REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF A DINNER IN HER HONOUR
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF A DINNER IN HER HONOUR, HOSTED BY THE HON. HILARY WESTON
Your Honours, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here tonight as the guest of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. I am particularly pleased as the first Irish Head of State to make a State Visit to Canada, to have the opportunity to exchange views with the first Irish-born Lieutenant Governor of Ontario! Ontario is fortunate to have as a Lieutenant Governor a woman who is not only Irish but who demonstrates a remarkable commitment to improving the quality of life of the community you serve. Your dedication to the elimination of youth unemployment and homelessness, demonstrated by the Foundation for Youth which you established on your inauguration and to which you donate your salary is a good example. So too is your fundraising work for research into breast cancer. Your initiative on early childhood education in Toronto is another. These are the issues which we don’t read about on the front page of the newspapers - but they are the issues that every mother worries about, and as a mother I would like to congratulate you for the practical kindness you have shown.
Since my arrival in Canada I have had the opportunity to meet many Irish born Canadians and many more descendants of Irish-born Canadians. I have been struck by the pride that these people take both in their new home, Canada, and in their Irish roots. Their concern and love for their country of origin is deeply moving. Your Honour, you are an outstanding example of a “new Canadian” - someone who has played a positive and dynamic role in your new home, while maintaining a strong attachment to your country of birth. In 1979, you brought together a group of people to found the Ireland Fund of Canada, a non-partisan, non-denominational organization which raises money to fund community projects in Ireland. The projects are designed to promote reconciliation and to alleviate unemployment, so often a factor in sectarian violence. They are not necessarily high profile projects - but they are all projects which make a difference. And on behalf of the people of Ireland I would like to thank you, Lieutenant Governor, for making a difference.
The links between Ireland and Ontario - or Upper Canada, as it then was - date back over one hundred and seventy years. The majority of the Irish who settled here arrived in the 1820s and 1830s, and established themselves in rural areas. They were farmers, and the majority of them came here as part of sponsored group settlement to particular areas in Ontario. They were for the most part young and ambitious people, these early Irish settlers, eager to build a new life in their new homes. They settled by a process of chain migration, in the more fertile parts of Ontario, many of them joined by their neighbours and relatives from North Tipperary, Cork or Tyrone. Life was not always easy for them as they adjusted to hot summers, bitterly cold winters, isolation and loneliness. In some cases, the unyielding rock of the Canadian Shield defeated their efforts to farm, but by a combination of hard work and determination, the majority of these pioneers survived and made their stubborn farmland fertile, establishing what is still today Ontario’s agricultural heartland. Their stoical frame of mind, bitter and yet exultant, was handed on to their descendants and is instantly recognisable to Irish people, and is captured in Al Purdy’s poem written in 1965, “The Country North of Belleville”. Anyone who has read Patrick Kavanagh’s “Shancoduff” will be in no doubt about the poem’s cultural origins:
“Bush land scrub land -
Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elzevir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
for miles -”
“....This is the country of our defeat
and yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
and shade his eyes to watch for the same
red patch mixed with gold
that appears on the same
spot in the hills
year after year
and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten-acre field....”
The Irish brought their stoicism, their gallows sense of humour and their capacity for hard work to Ontario. They built new lives for themselves and their families and handed down a tradition of self reliance combined with a sense of community and neighbourliness which has become part of the Canadian way of life. If the Irish made a positive lasting contribution to Canada, it must be said that some of them also brought across the Atlantic the same issues which bedevilled them at home, principally the sectarian prejudices which up until the end of the nineteenth century sometimes boiled over into rioting and violence in the city of Toronto and elsewhere. In time these tensions dissipated, and the two traditions, Orange and Green, Catholic and Protestant have learned to live together in Canada, to respect one another’s differences and to take pride in their shared Irishness. I had first hand experience this afternoon of this tradition of reconciliation among the Irish in Canada in practice. I met with the group of men who call themselves the “Apostles of Ireland”. All of the membership is Irish born, whether North or South, and all political traditions and religious denominations are represented. They meet regularly to socialise, to debate issues of Irish interest, to agree and more importantly to disagree in a spirit of friendship.
I believe that this slow process of healing divisions between former antagonists is what has made Canada such a wise and valuable friend to Ireland during the past four years as we have sought to bring peace to our troubled land. You have given immeasurable support to the peace process in the person of General John De Chastelain, one of the Co-Chairmen of the talks, and now the overseer of the delicate decommissioning process.
In Ireland today we are also slowly putting behind us the terrible legacy of a tradition of sectarian hatred. We know that we can continue to count on Canada as a source of strength and support as we work together to create a new beginning for the people of Ireland. Thank you
-TOAST: To the Queen of Canada and the people of Ontario