Remarks on the Legacy and Challenge of Irish Studies in new Conditions
University of São Paulo, 8th October 2012
I am delighted to be here today at the University of São Paulo as part of my visit to Brazil.
May I immediately say how very grateful we are in Ireland to know that there has been an Irish studies programme here that goes back more than three decades to 1980 and in a University that has achieved academic excellence in so many fields. I am delighted therefore to have the opportunity to visit and address this distinguished gathering. The evening’s distinguished gathering includes our Irish community of Sao Paulo and beyond and to them I extend a particular welcome. Fior Chaoin Fáilte romhaibh ar fad. Tá áthas an domhair orm fein beith libh in atmosphear na leinn is neither Gaelach.
While the Irish population in Brazil has never been large in size, the historical linkages between our two countries are, if not extensive, long standing. In their earliest form they are of a religious or military kind with all the resonance of history written and yet to be revised that this raises.
After accounts of the Jesuit, Father Field, who came to Brazil in 1577, the records refer to 300 Irish soldiers in Portuguese military service in Brazil in 1604. These are, if you like, the voluntary component of Irish migration. In the Antilles a mixture of indentured and forced Irish migration are unfolding in the Caribbean. We Irish had a presence in armies of competing colonizing powers, their local opposition, the acts of liberation and its aftermath. After church and army, came merchants and we know that some Irish tobacco planters like the O’Brien and the Purcell brothers in the 1620s and 1630s traded in Brazil tobacco, dyes and hardwoods. Bernando O Brien from County Clare led a group in 1620 that built a wood and earthen fort on the north bank of the Amazon and they became expert navigators of its maze of tributaries, canals and islands.
We also know that several Irish soldiers served in Brazilian armies, including Diago Nicolau Keating, Diago O Grady, and Jorge Cowan and there was a Hibernian regiment in the Spanish Army in southern Brazil in 1777. Historians have a rich terrain upon which to reflect in piecing the motivations of these skilled soldiers, and indeed the different settlers, together.
A story of some significance and poignancy is that of Colonel William Cotter’s failed attempt to settle Irish emigrants in 1827. Cotter was sent to Ireland in 1826 to recruit a regiment for service against Argentina. He brought over 2,400 people from Cork in 1827 with the promise of a grant of land in return for five years’ military service. However the Irish were completely neglected when they arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1828. They mutinied together with a German regiment, resulting in open warfare on the streets of Rio.
Most were ultimately sent home or travelled on to Canada or Argentina, although some did stay to form a colony in the province of Bahia. Further colonisation schemes were a failure, mainly due to poor preparation for the Irish immigrants’ reception, the lack of agricultural tools, poor land, scarce water and adjustment to the local diet. Many immigrants died and survivors moved on to other countries. Indeed it was one of Barnardo O’Higgins’ disappointments at failing to establish an enduring settlement of Irish agricultural workers on his estates in Southern Chile.
An Irish migrant who did achieve some prominence in Brazil in the nineteenth century was William Scully, a journalist and businessman, who became owner and editor of the Anglo-Brazilian Times of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1870s. That paper was published weekly for nearly 20 years from 1865 to 1884, a tremendous achievement and it is to its credit that it was a resolute campaigner for the ending of slavery in Brazil.
The special issue of ABEI (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses) – Journal no. 12 of the Brazilian Journal of Irish studies which appeared in 2010 commemorated the centenary of Roger Casement’s first voyage to the Amazon.
The recent publication of Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘El Sueno del Celt’ has reminded us all of the humanitarian work of another great Irishman. In 1910 Roger Casement, then a British Consul in Brazil, investigated and reported on claims that a Peruvian company was carrying out atrocities against employees involved in collecting wild rubber. His discoveries were captured in a shocking report in which he related that three-quarters of the indigenous people of the area had been wiped out through the slave labour of the rubber industry.
The journal is replete with splendid articles including Angus Mitchell, “Roger Casement in Brazil, Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World 1884-1916” – which, from the diaries shows the evolution of a revolutionary sensibility and the comparison between that being suffered by the American Indians and the Caribbean islanders suffering from typhus.
We know the rest of the Casement story, his knighthood for his work here and earlier, on similar issues, in the Belgian Congo, and his embracing of the cause of Irish independence which cost him his life in 1916.
This rich history was brought to life by your Irish Studies team in a major academic conference in the northern city of Menaus in Amazonas in 2010. And this has been supplemented by an exhibition here in the University on Casement’s life and work. There has, of course, been a renewed interest by younger generations in Roger Casement with the publication of Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘El Sueño del Celt’ with its subtle confrontation of the limited revolutionary intent of a nationalism that does not go on to allow for sexual freedom and its contemplation.
In social terms, the most significant development in more recent years has been the major increase in Irish religious undertakings in Brazil. I understand that there are some twenty Irish Religious Missionary Organisations working in Brazil. These women and men are carrying on a fine Irish tradition of many years where Irish people have answered the call to give of themselves to serve abroad and to place themselves among the poor and disempowered in areas of poverty and deprivation, and to give service and be part of the process of empowerment of those among whom they live, giving witness, giving voice to those who, like the threatened indigenous people of our fragile planet where they live or to those who move to cities in hope as migrants.
It is important that, based on such prior knowledge of each other that Brazil and Ireland, as countries with solid democracies, promoting economic development, and with an enduring focus on social equality, should, in the 21st century, find common cause between them on so many levels and seek to deepen their mutual friendships. It is my fervent wish and hope that my visit will assist in this.
Brazil and Ireland have so much to accomplish together in turning a depeopled global economy of unaccountable markets into a peopled social economy of responsibility with a commitment to delivering real sustainability.
The capacity to make great changes, necessary changes, and the long struggle for the opportunity to do so has been a great achievement by the Brazilian people. We too, in Ireland, have had to struggle for our right to have an independent view of ourselves and our relationships with Europe and the wider world. Ireland has an old European and international connection. This has helped deliver success for Irish presidencies of the European Union and will be drawn upon again in the first half of the coming year when Ireland again assumes the Presidency of the European Union.
In no small part, that is why I am in Brazil this week. And I am conscious of what Ireland can learn from the Brazilian experience. There is a great deal to admire, including the spectacular progress made by Brazil in reducing absolute poverty. Nowhere in the world has there been the progress like that which Brazil has made, nor in such a short period, in lifting millions, almost 20 million in total, above the poverty line. And on the economy, the record is equally impressive considering that in the 1990s Brazil was heavily indebted and suffering from the highest inflation in the world. Today the country is free of debt, and currently the sixth largest global economy with a GDP around US$2.5 trillion.
When we in Ireland look at Brazil, we see much to admire and emulate. We are conscious too of the imaginative response of Brazil to some capacity gaps that may be inhibiting further progress, such as those addressed by President Rousseff when she introduced the imaginative scholarship scheme, Ciência Sem Fronteiras.
Like many of our European partners, we have engaged with this programme and expect to welcome up to 1,500 Brazilian scholars to Ireland in the next few years, thus contributing to filling such gaps and thus assisting the building of national capacity in Brazil but also at the same time creating a new network of people to people links between our two countries. Ireland is now much better known to Brazilians because each year over 4,000 Brazilians choose Ireland for further study and more than 20,000 Brazilians have moved to Ireland, taking advantage of the growing economy. In the town of Gort in the West of Ireland almost 40% of the population is Brazilian.
The innovation and dynamism which characterises much of Brazilian industry is contagious and it is to be found among the Irish who have come here. For instance, a small number of Irish companies now have a presence in the Brazilian market, such as the Irish food company Kerry which has a factory in Campinas, Sao Paulo and employs over 600 people.
In seeking to deepen the cooperation and cultural links between us we need to know more of each other, exchange narratives, and reflect together on world and scholarly issues that know no borders in time or space, and to constantly renew our versions of each other and ourselves. It is in this context that the Irish Studies programme here assumes an importance that transcends the academic and the intellectual and has a wider significance. The versions of the social sciences, the reconnection of political economy and ethics to philosophy, the ending of crude divisions between science, technology and culture are well underway and in the new integrated scholarship Brazil and Ireland have much to achieve together.
The fascinating story of how Irish studies developed here in the University has been richly recounted by the founder of the Centre, Professor Munira Mutran in her publication of Sean O’Faoláin’s Letters to Brazil. Without the serendipity of that exchange of correspondence over almost two decades between a young PhD student and an aging Irish writer reflecting on the life of a writer and contrasting the irreversible price of ageing with all the energy, love and promise of the younger scholar, we would not be here today.
The letters are fascinating and paint a picture of a relationship which began as an exchange between master and pupil, and quickly evolved to one marked by genuine friendship and deep mutual respect. And, as it developed, so began and flourished the engagement of professor Munira and the University of São Paulo with Irish studies. The University of São Paulo has offered a postgraduate course on Irish literature since 1977. Academic exchanges with Ireland date back to 1979 and the ABEI (Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses) was founded in the University in December, 1989.
Since 1999 the University has been publishing the The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses, edited by Professor Mutran and Professor Laura Izarra. The Association regularly organises symposia that bring some of the major contemporary Irish writers to South America and its publications have included contributions from people like John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, Michael Longley, Margaret Mac Curtain, Declan Kiberd and Fintan O’Toole.
Moreover, it has established linkages and secured support from the wider network of established Irish Studies programmes so that, for instance, Professor Maureen Murphy, a stalwart of Irish Studies in the United States, has been a frequent visitor.
I have had the privilege of reading, thanks to the generosity of Professor Munira Mutran and Laura Izarra in some of Issue 12 of Nov. 2010 of the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies including the splendid contribution of Angus Mitchell’s treatment of indigeneity and Casement’s parallels of Indian and Connemara life.
The William Butler Yeats Chair of Irish Studies was founded in 2009 and I understand that last August the seventh annual symposium of Irish Studies in South America was held in the city of Natal on the theme of “Representations of Women in Irish Culture”. I am pleased that the Irish Government has been funding the William Butler Chair of Irish Studies at the University of São Paulo and has recently committed to do so for three more years. At a time of great budgetary difficulties, this commitment is a tribute to your dedication and drive, the quality of your output, and the value the Irish Government places upon it.
As President of Ireland I welcome the annual celebration of Bloomsday – the day around which the novel of “Ulysses” revolves. James Joyce’s achievement was to break the mould of the novel and his work has yielded works of criticism of world significance. Like so many writers of this continent he takes the importance of memory, remoulds it, passes it through the filters of imagination in space and breaks the mould of the novel. I have been told that for this year’s Bloomsday, a large bookstore in Rio de Janeiro, clearly infected by what began here in this University, had a special promotion with a stand containing all of Joyce’s works, both in Portuguese and English. The respect for writing, for culture and the arts, for their life affirming and vindicating qualities is another strong connection we Irish and Brazilians share.
Juan Alvaro Echeverra’s splendid ‘To Heal or to Remember: Indian Memory of the Rubber Boom and Roger Casement’s ‘Basket of Life’ (Basket of Darkness, Basket of Life) is a beautiful piece of anthropology in Issue 12.
Clearly things have come a long way from that first letter from Professor Mutran to Sean O’Faoláin. O’ Faoláin himself once said:
“There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.”
So we are able to gather here today because of the power of the imagination and the building of new realities that came from within the walls of this institution. I commend the University here for its enduring support for your work in developing a unique relationship between Ireland and Brazil and bringing to Irish studies the exotic coloration which Brazil, the home of Carnival, brings to all endeavours.
I commend all those who, inspired by imagination, made things happen. Firstly Professor Mutran, who has been succeeded by the no less committed Professor Laura Izarra and her dedicated team. I am especially delighted too that Professor Munira’s pioneering work over 25 years was acknowledged by the National University of Ireland in Maynooth when it conferred on her an honorary Doctorate of Literature in 2008.
Thinking about what inspired the creation and sustenance of an Irish Studies Programme in Brazil caused me to reflect more generally on the broader question of the legacy and challenge of Irish Studies in new conditions – conditions which are characterised by a sense of crisis in intellectual work and in the academy, a perception that the old paradigms in economy and society have failed and are fading, being replaced by a yearning for renewal in our institutions and, indeed, our identity. In many respects the multiplicity of efforts at creating forms of participation, of balancing State, civil society, and representative structures is much more advanced on this continent than elsewhere and we in Europe have to absorb that change and its significance. Perhaps we in Ireland have a more accommodating sensibility to achieve that than some others in Europe.
Renewing Ireland and with it our sense of what it means to be Irish is one of the most urgent challenges facing us at present. It is a challenge which encompasses and underpins economic renewal but also which goes beyond it, reaching into the realms of academia and intellectual life. Those of us who value the importance of Irish Studies and, in particular, the importance of its accessibility in the wider Irish Diaspora, owe a deep debt of gratitude to scholars, individually and through the work of their academic institutions, for their work. Indeed it is interesting too that the new critical work in literature is often very much more incisive and developed than in the social sciences, which find it harder to break free into the needed originality of our position.
As to Irishness, itself as concept and reality, in May this year I was delighted to give the third Thomas Flanagan lecture in New York on the topic of ‘Remembering and Imagining Irishness’. I am reminded most of all that Thomas Flanagan was the teacher who warned against any simplification of Irishness: “My Irish American identity” he said, “is typical only in the sense that there is no such typical experience”. “Identity”, he added, “is a personal matter, complex, slanted, convoluted”.
In Ireland we are not obsessed by the past and we welcome our constant necessary revisions. We are now again on the threshold of the centenaries of events that shaped Ireland for much of the past hundred years. In the next few years we will mark the centenary of the start of the First World War and the events that led to the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. The anniversaries are an opportunity too to reflect on our complex identities.
It seems to me that as the twentieth century progressed, anxious for pragmatic assurances of stability we sacrificed some of the powerful emancipatory, egalitarian and imaginative richness of the original independence to which we aspired, including its socially transformative potential. The writers of Ireland, in exilic mode, have reminded us of not only that but of the enduring luminosity of the original republican vision, a vision that knows no borders in its liberating tendency. The polarising events too of a hundred years ago in Ireland had the effect in many respects of fixing and freezing national and religious identities for the decades that followed in a way that was exclusive and confrontational, narrowing our horizons. It is the recovery of, and respect for, the complexity of intellectual work that will set us free.
The Irishness that I believe is now emerging, even if not yet fully realised, is one that will be informed by the experience of the Irish abroad as much, or even to a greater extent, than it will be informed by those of us who live in Ireland. Distance grants perspective and it is not accidental that so many of our most perceptive scholars choose the lens of temporary exile, and are people of Ireland at once at home and abroad. And of course if distance grants perspective, then you have an advantage here in Sao Paulo, half a globe away from the object of study. We Irish, all of us, will be especially interested in the insights and new perspectives you offer us through your valuable work.
On a number of occasions since my inauguration as Uachtarán na hÉireann, President of Ireland, I have suggested that it is not only from memory that the Irishness of a new departure will come, but from what is imagined as possibility, and capable of being brought to fruition, respecting the frames of experience and values to which our words and policies are directed. But this will not be a new task or novel experience for Irish people. Ireland is not a society that has simply moved out of tradition into modernity. As scholars such as Declan Kiberd have pointed out, Irish people have again and again been required to modernize, to adapt, to learn and to come through with such creativity as was necessary so as to define and deal with that which was initially strange. That process of adaptation and modernisation was particularly a feature of the Irish migrant experience as they sought to accommodate the strangeness of their host environments.
We are in changing times in Ireland, in Europe, in the world. I am mindful today that my predecessor, eight years ago, gave an address here in the University, in March 2004 on the subject of EU enlargement and Ireland’s experience in the EU. At that time, Ireland held the Presidency of the EU as we were preparing to welcome ten new countries to join the Union on 1 May 2004. It was a time of optimism when the EU was self-confident of its capabilities to further advance economic, social and political progress. The word cohesion had equal status with competitiveness. Since then, that optimism has of course been severely challenged by economic events as the supposed rationality of the financial markets has been brutally exposed. A tension has begun to emerge between accountable democracies, faced with unacceptable levels of unemployment and unaccountable markets, based on the rewards of speculation, and in an abuse of the concept of freedom, defining it as a freedom from State, or indeed any, regulation.
In the aftermath of that massive economic failure, and its attendant human consequences, a certain version of Ireland which prevailed in our recent past must now be regarded as an aberration in our long history and it must be replaced. That narrow version of Ireland was characterised by an extreme and unrestrained individualism and an almost reverential approach to wealth for its own sake. This version of Irish society was destructive at home, and it damaged our reputation abroad. It also fostered new forms of exclusion and inequality.
We are paying the human price of involuntary emigration again, as more young people feel impelled to emigrate in pursuit of employment opportunities, thereby perpetuating an historical experience of emigration that we had hoped had been consigned to the past. It is our hope that many will return, having helped other economies that they will come in time to build the Ireland of which they are a crucial part, and many are choosing to stay bringing new forms of innovation and social economy into being.
We have had nearly two centuries of researching and analysing the Irish migrations of the past, particularly since the post-Famine period. Our Irish history, our collective memory, is scarred by emigration and its sense of loss, separation and missed opportunities, even if there has been a rich literary harvest enjoyed, not only at home but at a global level.
The subject of migration has interested me all throughout my academic and political career. I believe that our migratory experiences should to us be a great moral and empowering strength continually reminding us that the appropriate human rights that attach to each person, from the fact of being simply human and alive, should never be diminished by necessity or the decision to move, should never be curtailed, limited or made conditional, on either being sedentary or the owner of property. In the end, as I have said before, we are all simply migrants in time – curious, creative and vulnerable in an interdependent world that is always on the edge of new possibilities yet to be realised.
Now we are at the cusp of great changes. We face, on the one hand, the challenge of accepting mutely and passively, the impact of such a homogenization as would define us as consumers, passively consumed in our consumption, or alternatively, of using science and technology to assist us in making a rich tapestery of the threads and cultures, of things ancient and things yet to be imagined. Irish studies can be as a loom, to such a project as will release, not only our curosity or our voyeurism as to what is different and, as Edward Said would have it “an exotic experience for a transient moment”. Irish studies can open our Irishness out to the world in all its wonder, its misery, its cruelty and its unquenchable impulse to an ethical humanity without borders.
Derek Mahon, a close friend of Tom Flanagan’s in New York, has recently written about the need to renew values in an Ireland that has seen excess:
“It’s time now to go back at last
Beyond irony and slick depreciation
Past hedge and fencing to a clearer vision
Time to create a future from the past.”
I believe we are at such a point of renewal. It is a great challenge – renewing Ireland and also renewing the sense of what it means to be Irish after the events of recent years. Those outside Ireland who share a sense of Irishness, including those who are teachers or students of Irish Studies abroad, are vital to that process. As President, I have made it a priority to strenghten Ireland’s connection with its wide diaspora and the scholarship of that diaspora. It is my wish and hope to strengthen and deepen all strands of our international connections to the global Irish family. That inclusive version of Irishness is, in its turn, but a strand in our common shared human existence, such a global approach as might include all our histories, peoples, narratives and scholarships. Charles Darwin wrote about the need to see beyond ourselves:
“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”
Now more than ever, we need to widen our perspective and leave behind all aggressive individualism and move in international solidarity towards a more generous form of inclusion. We need to work together to imagine anew such values and ideals as will create something new, emancipatory and transformative.The local Irish community here is estimated at 1,000, and I am well aware that there is no apparent Irish Diaspora here, no great hyphenated Irish community to endow from riches what is going on, to provide funding, to support its academics and furnish its student base, as prevails in some parts of North America. Rather it is as if one had happened on an oasis of learning, sustained by a small dedicated group from within South America who pursue the study of Irish literature purely on its own inherent merits. This makes Irish Studies here in this University special, precious, and wonderful in its achievements and even more so for its promise. There is something different, unique, colourful and even exotic about an academic programme which is Irish studies in Brazil.
I sincerely hope that this Centre of Irish Studies will continue to strengthen and grow. You are a like a beacon whose light gives us all hope and courage. George Bernard Shaw once said “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail”. You are doing that agus beir beannacht ar bhár n-iarrachaí.
To the Irish gathered here this evening – mo chomh-Éireannaigh i láthair – my wife Sabina and I look forward to meeting you and to hearing your stories. Míle buíochas as bhur gcomhuladar anseo anocht.
Finally, if the story of Ireland is about a people who scatter, it is also right that they should gather. Next year, in 2013, Ireland will host “The Gathering”, a great bringing together of Irish people and friends of Ireland in a year-long celebration of all that is best in Irish tradition and identity. May I invite you to come to Ireland and celebrate with us and let us think together about our shared vulnerable planet and its people and how to make it a space of fully inclusive humanity.