ile are remembered and honoured. We owe to their humiliation at the hands of fate just as much love and respect as to any brave or decisive action which turned the tide of history in our favour. But it is also important that as a people who have seen the dark and the bright face of such fortunes we take the initiative not just in compassionate action towards those who are now caught, as we once were, in famine and disease, but also in re-defining the contemporary attitude to such suffering.

We are in the presence, even as I speak, of an enormous historic irony. The ease and proliferation of communication has had, I believe, the result of isolating us further from one another. The presence of death in our living rooms, the images of horror invite us to feel helpless and fatalistic. Perhaps the real justice we can do these people here and those who died throughout our famine - perhaps the best way to commemorate them - is to think decisively and creatively about the supply and distribution of such ordinary commodities as food and water.

It may be less glamorous than standing in a posture of grief and regret. But a careful and analytical study of just how little, for instance, has been done to distribute clean water to areas of large slum dwellings or refugee camps is both vital and overdue. And if this seems too ordinary a detail, I think we should remember that the thousands who died here, whose dreams were extinguished, whose future was lost on this island, died because of the detail of the failure of one crop.  There are such details all over the world now, but particularly in Africa, which need our urgent attention.

Grosse Ile is not simply a place to commemorate the past and honour those who are buried here.  In essence, it is a resource to connect us with the terrible realities of our current world.  It challenges us to reject the concept of inevitable victims, and, having done so, to face up to the consequences of that rejection.