The ending of partition and the unification of Ireland can be “a really noble undertaking” that can offer “a new rising tide of energy and momentum”, former president of Ireland Mary McAleese has said.
“It raises the bar of human endeavour, human virtuousness, human kindness, and human good,” said Mrs McAleese, as she launched a book on unity by the Belfast-based writer, Ben Collins, The Irish Unity Dividend on Wednesday night.
Partition was never intended to be permanent, she said, quoting liberally from the speech given by King George V in Belfast City Hall on June 22nd, 1921, when he presided over the opening of the new parliament of Northern Ireland.
“Partition was born. He came, as he said, to the political leaders of that day, as the head of the empire, to inaugurate this parliament in Irish soil. I wonder how many people since then would resonate with the phrase, ‘Irish soil’,” she added.
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She said she had often been reminded of the importance of King George V’s speech by none other than the late Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip: “He always raised [it] with me, whether I wanted it raised or not.”
“He would always say, ’People need to read her grandfather’s speech, meaning his wife, on the opening of the parliament in Northern Ireland.’ Because that speech makes it absolutely clear that partition was never to be guaranteed in perpetuity,” she said.
King George V had come to Belfast with “a deep-felt hope” that politicians would do their “utmost to make it an instrument of happiness and good government for all parts of the community” in Northern Ireland.
“We know they did not do that. They didn’t do that. They didn’t live up to that hope, that aspiration. Partition presaged two de facto confessional states with marooned religious and political minorities in each.”
The monarch then had appealed “to all Irishmen, in his words, ‘to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land which they love, a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill’,” she said.
“It could still happen, but it hasn’t. Our experience was not that. It was a noble aspiration that I think still awaits its fullest realisation, though the realisation is probably nearer today than at any time these past 100 years,” Mrs McAleese said.
Throughout the last century, there “were always people who wanted that reconciliation, who needed to see us live as good neighbours. Partition or not, good neighbours,” said the former president.
“We’ve lived with the violence, we’ve lived with the injustices, we’ve lived with the un-thought-out downstream consequences. And now, we try conscientiously to make the best of them, to make the best of our relationships.
“We try to build a decent, shared, mutually respectful, inclusive, compassionate, and kind culture of engagement with our neighbours, a culture of good neighbourliness, which will stand us in good stead and is the right thing, partition or no partition,” she declared.
Partition has “provoked estrangement, an unhealthy estrangement that was further poisoned by sectarian politics and political sectarian violence, and the stark reality that there were conflicting political ambitions at play,” she went on.
Unification offers the opportunity for everyone, north and south and east and west, “to put all our genius and our hopes and our aspirations and our problems together, and try to solve them together.
“Life will reveal itself to us in an entirely new and an entirely wonderful way, in a way that offers real pride and hope to the children of the next generation in a way that others were deprived of because we were too narrow,” she added.
