May I thank Professor Paul Bartholomew, Vice-Chancellor and President of Ulster University, Dr Seán Farren, Chair of the John and Pat Hume Foundation, and Dr Thomas P. O’Neill III, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, for the invitation to be with you today to address the American Conference of Irish Studies hosted this year by Ulster University at their Magee Campus in Derry.
As we know, since its foundation, Magee College continues to play a distinguished role in the Northern Ireland peace process and in conflict transformation in general. It is very fitting, therefore, that the Chair in Peace, inaugurated by President Clinton in 1995, recognises not only the remarkable leadership of John Hume over many decades, but also his substantive contribution as a university professor, one who brought his unique perspective to shaping this work for peace for the future – a very significant legacy that will surely inspire current and future students and academics.
This Chair celebrates also the life and work of a great Irish-American and proud Bostonian, Speaker Tip O’Neill. The former Speaker paid memorable visits to Ireland in recent years, including Buncrana, County Donegal, and made such an historic contribution to the Irish-American relationship in so many ways. I am very glad therefore that his son, Lieutenant-Governor Tom O’Neill, has joined us today.
The lives and works of these leaders serve as a constant reminder of the special ties that exist between Derry and Boston, and of the need for constant vigilance in the preservation of the peace and for all the values for which they strived together; and of course the independent scholarship and true dedication of the American Conference of Irish Studies for over 60 years forms a critical part of that story, and it is a real pleasure to pay the warmest tribute to all involved.
May I pay a particular tribute to Pat Hume for both her own role and the role she and her husband John played in the Northern Ireland peace process, and indeed continue to play, through the medium of the John and Pat Hume Foundation, launched last November, supporting and inspiring leadership for peaceful change through a wide range of thought-shaping, outreach and support activities.
Your conference is of course coinciding with the anniversary of the birth of the region’s patron saint, Colmcille, some 1,500 years ago. What a powerful echo it makes – his legacy of spirituality and devotion as well as his contribution to education and cultural heritage. The hosting of the conference in Ulster University in Derry City, Doire Cholmchille in Irish, is also so apposite, being as it is at the intermix of cultural expressions and so much the richer for it. What an appropriate setting we have, then, to consider the arts, literature, music and storytelling traditions of the Derry area, a city recently designated as a UNESCO Learning City.
The conference offers an opportunity to examine, in some depth, the evolution of this North-West city region from earliest Columban times, whilst also celebrating and drawing inspiration from the rich work of local, renowned, contemporary artistic, literary and political figures that include such internationally recognised and honoured heroes of Ulster, such as Seamus Heaney, John Hume, Brian Friel, Seamus Deane, Willie Doherty, Eilis O’Connell and William C. Campbell, all of whom have made an indelible mark in their respective fields.
On heritage
The recent death of Seamus Deane is an incalculable loss to Irish writing, as his passing represents not only the loss of a foremost critic, but of a distinguished poet, novelist and internationally acclaimed university teacher. To Derry, he leaves the incomparable legacy of the life, the writing, the concerns, yes, the despair, but the hope and humour, too, that he shared with its people and to which so much of the work would respond. Few cities have a writer more embedded in its people, its history, its challenges, its hopes and its unique humour.
The conference theme, focused as it is on that of ‘heritage, home and healing’, invites me to reflect on some of my own experience in this area. It was one of my privileges, as the founding Aire of An Roinn Ealíon, Cultur agus Gaeltachta, Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, to introduce the Bill that became the Heritage Act in 1995 which, amongst other things, established the Irish Heritage Council, an Comhairle Oidhreachta, on a statutory footing. It was a matter of principle for me, when I took office as Ireland’s first Minister for Culture and the Gaeltacht in 1993, that heritage and culture would be elevated as a portfolio, given parity of esteem, as it were, within Government, strengthened, too, in terms of its resourcing so that we could identify, preserve, promote and enhance Ireland’s heritage in its widest sense, all of this considerably assisted by structural funding from the European Union.
I do recall that I felt it necessary at the time to suggest that the word ‘heritage’ had become somewhat narrowed in usage, to a dangerous point of being used as a background invoked for all too short tourist consumption, rather than an invitation to the slow, thoughtful visit to which such a people’s resource of generations deserved to receive. This created the danger of basing policy on a clichéd image of what was assumed visitors to Ireland wanted to see.
Such a utilitarian reductionism, I believed, and I remain convinced of that belief, was both blinkered and myopic, in that it did not ascribe sufficient recognition or importance to much of the natural, built and cultural resource that constitutes the fullness of our heritage. I have always preferred the Irish term “oidhreacht” which, I suggest, more accurately captures the totality of our heritage, built and natural, invoking, too, as it does, the context of ‘legacy’, of transmitted knowledge, respect for nature, wisdom of previous generations, and a duty of care.
In introducing the Heritage Act, it was my hope that we, as a nation, would re-engage with, and re-think, what heritage means as forms of identity inherited, but also achieving this in a dynamic process of continuous re-imagining, as a component of identity. Taking the word in its widest sense, “heritage” or “oidhreacht” can be said to embrace all those elements of Irish life, North and South, which we have inherited from the generations gone before us, and whose continuing survival into the future depends on the attitudes and actions of the present – the ‘samhlaíocht’ (‘imagination’) which we can share in such a task.
I am saddened, I must say, as I speak to know that such terrible damage to our shared heritage, North and South, has been experienced in the Mourne Mountains and in Killarney National Park. I am filled with disgust that it is the likely case that we cannot discount deliberate action as a source. Such a loss.
In recent usage, our concept of the word “heritage” has evolved and now the concept includes not only tangible heritage but also elements of our intangible living heritage, including that from the artistic and cultural spheres that include songs, poems, books and language, to that point that when we speak of heritage today, we are talking about our interaction with all of the world around us, both real and abstract, our multiple identities, and our need to tell our stories in our diverse ways.
In relation to all these aspects of heritage components, the parts of the process and experiences of lived culture, I do agree with Mark Patrick Hederman that Ireland, in one important respect, has the experiences and the qualification to position itself as a “conservatory of mythology”. In using our vast mythological archives to provide a haven for this part of ourselves, we are so much fitted to provide for Europe, and for our particular region of the world, “an oasis in the desert of unilateral thinking”, as Mark Hederman put it in his recent book, Living with Mystery.
By mythology, Hederman is referring to “a third way of truth between fiction and fact”. Such a “mytho-poetic language” as has provided, and can continue to provide, a middle voice, a third language that bridges that gap between science and the spiritual in our society. In our increasingly fragmented, polarised world, myths have the potential to retain their power, not simply as stories, but as shaping agents in society with the potential for providing cohesion. Our Cartesian period, in what we call ‘the Western World’, may have left us in a limiting cold of reason for which, may I suggest, we may need the warming of the heart.
Heritage includes an understanding of the land itself, and it is the choices as to how it is used, respected, formed, occupied, owned, that have dominated so much of the thread and difficult stitches in the long sleeve of Irish history like no other. As Philip Bull, among others, has noted, the unsettled issue of access to land, tenant security, fairness of rent, created on this island a bond between the issues of land, survival, dispossession, agrarian agitation and nationalism so powerful and pervasive that each issue, at times, could become effectively a metaphor for the other in the Irish lexicon, creating, too, a circumstance when the issues could not be allowed a separate solution, too often at the cost of those at the lowest level.
In such balances, however, George Bermingham was in no doubt which of the issues was at the forefront of thought: asking his newsagent in the late 19th century as to how the vote on Home Rule had gone in London, his Mayo shopkeeper would reply, “To Hell with Home Rule, it’s the land we’re after”.
Indeed it was to be so. Land is exhaustible, capable of being used up. Changes in usage, for example, from tillage for survival to tillage for export, to grazing, had immense and, as history shows, tragic consequences. Changes were most frequently implemented through eviction, house demolition, expulsion, occupation and defeat, not voluntary. Being driven from the land, one’s shelter torn down or burned, was a major source of dispossession, and forced, in time, those migratory flows which became key features of Irish history for many centuries. Such dispossession, as lived in memory into the modern period, can be traced in their early forms, at least as far back as the Cromwellian ‘land grants’ of the 1650s, the payments to his soldiers for the successful invasion of Ireland that would be paid for by the confiscation of estates, and land held in common.
With the Elizabethan conquest, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and the organised plantations of English and Scottish settlers, the patterns of land ownership in Ireland were so fundamentally altered, with the old order of transhumance, moving from lowlands to highlands in seasonal adjustments, and open-range cattle breeding, becoming replaced by a structure of great landed estates, small tenant farmers who held precarious hold on their leases, and a mass of landless labourers who struggled to survive. Even though feudalism was not part of the Irish experience, those at the bottom experienced what were conditions of serfdom, or worse than the protected vassal of the European experience. For example, those on the lowest rung paid for a wattle shelter and a potato patch, with 200 days of labour, paid to those in the rung above them.
As to regional patterns, the custom of tenant right, commonly referred to in Victorian Ireland as the ‘Ulster Custom’, was of course a defining aspect of the land question in the north of the country. This practice, by which rural tenants claimed property rights in excess of their contracts with landlords, allowing departing tenants to exact a payment, a goodwill, as it were, above the yearly rent from those who wished to replace them in their farms, thus creating two sets of relationships between tenant and landlord. In Ulster, this was a fundamental characteristic of rural property relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Like other earlier forms of customary tenure in Scotland and the north of England, tenant right signified the tenant’s place within a community, his or her way of belonging to its history and development and, crucially, the right of the tenant’s family to continue in possession in the future. In Ulster, the custom of tenant right came to signify the place of the tenant within a troublesome recall of colonial history. The new conditions involved the development of a commercial economy in what was a new property system, as well of course as the visual transformation of the landscape that is now very much a part of our natural heritage.
An understanding of the history and course of the land question in this period of Irish history, and its legacy, can assist us with an understanding of the early material and human basis of conflict, violence and division on the island of Ireland today. However, in relation to land and its insecurities, there were long periods of shared tenant struggle. For example, the Ulster Custom was proposed at times within the Land League in the South, and anti-rancher and anti-grazier sentiment came forth with it at times as a demand.
The Irish language, too, was shared. It is a continuous thread running through so many aspects of our heritage. It cannot be disaggregated from how, for millennia, the Irish related to, interpreted, resonated with, and shaped their and our world. Place names, folklore, literature, the natural world, culture, social customs, politics and religion were all contemplated and explored through the prism of Irish sounds.
The preservation of the spoken language is understandably, therefore, a key component of our efforts to understand and draw from our heritage. It is a language that, while having its distinct branch in the Indo-European tree, has, through usage and scholarship, taken into itself Classical and other contemporary languages, including old Middle and Modern English.
Yet, when we talk about heritage, the spoken language sometimes seems to be regarded as separate, disconnected, somehow located within a niche, the furniture or subsection of survivors or primitives rather than an integral part of our heritage in all its aspects. This has to change. It is the heritage of us all. We need champions for the Irish language in the same manner that Colmcille became a champion for the dissemination of knowledge, even disturbing knowledge that would discomfit his superiors. We need to redress a situation where what we publish as heritage policy is not available in the Irish language, an unacceptable contradiction.
Colmcille
In 2013, I had the privilege of making a personal pilgrimage to the island of Iona, where I was able to pay tribute to Saint Colmcille, the abbot and missionary so synonymous with Derry, and the founder of Iona island’s greatly influential abbey; a monk who valued the creation and acquisition of knowledge, but more importantly, its dissemination – values which scholars in Ireland North and South have taken to heart and have made manifest across the centuries through a commendable commitment to education and scholarship.
Colmcille, together with being the patron saint of Derry, was a towering figure in our island’s political, diplomatic, cultural, scientific and religious history. Known also as Saint Columba, Colmcille, as an important evangelist, is credited with founding his first monastery in what is now the modern day city of Derry, in the year 545, before spreading Christianity in what is today Scotland at the start of the Hiberno-Scottish mission. His foundation of Iona Abbey created the dominant religious and political institution of the region for centuries.
The legacy of scholarship which he built in Scotland and in Ireland is a profound one, a great and lasting contribution to the manuscript arts, culture and learning. The fact that Derry’s schools and churches, streets and parks, cultural and sporting clubs, still bear his name, and that Columba is held in high regard by those of all faiths and none, Protestants and Catholics alike, is testament to his emancipatory, spiritual and inclusive legacy.
In many other ways, too, he was precursor of a tradition which has run through Irish letters for millennia, a tradition of migration and the cross-fertilisation of cultures and ideas – be it the monks of early Christianity, to Joyce, whose artistic manifesto was defined through ‘silence, exile and cunning’, and beyond. That Irish tradition includes a rich Pre-Christian spirituality and creativity reflected in art and ritual, and, most importantly, in harmony with nature from which ideas of the cycles of time, planting, renewal, harvesting, passage of the soul, were drawn.
Yet, Colmcille is perhaps most well-known for his work in advancing the importance of manuscript study as a source of knowledge and education, and specifically he is noted for his notorious work on an unauthorised copy of the gospel which he hoped would promote scholarship of the church. He was one of the earliest Irish monks to engage in the practice of copying, and to have his monks at Durrow copy any teaching material that came into his possession, a practice that has since been so often cited as “how the Irish saved civilisation” given how many church books were subsequently burned during the Dark Ages.
Alas, the basis of much of Colmcille’s life’s work was to be effectively proscribed, his vision seemingly fatally obstructed in a devastating ruling against his copying of the gospels by King Diarmuid, as a breach of intellectual copyright. Not long after this judgement, Colmcille was forced to live in exile in Scotland.
The Irish people are a migrant people. It is an essential part of their culture. Culture cannot be defined or understood solely on the assumption of what is sedentary, static, yet such a paradigm exists, neglecting what is migratory, transient, transacted. It will represent one of the most important paradigm changes in Irish scholarship when we give recognition to the limitations that a static view of society or culture represents. Our lives are migrant lives, and any imposed model of assumed stasis or pre-determined structure means we miss the importance of the exciting emancipation and beauty of ‘transience’. Missed in the social sciences, it is happily not so in literature. We would not want to have missed either Ulysses or Leopold Bloom.
The history of Irish migration is older than the island of Ireland itself. Colmcille forms an early example of the tradition of forced or involuntary migration, of the Irish émigré living abroad to flee persecution, to pursue his good work, yet never turning his back on his home and heritage.
Inspired by great manuscripts which travelled from Iona to Ireland, Colmcille’s work is also an expression of how we each reflect our own heritage and culture and launch our own message into the world, and may do so in a way that may promote healing and may even be emancipatory, as was the case with Columba. It informs, what social philosopher Hartmut Rosa describes as, ‘resonance’ – the feelings we experience as we relate to the world, be it with either curiosity or fear.
As migrant peoples, we reflect on these matters perhaps more than most. Reflecting on Colmcille and his journey, and the relationship between the peoples of Ireland, and those points of destination for the émigré, requires that we think about the broader social and historical context of the tasks, challenges and prospects when we speak or organise events of commemoration.
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