Speech at the Presentation of Drew University’s Centre on Religion, Culture and Conflict Peacebuilder Award to former U.S. Congressman, Bruce Morrison
Club na Múinteoirí, Dublin, 10th January 2016
A Dhaoine Uaisle agus a Chairde,
Former Congressman Morrison,
Tá áthas orm a bheith anseo libh ar fad anocht chun Gradam Síochána Ollscoil Drew a bhronnadh ar Bruce Morrison.
As President of Ireland I am very happy to be given this opportunity to recognise publicly your important contribution, former U.S. Congressman Morrison, to the advancement of peace in Northern Ireland. You have made this cause your own with a generosity and tenacity for which the people of this island are profoundly grateful.
Your concern for Irish matters goes back for more than three decades, to the early 1980s, when you joined the “Friends of Ireland”, and then the “Ad-Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish Affairs.” Through these two organisations, alongside such spirited Irish-American figures as Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy, you forged a heartfelt and enduring commitment to the ending of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
In the next decade, you provided briefing on Northern Irish issues to your fellow Yale Law School alumnus, Bill Clinton, during his 1992 Presidential campaign and throughout his two terms in office. In particular, you participated with great zeal and political skill in the activities of the “Americans for a New Irish Agenda”, a group of people who are widely credited with having facilitated the negotiations that eventually led to the IRA ceasefires of 1994 and 1997.
Mr. Morrison, since your first visit to Belfast, in 1987, you have travelled to Northern Ireland on numerous occasions, to meet in person with protagonists from all sides – to discuss, to challenge, to persuade.
So many of the milestones in the Northern Irish peace process – the ceasefires, Declarations and Agreements – would not have been possible without the quiet diplomacy, the patient persuasion, the repeated conversations that preceded and outlasted them. They would not have happened without the trust and the personal relationships built over time, painstakingly.
May I salute, Mr. Morrison, your determination – and that of all the other protagonists in the peace process – to challenge the established impression of the conflict in the North as intractable and insoluble. Twenty years ago, many were those who could see no way out of the pattern of violence that seemed to ensnare the people of Northern Ireland. Thousands of lives had been lost, and countless more marred by mistrust and fear.
It took a transformation of vision, an act of political imagination, for this situation to change. Progress, in that crucial decade preceding the Good Friday Agreement, can be charted by the number of people who came to share the view that a lasting peace was possible. In your own words, Mr. Morrison:
“What was impossible became conventional wisdom. Such is the measure of success”
Such confidence in the transformative power of political action is surely politics at its best. It is a stance that guards us against any form of destructive cynicism; a version of politics that rejects any passive acceptance of a depressing state of affairs (often and erroneously cast as “realism”).
In several of my past speeches – e.g. in an address entitled “Remembering, Forgiving and Forgetting” which I gave to Queen’s University, Belfast, in October 2014, and more recently in my speech at the “Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation” – I have emphasised the importance of imagination to processes of reconciliation and remembrance.
Indeed in societies torn by internal conflicts, the possibility of living together is predicated upon the people and their leaders’ ability to imagine a future released from the burden of distorted past memories and seemingly insurmountable present difficulties. While past crimes cannot and should not be dissolved or forgotten, it is, I believe, only through an act of generous imagination that we can prevent the tragic memory from colonising the future.
As my friend the philosopher and poet the late John O’Donohue put it in his essay entitled The poetics of possibility:
“The imagination is the great friend of possibility. Where the imagination is alive, fixated positions cannot claim final authority. Givenness is not allowed to proclaim any despotism of facts.”
I am sure that these words find resonance with Bruce Morrison, who, as a lawyer and as a political representative, devoted much effort to devising new possibilities for those enduring the despotism of poverty.
During his days as a young Staff Attorney with the groundbreaking New Haven Legal Assistance Association (LAAA), throughout the 8 years he spent serving the people of Connecticut in Congress, when he became an expert on housing issues for the poorer, and through his focus on international human rights issues, Bruce Morrison has consistently shown his concern for the advancement of social justice at home and abroad.
May I say, Mr. Morrison, that I am particularly sensitive to the interest you took in South Africa at the time of apartheid, and in Chile, Nicaragua and Paraguay in the 1980s. These are all countries with which I also have had a personal involvement – nations who suffered situations of injustice that very much shaped my own outlook on international and human rights matters.
To finish, I would like to acknowledge your engagement, Mr. Morrison, on an issue of the utmost relevance to the contemporary moment, namely that of immigration. As many in this room will know, you were the House author of the 1990 Immigration Reform Act, that gave tens of thousands of people the opportunity (and the security) to build a new life in the United States.
The visa scheme deriving from this bill will forever be associated with your name – and indeed, who in Ireland hasn’t heard of “the Morrison visas”? This is because 40% of those visas were allotted to Irish citizens, reflecting the very special relationship between our two countries.
But the 1990 Immigration Reform Act is not important to Irish citizens only. At a time when the impulse of Western societies is very predominantly to close borders and erect walls, it is fitting to recall the spirit of that 1990 Act as one of only two notable immigration bills in the history of the USA to have increased immigration into the country.
Thus I hope that the young people who are with us tonight can find inspiration in the vision and accomplishments of former Congressman Bruce Morrison. I know that you are here with Drew University to spend the next week studying conflict resolution and the peace process in Northern Ireland. True peace and reconciliation is the work of generations: I invite each of you to make your own contribution to this important work.
And now, it is with great pleasure that I present Drew University’s Centre on Religion, Culture and Conflict Peacebuilder Award to Bruce Morrisson.
Thar ceann náisiún na hÉireann, is mian liom mo bhuíochas ó chroí a ghabháil leat as do thiomantas ar son chúis na Saoirse ar an oileán seo.
[On behalf of the Irish people, may I, once again, thank you very sincerely for your dedication to the cause of Peace on this island.]