Remarks by Mary McAleese
President of Ireland
at the University of Delaware
Friday, Oct. 11, 2002
 President Roselle, distinguished guests and friends, alumni, staff of the University of Delaware of Wilmington. There is a rumor, you know, that Francis Alison left the beautiful wide and mountainous and magnificent County Donegal to escape the rain…and that he was sorely disappointed it seems. Because the one thing I can confirm after my very short sojourn in this part of the world is that you actually do rain better than us. Which is remarkable because we do rain very well, as any of you who’ve been to Ireland know. But, I understand that there’s been a kind of a drought and that you’re glad of the rain. Am I right? Well, that makes me feel a lot better. Because I wouldn’t want to think that I brought it all the way with me only to have you disappointed. In that case, it’s rather like a visit my husband and I made last year to Uganda and to Kenya. We arrived in a desert there where they hadn’t seen rain for 20 years, naturally, until the day the Irish arrived. But, they did tell us that they regarded it as a blessing, so maybe that’s what it is today. A blessing as an Irish president comes for the very first time to this University. And it’s kind of, I suppose, a homecoming because, as we heard, its foundations, its roots, go right back to County Donegal, right across the sea. So, it’s kind of a homecoming in a way, isn’t it?
And, I want to say what a joy it is to be here, to be the first president of Ireland to visit and to be so deeply drawn into the life of the University by joining the ranks of its alumni as an honorary Doctor of Law. I want to thank your president, David Roselle. I want to thank Howard Cosgrove, for both the very kind invitation and also the lovely words of welcome, which have given me what I know is going to be a very, very memorable day.
My husband and I started university life together. That’s one of the up sides of university life that doesn’t get talked about much, I don’t think, in university documents that are trying to attract you. But sometimes you come out with more than a degree. I came out of university with a husband as well. Almost 30 years ago. I have to say that I personally loved university life so much that I stayed in it from the age of 18 to 45 and was only amputated from it by election to the presidency of Ireland. In behind all the papers and the exams and the pressure and the midnight oil, and I’m talking here about the staff and not the students at all, though I know that the students go through this rigamarole as well, I think that in universities there is a way of life that is just so unique, so full of adventure–intellectual adventure and so many other kinds of adventure–that to be honest I feel a kind of a curious mixture of nostalgia and envy for many of you in the audience. And, as I reflect on what life must be like as part of the community that is the University of Delaware in Wilmington, that nostalgia, I have to say, is for those student days that my husband and I shared when we were both students together at the Queen’s University of Belfast. And the timing…we arrived at the university in 1969. I think there is maybe something in the air here in the United States and in our world that maybe captures something of the mood that was beginning, the cloud, in a sense, that was beginning to descend on us in 1969.
At that time, Belfast, the city of our birth where we’d grown up, was just beginning to crumble into 30 years of violence. We weren’t to know that at the time, of course. The intonations were there, the start was there, but sure we thought it would last a week, and then we thought it would last a year, and then we thought it might last two years, and then it lasted 30 years. But, we were enthralled and excited as we joined hands crossing the threshold of the university for the first time, at that stage not fully aware of the awesome, the awesome power of human hatred, the single most potent weapon on the planet. Nor were we aware then, though we subsequently slowly became aware, of our own individual and also our collective power to stop the course, the toxic course, of hatred through human history, that we had the power to stand in its path in our own lives and stop it coursing through our lives.
The envy I feel, of course, is for a generation of young men and women who are 30 years nearer than I am the universal truth that is the central quest of any university. Martin studied physics at university, I studied law, and yet nonetheless we were both then part, just as all of you, no matter what you study, are part of that complex and endless shared endeavor of trying to understand our life, our times, our nature, our destiny, our world, its part. We keep asking the same questions, we may come at them from very very very different perspectives but that’s ultimately what it’s about.
I began studying law in 1969, which was not exactly the dawn of the Ice Age, despite what my children might think, but it was a time when females---and I was very taken by the fact that Mr. Alison’s early students, of course, all 10 of them were men, or young men---but I started studying law at a time when only 10 percent of the students in law schools were women. Today, of course, in law schools women considerably outnumber male students, a matter of sincere disappointment to many of the women, who are forced to go down to the engineering faculty to get the redress balanced, I’m told. Today, when you look at the demographic changes and structures vis-à-vis men and women in universities generally, it’s just one visible outward sign of a remarkable revolution that has taken place these last 30 years in attitudes and expectations. More than that, of course, as young women today do very well academically across every discipline–often it has to be said, certainly at certain stages in their careers, outperforming their male peers. We begin to get a kind of a glimpse, just a glimpse, perhaps no more than a glimpse, of a world that has until now been flying rather unsteadily on one wing, using only half its potential, wasting or corralling the other half. And, more importantly, we also begin to get a really exciting glimpse of what the world could be like and will be like, please God, when we fly on both wings, harnessing all the talent that’s available, empowering and releasing all the available creative genius–no matter where it is located or in whom it is located, irrespective of gender, color, class, creed, ethnicity, disability, all of those things. There is a time coming when, please goodness, we will accumulate into a pool, the great pool that is human resource, all that available talent. And, we’ll do it with an intensity and a kind of a magnitude that has never before been encountered on Earth. And, please goodness, when we have that extraordinary resource assembled, we will put it at the benign service of humankind with a commitment never ever before experienced on this globe.
Your generation, I think, are likely to come closer to that world than I am. Your choices, the choices that you make, can bring that world nearer or they can retard it, just as the choices of my generation brought it nearer or retarded it. Looking back to those heady days of the 1960s, I’m amazed, frankly, at the stubbornness and determination and sheer naivety that carried many of us through, particularly the women of us, because of the absence of so many role models. Though it wasn’t just women, it was also people from our social background. Both my husband and I came from homes where we were the first of our family ever to go to university, part of that “perverse generation” that the poet Seamus Heany writes about so brilliantly in the poem “From the Canton of Expectation.” He calls us, he describes us as having intelligence “as brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.” It’s a great description, isn’t it? And the crowbars were necessary, because there were so many huge big rocks on the pathway to the kind of world that we wanted. But, just how discouraging it was is probably best exemplified by a story from my own direct experience. It’s a story about the gender thing, but it’s not just about the gender thing, there were lots of other impediments–it’s just the one, one of the many, that I have become familiar with over my lifetime.
When I was a teenager and I first voiced my ambition to become a lawyer, it was at home, I was about 16 and I was in the presence of my parents and the parish priest. And, the parish priest’s response–he was a good Dublin man, his response was immediate and emphatic. He said to me, “You can’t. You have, you suffer from two terminal impediments: One, you are a woman, and two, you have no relatives in the law.” And, I have to say that my mother, a fairly typical Irish Catholic mother of a large family, she had a reverence for the clergy unmatched in Ireland I would’ve thought. But, she threw him out immediately. And as she was throwing him out, she threw back at me the only piece of career advice I ever received from either parent, and it was very good advice. She just said, “Ignore that ould eejit.” So, I’ve been doing that for most of my life.
I took my mother’s advice and I have to say in fairness to that kindly, if conservative, old man he was very, very supportive when I entered law school subsequently. But, his views were, of course, not at all unique, they were very, very typical of the time, and based on a fairly accurate analysis, indeed, of the prevailing culture. Shortly before I entered Law School at the Queen’s University of Belfast I was sent, (I don’t know if you remember, do these things still happen?) a reading list from the faculty telling you the kinds of things you should read before you come to university. And, of course, the first thing you do is you jump on the bus, you go into town, into the bookshop, you descend on the bookshop like a locust wanting to devour the words because you really want to show willing. Now, we were told that we must buy and read, the only book, in fact, that we were advised to read was a book by a man called Prof. Glanville Williams. Any of you that are criminal lawyers here will know his name well, a very eminent criminal jurist. But, we were encouraged–in fact, we were instructed–to read his book, “Learning the Law.” So, we knew this book was holy writ, the key to our future, the gospel according to Glanville, so I sat down to read it.
And, it’s very interesting the messages that that book contained for a young woman hoping to embark on a career within the legal profession. It’s only when you get to page 192 that you realized that he has presumed up until then that all his readers are going to be white, middle-class males. And then, on page 192, it clearly, suddenly occurs to him that by some accident a women might actually be reading this book, and she might even have it in her head to become a lawyer. So he feels obliged at this point to address any such trespasser. And, he says, “It is difficult to write this section without being ungallant,” (there’s a nice word for you, I haven’t heard that for a long time), “Parliament, it is said, can do everything except make a man a woman or a woman a man. In 1919, in the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, it went as far as it could [go] to perform the second feat” (that is, to make a woman into a man). “The results so far have not been striking.”
Then, he goes on to say, “Practice at the Bar is difficult enough for a man: It is heartbreaking for a woman. She has a double prejudice to encounter: the prejudice of the solicitor and the prejudice of the lay client. Combined, these two prejudices are almost inexpugnable.” There’s another big word for you, and it was a terrifying word, it was not like the kind of word we were ever going to be able to transcend. And then he goes on, “It is not easy for a young man to get up and face the court; many women find it harder still. A woman’s voice, also, does not carry as well as a man’s.” You’ll have noticed that in the back yourselves, I’m sure, but clearly he’d never met my mother, because my mother could be heard in stereo, without the benefit of electricity, long before stereo sound was ever heard.
So, that was the backdrop. I have to say, rather funnily, five years later when I was called to the Bar, myself and my two other female colleagues who were called to the Bar---the first women to attempt to practice law in Northern Ireland since the 1930s. When the three of us were called to the Bar, the judges handed us beautifully hard-backed, inscribed copies of a beautiful book that was their gift to us on call. And it was only when I got home and opened up the parcel that I discovered it was a hard-backed copy of Glanville Williams. So the message was still the same five years later. So yes, I’d like to be sitting in some of your seats, quite frankly, with so much of that old, paralyzing stereotyping behind us, all that language gone, hopefully, and a future as yet unscripted in front. All those days ahead when you can be changers of things that are wrong, when you become harbingers of hope, when you become mobilizers of the kind of future that you want to shape, the kind of future you want to be proud of.
On the other hand, I have to say that when I’m standing here I am extremely proud to be the president of a small country, a small island country, which within living memory, and indeed within my living memory, was a poor Third World country whose greatest export was its people, and which, in a generation, has transformed itself into one of the 10 wealthiest nations on the planet–now the biggest exporter of computer software in the world, and a country to which people now come in search of opportunity, reversing for the first time a century and a half of outward migration. The story of that remarkable transformation---the key to which, incidentally, lies in education---is no great mystery. The key was the unlocking of the genius that lay in the heart of Irish people, and the key to that mystery was those intelligences, “brightened and unmannerly as crowbars,” being given the lovely sense of delight that comes from bearing an education and knowing that you are an educated person and going out into the world.
But, the story of that transformation also cannot be told without also telling the story of the Irish who came here to the United States. Many of them came in rags, some of them may very well indeed have been your ancestors. They came to hard labor very often. But their sea of cents became dollars that were put into envelopes and faithfully sent home, week after week, to feed and to nourish and to educate the next generation. Their children and grandchildren’s successes here in this country became our role models. You mentioned one of the best of them, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We saw how well they did here, and we began to believe, given a chance, we could do the same at home. And, those people lived and died in hope that there would come a day when an independent Ireland would take her place among the nations of the world; her children would be self-confident, well-educated, successful, culturally dynamic. And, I am deeply privileged to be the president of that Ireland and to have this opportunity to acknowledge, here, how much we owe to the United States, to the people of the United States, to our Irish family here in the United States with whom we have the strongest and most enduring of familial bonds.
Today, those bonds manifest themselves in a kind of a mosaic of links, crafted by the unique genius and effort of so many individuals, groups and organizations, to say nothing of government. They stretch through every field of human endeavor, whether it’s from business investment to the St. Patrick’s Day parade, right through to the peace process that you helped us to build in my birthplace in Northern Ireland. And this is a wobbly time for the peace process, and indeed it’s been wobbly from time to time. Nonetheless, these past four years since the Good Friday Agreement, crafted, it has to be said, with the extraordinary help of the American administration, these past four years have been the best four years we’ve ever had, certainly in my experience. And, they’ve been infinitely better and more precious than anything we’ve ever had before. And, we would not have these days and indeed we still wouldn’t have the hope that we’ll be able to ride out this crisis. And we will. I describe it as the storm after the lull after the last storm, which also had a lull before it and a storm before that again. So that’s, you know, blessed be the peacemakers, they’ll never be redundant---not in Ireland, anyway. But we’re getting there, with your help, we’re getting there.
And, all of these things–the idea of peace, the idea of peace building, the idea of bringing prosperity, the idea of educating people and unlocking their genius, the idea of looking at human beings as people with rights, with dignity, with integrity that needs to be released, needs to be helped not hindered–all of these things start with an idea seeding itself in some human being’s mind. And then, those ideas happen because people commit to the idea, and they refuse to give up, no matter what the cost, until the idea is realized, until it is lived. And, one such idea that links Ireland and the United States, of course, is your wonderful Irish Studies Program and another, I know, in back of that is the fantastic range of Irish works that your library holds here, a very fine collection of Irish manuscripts, I’m told, featuring names as great as Yeats and O’Casey. Someone had to have the idea for making these links and maintaining and keeping these links, this integrity of history that links this University with Ireland. And, I hope that these links and the opportunities that they have presented will have whetted your appetite, not just for our rich literary tradition but for Ireland itself. And, it’s wonderful to hear that many of you will get the opportunity to visit, and, please goodness, those of you who haven’t yet taken that opportunity and those of you who do take that opportunity will come and enjoy our country. In every generation the children of America and the children of Ireland have had a profound influence on each other. And, they have driven a shared global debate about freedom, democracy, equality, and they have driven those debates through the best of times and through the worst of times.
To quote President John F. Kennedy again, on his visit to Ireland in the months before he was assassinated, he said, “And so it is that our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history.”
And I’m very grateful for the way in which this University has played its part in making that shared history develop in another generation, for allowing another level of it, another layer of it, to develop by inviting me to be part of the story of this University. When John F. Kennedy visited Ireland and made his celebrated address to our joint houses of Parliament, our Dàil and Seanad as they are known in the Irish language, John Kennedy quoted from another celebrated Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw, and I think that the quote could be a perfect motto for any student at this University. It’s been a kind of an axiom or a maxim that I have lived by for a good deal of my life. What Shaw was speaking, I think it’s a good maxim for anybody who’s a student, looking out at the world and saying, “When I leave this University, where will I go and what will I contribute? When I tell my children and my grandchildren what I did, what will I be saying to them was the thing that drove me? What was the fury, the passion inside me that drove me?” And, Shaw was speaking as an Irishman, and he was trying to explain to a predominately English audience the approach to life that the Irish have. And, he put it this way: He said, “Other people see things and say ‘Why?’…but I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’” And it’s a lovely, lovely way of looking at the world, that magnificent open-ended way of looking at the world.
I want to thank each one of you for your attention. I hope that you will have that wonderful open-ended way of looking at the world, that great sense of adventure and welcome that I think has to be part of intellectual pursuit and scholarly quest. To those who prepared this day, and I know that many people have helped in the preparation of this day, may I say thank you. May I ask God to bless, not just with rain but other kinds of blessings please, this community of scholarly endeavor that I am now very, very proud to count myself part of. In the Irish language, we put it this way when we’re saying thank you, we say, “go raibh mile maith agaibh go léir.” Thank you very, very much indeed.
Photos by Eric Crossan
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