Speech at a State Dinner in Honour of Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, President of Croatia
Áras an Uachtaráin, 3 April 2017
Your Excellency, President Grabar-Kitarović,
Mr Jakov Kitarović,
Distinguished Guests,
A chairde,
I cúis mhór áthais dom é, a Uachtaráin na Cróite, fáilte a fhearadh romhat féin agus roimh d'fhear chéile go hÉireann. Tá áthas orm an deis seo a bheith agam an cairdeas atá ann idir ár dá mhuintir a cheiliúradh - cairdeas a aithnítear agus a dhoimhnítear go mór leis an cuairt seo uaibh; agus cairdeas atá cur amach pearsanta agam air ón cuairt a thugas féin ar an Chróit ceithre bliana ó shin.
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you, President Grabar-Kitarović, Mr Kitarović, and all of the Croatian delegation, to Ireland.
I am delighted to have this occasion to celebrate the friendship that unites our two peoples - a friendship that your visit acknowledges and deepens; and a friendship which Sabina and I experienced at first hand in your beautiful country in early June 2013. This was our very first State Visit since my election as President of Ireland, and it took place at a time when Croatia was getting ready to become the 28th Member State of the European Union. I recall the atmosphere of excitement and optimism that surrounded this historic event, an event which coincided with the last day of Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the EU.
Your visit now comes at a time, President Grabar-Kitarović, when the European Union is facing the exit of a member. It is a time, too, of much confusion and turbulence on the European street – a confusion that is amenable to political exploitation in an atmosphere of fear, ignorance, and some righteous anger at economic and social exclusion.
These appeals from the European street are ones that concern both of us, as directly elected Presidents, and I believe, Madam President, that in facing these challenges we can both be encouraged by the warm bilateral relations that exist between Croatia and Ireland.
These warm relations are ones that have grown in part from our shared experiences. We are two nations who have had inflicted on us the experience of imperialism, two peoples who cherish their hard-won national independence; we have similar population and territorial sizes; both our peoples have emigration at the heart of their history, which gifts us with an intimate understanding of the propriety and richness of hospitality for the migrant and the visitor. Then too, our two States can also learn and share so much from their respective relations with borders, and their consequences, ours with Northern Ireland, and yours with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Croatia and Ireland are also renowned as two lands of astonishing natural beauty, although, admittedly, the beautiful Croatian landscapes and coasts bask in a distinctively warmer climate. The attractions of the Adriatic are ones that had a spectacular influence on one of our greatest Irish writers, James Joyce, who was to spend a year teaching English to the Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at Pula, today renowned, amongst other things, for its film festival.
According to one of his early biographers, Richard Ellman, it was in Pula that James Joyce "felt the first stirrings of dandyism": he rented an upright piano, put on weight, grew a moustache, "had some teeth fixed", bought a new suit, and, "with [his wife] Nora's help in curling began to wear his hair en brosse." Some Joycean scholars have also pointed how James Joyce's craft as a writer was informed by the "Babylon of languages" he found in Pula, a place where Mitteleuropa, the Mediterranean and the Balkans meet, and where the Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and even Istro-Romanian languages could be heard on the streets.
During my 2013 state visit to Croatia, I had the opportunity of recalling the memory of another Irishman, Laval Nugent, who, in the 19th century, left his native County Westmeath in Ireland and became a Field Marshall in the Austrian Army. The journey of Laval Nugent connects us to an important chapter in Irish history, which saw so many sons of Ireland leave this island after the fateful defeat of the Boyne, and offer their services to the Catholic monarchies of continental Europe.
I know that Laval Nugent is remembered as a patriot by many Croats, and I was pleased to learn that one of his former properties - the Trsat Castle in Rijeka – was part of this year's Global Greening initiative, in celebration of Ireland’s national Saint Patrick’s Day.
I was equally delighted to learn of a deepening cooperation between Rijeka, your home city, Madam President, and Galway, the place which I have come to call home in Ireland. The two cities are getting ready to become our European Capitals of Culture in 2020. I know that you intend to visit Galway this Wednesday and I assure you that you have chosen wisely!
President Grabar-Kitarović,
Dear Croatian friends,
As you are well aware, Croatia joined the other members of the European Union at a very critical juncture in its sixty-year history. Now all of us Member-States are called upon to respond to unprecedented challenges, both external and internal. Indeed, we are confronted simultaneously with the need for institutional, political, economic, and financial measures that are inclusive. In parts of the Union there have been alarming security threats. We frankly face a very grave institutional and political crisis at European level.
We in Ireland are required to respond, not only to Brexit, but also to the wider challenge of political legitimacy. European citizens must be enabled to empower themselves with a vision for Europe as a global exemplar in sustainability, human rights, inclusion and accountable policy, rather than allowing themselves to be the pawns of xenophobic populisms across the continent – populisms that are threatening the very future of the European project, and which also have the capacity to lose the peace the European Community was founded to make possible.
We must approach these multiples crises with hope, courage and renewed political will. We need, dear friends, to acknowledge the current loss of trust on the European street by rebuilding the democratic pact between European citizens and their institutions, with a positive regional invitation that is in fit with future global realities and necessary reforms.
The Union, after all, let us remind ourselves, draws its legitimacy from the support of its people – and for this legitimacy to endure, it is important to recall that European democracy is endangered whenever decisions that are the legitimate object of political debate in national and European elected fora are leaked, or ceded by default, either to the outcomes of speculative markets, or to the automaticity of rigid, and, although their assumptions are rarely stated, essentially ideological, fiscal rules.
Democracy is endangered whenever a hegemonic, empirically unaccountable version of abstract economics, perhaps based on a narrow theory of interests, prevails, at the expense of the fundamental objectives of social cohesion and democratic vigour. We are reaping the consequences of this neglect of social cohesion. The voices of the European street are loud. We must listen to them, and respond not by adjusting what is failing, but by offering a vision based on the solidarity of all citizens in all Member-States going forward together.
Indeed, as the distinguished German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, has reminded us, without the constant exercise of public deliberation, and without citizens being enabled to submit their arguments to rational disputation, democracy itself will not survive. The public presentation of accommodations reached at European level, the policy instruments used to fend off our recent financial crisis, have, too often, had the effect of separating European institutions from the people they are meant to represent.
The European public discourse has not been sufficiently informed, for example, in terms of the macro-economic assumptions, justification and consequences of fiscal measures or so-called “austerity measures”, in such a way as would have enabled genuine moral-political choice. The discourse must change, become more permeable to the concerns, the fears, the hopes, of European citizens.
The choice, then, as I see it, is between recovering a flexibility in decision-making that will be democratically accountable, or remaining transfixed, waiting for the system to be overturned.
In this regard, I must confess disappointment at the outcome and statement from the recent Rome Conference. We must go further and foster a new democratic moment in Europe, by inviting and enabling our citizens to deliberate, not only on European issues, but also on the great global issues that are at the root of much of their current malaise.
We must allow citizens to gain informed political understanding of the immense transformations at play in the wider world, not just in the geopolitical realm, but also in relation to such matters as demography, ecology and climate, sustainable development and the landslide changes in international production, finance and trade. We must also, importantly, reclaim the public discourse on Europe from those who distort and undermine it, so as to reaffirm forcefully the vital relevance of the European Union to the great challenges of this new century.
Indeed, what better solution than a united Europe do we have to offer in responding to the great collective issues currently facing us? Which alternative means of cooperation do we have at our disposal, that would enable us to meet effectively the global environmental challenge, the challenge of development, the challenge of demography and large-scale migration and, also, yes, the challenge of democracy, in a context where we are witnessing the rise of so-called "illiberal democracies" and increasingly emboldened transgressions of the rule of law both inside and outside the EU?
It is important to remember, dear friends, that Europe has always strengthened, not weakened, its identity through a courageous engagement with the great challenges of History. This is a lesson particularly worth recalling as Europeans are challenged, today, to respond in accordance to their founding values to the needs of thousands of migrants and refugees who are fleeing to their territory. Can our collective answers to them be predicated upon restrictions of the rule of law, or an encroachment of the human rights and core liberties proclaimed in our treaties? We should never forget, or ever even neglect, be it only temporarily, the values that are the very heart of the European project, values that were invoked after a nadir had been reached in terms of atrocity and violation of human dignity in so many settings of detention in Europe.
The founders of Europe recognised both the fragility and the fundamental value of the concept of human dignity; they understood the crucial importance of having shared institutions of peaceful cooperation. These are, of course, values that are acutely understood by the people of Croatia, for whom the memory of fratricidal war is a fresh one, as it is indeed for us on this island. We face the challenge of remembering actions that are not now, and indeed never were, defensible.
The framework and the values offered by the European Union are important, then, not only in that they have served, and continue to serve, to strengthen our respective journeys towards peace and reconciliation, but also because they are, at a deep level, propitious to what I call “ethical remembering”, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has called "narrative hospitality": that is, a critical perspective on one’s own narratives, as well as an openness to the memories, the stories, the grievances of the other, the neighbour, the enemy of yesterday – the partner in new possibilities and the friend of today. This is an acquis – an immensely valuable historical and ethical acquis – which must serve to attach us all very firmly to that great enterprise that is the project of unification in peace and sustainable prosperity of the European continent.
It is a great project; it is a project to be consolidated, not unravelled; and it is also, as we all know very well, an unfinished project. All of us in the European Union are grateful to be able to rely on you, President Grabar-Kitarović, on the Croatian government, and on the Croatian people, as good will ambassadors for your former sister-Republics within the Yugoslav federation, whose peoples are today awaiting to share in the promise of peace, stability and prosperity offered by the Union.
We are, Madam President, at a moment when a new departure is required for our European Union – when a new departure is possible. We can, together, breathe new life in the European vision. In doing so, we will also be saving a model of cooperation and cohesion on which the peoples of other continents have placed their gaze, and a model on which Croatia's neighbours from the Western Balkans have placed their hopes.
May I now invite you all, distinguished guests, to stand and join me in a toast:
To the good health of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Mrs. Grabar-Kitarović;
To the happiness and prosperity of the people of the Republic of Croatia;
And to the enduring friendship between our two nations!
Sláinte mhaith, Živjeli!