REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY AND CONFERRAL OF HONORARY DEGREE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY AND CONFERRAL OF HONORARY DEGREE, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY, PHILADELPHIA
President Dobbin, Distinguished Guests, Reverend Fathers, Reverend Sisters, Ladies and Gentlemen.
What a privilege it is for a President of Ireland to follow in the footsteps of the two Irish Augustinian priests, John Rosseter and Matthew Carr who first set foot on Philadelphian soil in 1796 and whose gift of education to the people of this region gave birth in 1842 to this great Augustinian University of which I am proud to be a very recent Honorary alumnus. I am deeply grateful to Villanova’s Academic council for this honour, which reaffirms and refreshes the generations old bonds of affection and deep kinship between Ireland and the United States of America.
The great thing about Honorary Degrees is that they do not require the doing of exams or the impoverishment of parents. In that respect, I am in quite a unique position today for those with whom I share this commencement ceremony by and large got here the hard way. To them and to their supportive families, I offer warmest congratulations and hope you feel, possibly for different reasons the feeling described in John Henry Mary Newman’s Dream of Gerontius:
“I feel in me an inexpressive lightness and a sense of freedom….”
For students it is the relief from the tough discipline of studies and exams as well as the rite of passage to the freedom and adventure of new choices in life and widened opportunities. For parents and partners it is the lifting of the burden of worry, the realisation that the sacrifices have been worthwhile, the prayers have worked and there may soon come a day when your son or daughter or partner’s graduations certificate is matched by that other important piece of paper, their first paycheque - the harbinger of a sense of relief if not freedom all round. To students who raised families and struggled with part-time jobs in order to get to this day, we salute your commitment and resilience in a special way. This day I share with each of you is truly your day of pride and celebration, a landmark day which will be held deep in memory in framed photos on walls and mantelpieces, in reunions yet to come, in lives yet to be fully revealed. It is a day to be grateful to each other and for each other and to quietly reflect on those who started the journey with us, loved us and invested in us but who, whether through death or illness, cannot be here but who are nonetheless part of the story of this lovely day.
No two of you have the same story to tell; no two have the same mix of gifts and talents; no two will go the same journey from here but you will each take the mark of Villanova with you and from today you become its ambassadors, the outward evidence of its spirit and its values. It is a responsibility to be carried lightly but taken seriously for if the years of study and support are to mean anything they must mean that something of the Villanova vocation has shaped and formed you, that in and through your important years here you have come to know yourself better and to see yourself differently. To be a graduate, to be an alumnus of one of the foremost Universities in the United States is a wonderful privilege. To many an emigrant grandmother or grandfather it is a miracle, a wonder and a joyful vindication of uprooted lives, of hidden loneliness, of deep faith and unshakeable hope, of things endured so that there would be a better future for a new generation.
Your country was built by emigrants. Mine was ravaged by their leaving though in truth for generations there was little to encourage them to stay. Discrimination, oppression and poverty drove them onto the emigrant boats and brought them here, connecting almost every family in Ireland to another on this side of the Atlantic. But for the most finely drawn of lines I might be sitting among today’s parents listening to a different President of Ireland. My cousin is here today. She and I were born in Belfast within weeks of each other. We started school together, sat in the same class, travelled there together hand in hand until the day she emigrated to Philadelphia at the age of nine. Belfast was then, a “cold house for Catholics” to quote Nobel Laureate and Northern Irish politician David Trimble and talk of emigration was in the air. Her family decided to go. Mine reluctantly decided to stay. I still remember the sudden emotional amputation that was the loss of a best friend and then the start of years of to-ing and fro-ing between Belfast and Philadelphia as the lived lives of families in those two cities wove their tapestry of mutual interest and care even across thousands of miles. Every coat I wore in my Belfast University days was one of her cast offs. And now today, her daughter is among Villanova’s graduates. She and her fellow students have, thanks to Villanova, had the chance to study in Ireland and to get to know the peaceful, prosperous, confident and successful Ireland my children have grown to adulthood in. That Ireland is now utterly transformed by widespread access to excellent education, which has unlocked the genius of our people and revealed to us for the first time in our history, our truest potential.
When times were bitterly difficult both here and in Ireland, it was hard earned dollars sent back to Ireland that paid school fees, that kept hope and the dream of liberty alive. When support was needed for a just peace and a new dispensation between the fractured communities in Northern Ireland and between North and South, it was Ireland’s huge American family which rallied around and their Government which became the most faithful of friends. Here in this very University a culture of intellectual and academic curiosity about Ireland and her heritage was cultivated over the decades. Your
pre-eminent and highly successful Irish studies programme has attracted leading Irish scholars. The Charles A Heimbold, Jr. Endowed Chair in Irish studies, represents a glorious opportunity to nurture anew in each generation a love of Ireland’s rich cultural heritage and an appreciation of its changing face. I would like to pay special tribute today to the current holder of the Chair, Tipperary poet Michael Coady whose landscape as a poet deals so brilliantly, humanly and compassionately with the epic story of Irish emigration to the United States. He and our emigrant ancestors wherever they came from might well see this day in his words:
“…. Like a blessing
on a harvest safely home” [1]
In 1842 just as Villanova was opening, Ireland was heading into a famine which would leave a million of her small population dead and another million in rags on famine ships bound for America. In America the Augustinians were opening Villanova University, “releasing” to use Coady’s words again “glories of the spirit”[2] and an intellectual home in which the sons and daughters of those emigrants would flourish and blossom, without let or hindrance, as God had intended. They did not forget Ireland but they have kept faith with her every step of the way. I came to say thank you and to say how proud Ireland is of its children’s children and their many achievements and accomplishments. We are proud too of the legacy of two Irish Augustinian priests who once came to Philadelphia with a dream, not for themselves but for others. They would surely be proud that so many strangers from all around the globe created here a great, free and democratic nation. They would be proud too that their small island home is now one of the world’s most prosperous and successful liberal democracies and is today a partner in the world’s other great democratic Union, the European Union.
There is an old Irish saying - tús maith is leath no h-oibre – a good start is half the work. Villanova has given you that start in life and you leave here with certificates and with dreams. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats once wrote that “in dreams begins responsibility”. I know you will carry that responsibility with grace as you leave here. I know because that is how it has been since 1842, as each generation of Villanova graduates has released its own “glories of the spirit”- bringing in a rich harvest, making Villanova proud, as you too have made your alma mater and all of us, proud today.
I wish for you every success, happiness, good friends and Irish luck wherever life after Villanova may take you.
Go n-éirí go geal libh. Go raibh maith agaibh – thank you.
[1] (from Adagio Cantabile in All Souls, Gallery Books 1997)
[2] (from “Though there are torturers” Irish Poets Now. Other Voices ed. Gabriel Fitzmaurice Wolfhound Press 1993)