McAleese pays tribute to O'Connell the Liberator

IN ONE of her final speeches as President, Mary McAleese has paid tribute to Daniel O’Connell. President McAleese said that people went to the polls yesterday “exercising a right which was only achieved thanks to O’Connell’s peaceful mobilisation of the Irish people in protest against a wilful political elite which drew its power from treating the vast majority of Irish citizens as second class”.

Delivering the Daniel O’Connell memorial lecture at the Four Courts in Dublin last night, she said: “We acknowledge him as the Liberator, the man who sowed the seeds of a fresh new understanding of the innate dignity of the human person, the man who cranked up on these islands a slow-burning momentum towards democracy, civil rights and human rights that has at last paid off in the peace we share on this island today.”

His was “a universal concept of justice and equality which transcended all barriers and frontiers . . . and without a doubt he was a key influencer of not just Irish, but of British, European and American politics. William Gladstone simply described O’Connell as ‘the greatest popular leader whom the world has ever seen’.”

O’Connell’s influence on the 1949 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “signed a century after his death, has been chronically undervalued, as has his contribution to the evolution of British democracy, Irish democracy and independence and American democracy”, she said. “The magnitude of his achievements awaits redemption in a more thoughtful and reflective Ireland.”

In assessing O’Connell’s long-term impact on Irish history, she said: “We should not judge it solely from the perspective of the early to mid-19th century, but also from the late 20th century . . . through the conduit of our peacemakers and the painful process of persuasion that led to the Good Friday agreement.” This was so particularly where John Hume was concerned, she said.

O’Connell “knew from the bitterest of experience that the road to dismantling embedded and unfair structures was a long one that called for as much patience as impatience.

“He wrote, ‘incessant repetition is required to impress political truths upon the public mind . . . You must repeat the same lesson over and over again if you hope to make a permanent impression’. John Hume did precisely that.”

She added: “In today’s peace process we can perhaps see O’Connell’s finest achievement in the land of his birth. He planted the seeds, the gestation period was long, slow and vexed but there were always those who nurtured the fragile seedlings of peace and who in this generation brought them to a harvest that is only just beginning.”

More personally, she spoke of the “curious kind of personal synchronicity for both Martin and for me” in acknowledging the legacy of O’Connell “as we get ready to close the doors of Áras an Uachtaráin behind us”.

He had been a hero since their teenage years and they visited the O’Connell home in Kerry on their honeymoon. “His life and more importantly his words and deeds were rocks that we clung to for guidance during turbulent and testing times when many of our generation were making choices between repeating history or remedying history.”