President delivers first of major US addresses

PRESIDENT MICHAEL D Higgins delivered the first of three major addresses he wrote for his US visit at the American Irish Historical Society last night.

“I would like my presidency to be remembered as a presidency of ideas,” Mr Higgins told young Irish professionals earlier in the day. “Ireland should never be anti-intellectual.”

The main idea he wanted to convey was that of “inclusive citizenship in a creative society, to create an Irishness we can be proud of”.

He delivered the third Thomas Flanagan lecture at the Historical Society’s elegant mansion on Fifth Avenue. Flanagan, an Irish-American academic, wrote a trilogy of novels that included The Year of the French about the 1798 uprising against the British.

He said there was no typical experience of what it meant to be Irish-American. The “sense of what it means to be Irish” must be renewed through “memory and imagination harnessed to present purpose”, Mr Higgins said. In this decade of anniversaries, he asked, “How should you remember? What can we not afford to forget? And that which we want to make sure not to forget – how should we handle it, with other people’s versions of the past?”

The renewed sense of Irishness should help to build “an ethical relationship with others . . . and it can be emancipatory in freeing us from models of economy and society which are not only failing but which are disastrous in their social consequences,” he said.

“The Irish have repeatedly mined the past to meet the needs of their present,” he continued. Mythmaking was “a mechanism for the retention of hope”.

It was in literature, the President added, “that we Irish have perhaps laid bare the full creative potential of mythmaking . . . We are now in a time which needs new mythmaking, including a myth for our Irishness.”

Irish people would take English, the language of their colonisers, “adapt it, stretch it for ironies, and make something entirely new of it”, Mr Higgins said. He recalled how early immigrants ghettoised themselves. They were “caught in a double bind: enter the establishment (Protestant) culture and they cut off their roots . . . Refrain from doing so and they remain in a cultural province”.

The President noted that “the impact of the Irish immigrant experience on Ireland itself was creative, profound and lasting . . . In reality the Irish proved to be great modernisers.”

Emigration, Mr Higgins said, “taught the Irish a further skill – the ability to maintain poise in the face of change, to live in two or even more worlds at once”.