SPEECH BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF STROKESTOWN PARK HOUSE FAMINE MUSEUM
SPEECH BY PRESIDENT ROBINSON AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF STROKESTOWN PARK HOUSE FAMINE MUSEUM, 14 MAY 1994
Coming to this museum today, remembering the suffering it commemorates, we stand at the heart of Irish history. This is not only what happened to us; it is what we are. As countries grow more prosperous, as they move more confidently towards modern statehood, the temptation is not - despite the accepted wisdom - to dwell on the past. But to try to escape it. To forget its defeat, its sorrow and the terrible reminder it offers to us all of just how precarious life is.
In Ireland we have a remarkable history and, in many senses, an allegorical one. The allegory is of a small country which defined itself against the odds. Our ballads and our stories make much of this. And rightly. They commemorate the bravery and persistence which made us a nation. They give the account of the rooms and fields and backstreets in which actions of enormous bravery were decided on and carried out. And as we read of them, we are left with the question of what it is that makes a nation.
Here in this Famine Museum, at the very centre of our history, we have the chance to ask that question again. We have the chance to claim the ordinary suffering, the anguish of a past in which men and women who were our ancestors did no more than barely survive. They wrote no ballads. They had no strength to join in brave actions. All they could do was move from day to day, overwhelmed by random misfortune. And what we owe them is to give to their survival, and to their suffering and loss, just as much love and respect and honour as we give to any brave action or any other defining moment of our history. It is precisely because Strokestown House allows a focus for that act of respect - and provides the information which strengthens it - that it is so valuable to our sense of heritage in Ireland now.
But perhaps the real question here today is not simply how we interpret that past but how we apply it to our present. I am thoroughly conscious as a Head of State who has been in Somalia, who has come back only recently from South Africa, that we are no longer the children of Famine. We have moved on, through a series of historical privileges, to be a contemporary and relatively prosperous modern State. And yet, unlike many of our Western European neighbours, our historical consciousness is defined by the past we remember today. By colonization and famine; and by the poignant and terrible memory of a gifted Irish generation who were swept away, by hunger, disease or emigration, in the greatest catastrophe of our history.
The memory of their circumstances is hardly bearable even now. And yet I also want to say that I have taken pride in meeting the descendants of those who survived in other countries, who have succeeded through hard work and persistence, to a life they themselves could not have dreamed of. And I have wished with all my heart, as a President from a part of Ireland which was devastated by that Famine, that they could see their descendants, working in peace and dignity - a living tribute to their survival.
A perspective on the past is vital to any people, and any nation. In our case, the past is so vivid - and occasionally so terrible - that we need to convert it to a practical use. The practical uses of our past are, I believe, to give us a moral viewpoint and an historically informed compassion on some of the events which are happening now. What happened in Ireland in the 1840's was terrible and defining. But it was not unique. Wherever economic catastrophe meets with human defencelessness - and their relation is of course causal - there is a chance that it will happen again.
Perhaps the easiest and most obvious relation is to the famines which are at this moment devastating parts of Africa. They are a terrible and in some cases a literal correlative. There are others. Famine is a definable disaster. But there are also catastrophes which are less easy to define and yet which may, in the end, be just as devastating. The growth of population and the scarcity of jobs has thrown thousands upon thousands of young people onto the roads and waterways and air routes of our shrinking world in search of new opportunities. The fact that they are a dispersed migrant population should not blind us to the reality that they are intensely vulnerable - as all historical victims are - to our neglect and our indifference.
In all the terrible grief of the history which is remembered in this Famine Museum, we should look unswervingly at one fact. A million Irish people left the shores of Ireland in the 1840's. Their lives were shattered by famine. But they were able to have life and give life on other shores because they had freedom of movement. The equivalent young people today do not. What would have happened to these - our broken and vulnerable ancestors - if the United States and Canada, Britain and Australia, had closed their shores to them?
And this brings me to the core of this project on the great famine: that it encourages us to think imaginatively, and to link our past with the futures of those who are vulnerable now. It is appropriate indeed that this Famine Museum is supported by Trócaire, Concern, Oxfam, AFrI and the Columban missionaries, and that the stories it tells are interlinked and connected.