Farewell then, to this our 20th century; to 100 years of advancement on a scale once undreamt-of, across the developed world. Farewell to this century of once-unimaginable scientific achievement, of wealth-creation, of technological and engineering wonders which our grandparents or great-grandparents could never have contemplated. We leave behind, too, a century of unprecedented cruelties in war and of the pillaging of the Earth as never before. We come to the end of the century in which man learned that he could destroy whole cities in a fireball instant; in which he brought the geniuses of science and human organisation together to implement genocide on an industrial scale. We leave the century in which man developed the capacity, at the touch of a button, to destroy his own race and the planet it inhabits.
And as we enter now the 2000th year since the birth of Jesus Christ, we take our leave, too, of the Second Millennium. It is not very difficult, given the normal span of a human life, to comprehend the turning of a century. A millennium is a different matter. Daily existence for those of us who now live in the developed world bears little relationship to the way our ancestors lived in the year 1000 AD. Life was short and uncertain. Science and medicine were elementary. The benefits of learning were confined to a tiny proportion of society. Individual rights as we understand them extended only to a small and privileged elite. The processes of democracy, equality before the law and the freedom of the individual were concepts developed by the philosophers which had little application in daily life 1,000 years ago. Most of us who live on this island can know who our ancestors were as they turned into the present century. Church and civic records and the invention of photography have bequeathed us names, dates of birth and even visual images of those who went before us. Some came from Celtic stock, or Norse, or mainland European. Others were descended from those who came as Norman invaders, as English settlers, as Huguenot refugees, as Scots planters.
We have no such precise or immediate points of reference for the turn of the last millennium. All we can know is that our forebears, removed by many generations, lived and procreated and died. Some may have fought with Brian Boru at Clontarf. Others perhaps were combatants fighting for the Norse kingdom of Dublin. Some were Anglo-Saxon, or Norman-French, or Picts, or British Celts, or descendants of the Germanic tribes who had never set foot upon the island of Ireland 1,000 years ago. We are an extraordinary mixture of genetic inheritances, of historical convergences, of conditioning by time and circumstances.
How wondrous then, as we approach a new century and a new millennium, that for the first time in modern history the mingled races of people which now live on the island of Ireland have agreed how they will live together. Old rivalries and enmities have not been eliminated. Terrible deeds will not be and must not be forgotten. Three thousand dead and five times that number maimed or disfigured cannot be written out of the record. Forgiveness will be long in coming and for some, perhaps, will not be possible at all. But with the establishment of the new institutions under the Belfast Agreement, a framework exists for partnership and for participation by all. These have been truly historic days and months for Ireland as we have come to the century's end.
Few of those who lived at the opening of this century could have anticipated such arrangements, or the economic advances which have characterised the 1990s. But let us not forget the slow, incremental steps, the courage, the sacrifices and the vision which brought us to the point where economic take-off to present levels became possible. Even those born in the middle years of the century could hardly have visualised the extraordinary progress in wealth and material wellbeing. When the new vibrancy and celebration of Irish arts and culture are added, it is clear that the great majority of those living today on the island of Ireland may count themselves fortunate indeed to see such days of providence and peace.
There is much of which we can be proud and there is much with which we must be concerned. It is important both to recognise the darker side of what we have become and to see our condition and circumstances in the instructive context of a wider world. We have begun to exhibit so many of the unpleasant aspects of an affluent society; the push for further wealth, the hostility towards immigrants, the diminishing willingness to give time or support to the voluntary sector. We find ourselves confirmed in membership of the club of rich nations. But western levels of wealth and well-being are still denied to the great majority of humankind. The dread evils, Ignorance and Want, inhabit the greater part of the Earth, doom-warnings to western society no less than when Charles Dickens personified them as monstrous infants in Victorian England. The 20th century ends with the human race connected as never before through technology but as divided as ever in levels of wealth. Hunger, lack of health-care and poor education are still the lot of three-fifths of mankind. When we celebrate and mark the progress of our western and Christian society it is well to remember that for the greater part of our race today marks another day of want.