President McAleese has conducted her state visit to Australia in excellent, indeed exemplary, fashion. Her personality and style were fully in tune with those of her hosts and audiences, many of them from an Irish background. They were delighted to hear the messages of national renaissance, reconciliation and cultural pride she brought from Ireland, together with her readiness to identify similarities between the two countries and to draws lesson from Australia for Ireland.
Timing made a difference too, as always in such matters. Australians were starting their general election campaign as she arrived. They were, therefore, more aware of one undercurrent of this visit, their own political debate on whether Australia should become a republic or continue with the British monarch as head of state. Not surprisingly, Mrs McAleese became the subject of favourable comment as to the desirability of a republic, even though she refused to be drawn on the subject. She did, however, have the nous to say to those who fear a republic would mean the loss of all things British, that the lesson of the Belfast Agreement is that this would not be so and that different identities can coexist.
Mrs McAleese's visit, coming so recently after the Omagh bombing, made her public support and explanations of the agreement all the more telling. If it is centrally about how people can live together with their differences, she was also able to find excellent arguments in the Australian experience on how this might be best accomplished and what the relevant lessons are for Ireland. Australia is one of the best examples of a multicultural society, having recently added substantial numbers of Asian immigrants to the diverse layers of those from British, Irish and continental European backgrounds who have been there for many generations.
All these people have had to learn how to live together with their substantial cultural differences - and likewise with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. Mrs McAleese addressed these themes from several perspectives. She made passionate pleas for a multicultural Australia against the background of attacks on that position from Mrs Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. The president compared the position of Aborigines to that of travellers in Irish society. She repeatedly reminded her audiences of how Irish people migrated and found new homes and employment overseas, drawing important lessons for the treatment of migrants today.
She argued, quite validly, that this experience of diversity must be drawn upon by people in Ireland as we come to terms with immigration, new found prosperity and a real prospect of peace in Northern Ireland. If the Irish diaspora is to be more than a token point of reference, but rather a genuine community of people, values and interests in a smaller and more interdependent world, there is an obligation to absorb such lessons to guide policy and action in Ireland, as Mrs McAleese has valuably reminded us.