President Michael D. Higgins Saint Patrick’s Day Message 2024
“May I, on this Saint Patrick’s Day 2024, send my warmest greetings as Uachtarán na hÉireann, President of Ireland, to all of our extended Irish family and indeed to all of those interested in Ireland across the world, whose interest is much appreciated.
Wherever they may be, and in whatever circumstances, the Irish scattered across the world, and all those who feel a connection to our country, are part of a global family that on this special day celebrates and invokes a shared culture and heritage, but reminds us too of a humanity of possibilities and vulnerabilities that we share despite the borders, oceans and miles that may separate us.
How so much better it would be that these celebrations be taking place in conditions of peace and shared concern for the sustainable future of our planet and all forms of life on it.
Unfortunately and tragically, our times are scarred by conditions of conflict, by wars and unresolved issues of hunger and poverty that affect so many in our human family. As we are all too aware, millions of people worldwide are struggling as a consequence of the contemporary multiple interacting crises, and of inequality, climate change and biodiversity loss.
In these challenging times, it is appropriate for us to invoke and reflect on the values that we wish to define us as Irish people. To call to mind those words and actions of which we can be proud.
Saint Patrick’s life embodied the values of solidarity, friendship and concern for humanity. Coming to Irish shores as an outsider, an exile, a migrant finding solace and purpose in a foreign land, his story serves as a poignant reminder of the resilience, courage, and wide-ranging contribution of migrants throughout history, of those who seek refuge and shelter.
These migrant traits we rightly celebrate in those who have left our shores, including those who have made, and are making, such important contributions to so many causes across the world. We see it today in the contributions of the many wonderful people who have come to live their lives in Ireland over recent decades and who are now such a central part of the Irish family, whose work makes our society possible in its vulnerabilities and possibilities.
An example of Irishness at its best, in a world marked by conflicts and unrest, is Ireland’s practical contribution to peace-building, as part of its commitment to living in peace and harmony with our global family. Encouraging others to do so becomes, in current conditions, ever more crucial.
On this, our National Day, we pay tribute to all those Irish women and men who are directly engaged in peacekeeping and in humanitarian relief around the world and of whom we are so proud.
Attacks on citizens have increased, as in the attack by Hamas last October followed by a reprisal of horrific assault as collective punishment. This year, all of the people in Gaza, ordinary citizens facing the most horrific of circumstances of war and displacement, will be in the thoughts of Irish people.
On this special day, it is important to call and pray for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the killing including as it does such a huge proportion of children, a ceasefire which will include too the release of all hostages. The facts of child deaths and malnutrition are carried each day on the television screens of the world – of children dying of lack of oxygen, with many more threatened with what will be a human-induced famine.
In responding to this, the lead taken by Ireland in giving increased and additional aid to UNRWA is an initiative of which Irish people can be proud, influenced as it is not only by our own history, but given the importance and urgent need for international humanitarian action, and international humanitarian law in our world.
So on this St. Patrick’s Day 2024, this is a special year for holding in our minds the Irish people who are involved in building and supporting peace in so many regions across the world, including continuing the longest unbroken record of overseas service of any country in the world in peacekeeping with the United Nations, since first deploying to a United Nations mission in 1958.
This is such vital work at a time when humanity is faced with unprecedented challenges of a global kind. The United Nations, and multilateralism itself, is under grave threat. Secretary-General António Guterres’ recent comments as to how parties to conflict are not only ignoring but trampling on international law, the Geneva Conventions and even the United Nations Charter cannot be ignored. We all must respond to his words, support him.
Such a rejection of international law, of international responsibility, emphasises again how the Security Council has been weakened by abuse of the veto, leading as it has to its failure to respond with appropriate agreed resolutions both to Israel’s military operations in Gaza and to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
Now is the time for all those countries of the world who wish to see a world of peace, the building of a sustainable more equal world built on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to come together and ensure our multilateral system is reformed to make these vital goals a reality.
Saint Patrick’s message was also, at its core and in a fundamental sense, one of respect for nature. We need no reminder of how we are now at a critical juncture in the battle against the consequences of climate change, the effects of which are being felt acutely by the world’s most vulnerable populations. As Irish people, we have the opportunity to take a lead in building a better alternative, one based on principles of respect for nature, justice and inclusion.
Today, as we celebrate the heritage Saint Patrick gifted to us, we are encouraged to be guided by a recovery and reassertion of values such as solidarity, care, kindness and compassion.
We must never lose sight of the possibilities that remain for us in conditions of a shared peace; how our lives could be without war, famine, hunger and greed in a just world that eschews the poisonous ideals of imperialism, racism and xenophobia and embraces the decent instincts of humanity; of how we can build a society of inclusion at home, while working together with other nations to build a peaceful, hopeful world.
May I wish all those who share this island, and all those who have a connection with Ireland, an interest in matters Irish, wherever they may be in the world, a happy and peaceful Saint Patrick’s Day.
Beir beannacht.”
source (plus link from there to as Gaeilge): https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/president-michael-d-higgins-saint-patricks-day-message-2024
Welcome to your annual reminder to please stop wearing those fecking hats.
They were all over downtown yesterday, I made random new friends who had Irish-spotted me and we supported each other in the other national passtime, especially for migrants, of not picking fights with people of this continent unaware of cultural appropriation and of historically-ignorant and historically-destructive stereotyping.
When living in the USA earlier this century, I would joke that we celebrated St Patrick’s Day by fighting with English people. Living in the UK in the 1990s as an Irish person, this was a joke and not a joke; therefore the most Irish and best kind of joke. I’m not going to footnote it with references to contemporary political history, or to the twentieth century’s longer history and to four centuries’ continuing socio-cultural prejudices and xenophobia. Relatives tell me that it’s worsened with Brexshite and the rest of the right-wing turn.
We, internationally, worry that it’s the 1920s and 1930s all over again, but speeded up.
You’re not kin if you’re oblivious to the ironic neocolonialism of settling someone else’s identity.
If you’re so connected to your Irish roots that you become a new colonialist aggressor abroad, exploitative, extractive, necrocapitalist.
If you’re so in tune with your immigrant heritage and the Fenian spirit that, at home, you behave not as a transient marginal temporary migrant but as a settler; and you treat those who are poorer that yourself, less fortunate or healthy or able, and those who are different, as non-persons.
If you’ve forgotten that ours is an identity older and younger and larger than those of nation-states based in territory and blood, inheritance and patriarchy: a largesse beyond physical size and material fortune, a transnational adelphic republicanism, in President Higgin’s words, a “hopeful” identity of “solidarity, friendship, humanity, solace, shelter, shared peace, sustainability, respect, inclusion, justice.”
But you can always learn and relearn. That ability is fundamental to being human, a sentient sensitive being of “compassion” with “the decent instincts of humanity” that make possible a happy peaceful hopefulness.
Now we can be kith and kin again, and isn’t that so much better than being angry and territorial and fighty (me included)? Blessèd are the peace-makers, peace be with you, and may we all be Irish at least for today; and maybe hopefully in spirit for more than just a day, whether or not we’re wearing the colour green in an outward display of that inner peace, hope, and environmental love.
Kinship is incompatible with being blithe in a mythified fossilised “Irish Pride” based on an ancestor four or more generations ago who died before you were born and about whose personal history and sense of and feelings about Irishness you know nothing.
This is a compassionate peaceful hopeful post, though, so I—we—should also bear in mind that people and their histories (and history) are complicated; and that identity is a living motile thing of human imagination.
Be mindful that if your Irish relative is still alive, they might have told you a partial version of their story; “partial” in some combination of “incomplete” and “prejudiced or biased.”
They might not want to talk about their memories at all, if they were traumatic and traumatised.
They, and your people, might have had to forget in order to survive. A forgetting isn’t necessarily the opposite of a remembering—memory, memorialising, commemoration, and remembrance—for which idea, in a different context, I refer you to the work of my colleague Dr Joel Akinwumi (SFU). People live with trauma and scar differently. For some, a next generation’s ignorance might be healing, even if the destructive erasure of that new start and the creative invention of new and hybrid identities have been at the expense of familial and larger socio-cultural histories.
Remember also that people leave for many reasons, and reasons can be misogyny, homophobia, and other social conservatisms and their intersections with culture, community, and religion “back home” within our lifetimes. “Home” isn’t always as rosy-hued as nostalgic fossilisations might suggest. (High five to everyone who’s suffered Peig at school.)
So. Yesterday we partook in the other tradition that is delighting in kinship with all migrants, celebrating together with other random strangers our “luck” in still being alive and able to celebrate, as we crossed paths with Iranians, Spanish, Japanese, Palestinians, Mexicans, Jamaicans, Syrians, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Brazilians downtown too; people for whom that was their formal nationality (passports of workers on visas, permanent residents, and tourists), and otherwise (last place of belonging before exile; and second, third, fourth, etc. generation descendants of immigrants).
None of this was intentional or planned. It was just a lucky day. I was shopping for a close person’s birthday, that’s my excuse for being there and being included in that “we,” having completely forgotten about Vancouver’s CelticFest which has attracted lots of people downtown: Irish, Irish-adjacent, pseudo-Irish, Irish in spirit, and music-lovers.
Last week was work-heavy and occupied by marking stress and my head had been full of all that other stuff; then on Friday, as I put it in a Canvas Announcement to students, “I am up to date with marking in all of my classes 😶🌫️🫠🤪🥳” and in an unfamiliar kind of overwhelmedness, of *not* being behind and worried and panic-paralysed and spiralling and distracting from it by doing what I could, to manage at least the day to day, and my head full of bees. A strange feeling staying through this whole weekend, fascinating that clear-headedness, light-headed the dizzy bewilderment; being bewildered, and in a state of wonder and wondering about it, is in that “rewilding” that I’ve been thinking about. It sounds like this is overthinking and it’s sad if it’s the nearest that I can get to just sitting still and being in that moment, but there has been that too, in the regular usual “mindful but never ever mindless” zonings-out.
And “we” also had the rugby to celebrate too of course.
All in all a happy fortuitous conjunction.
Some of that “luck of the Irish” is about the state of mind where it’s a grey chilly windy rainy day, then there’s a glint of sunshine, and that moment of delight turns your perception of the day to “sunny.” It’s usually close enough to St Brigid’s Day (now also a public holiday with equal status in Ireland, and a rite of equal or greater importance; there’s also a third national saint, Columba) that the weather is gloomier and good reason for the liquid transubstantiation of that state of mind, Irish coffee; but yesterday and today, it’s been warm with blue skies and bright sunshine and when the literal manifestation of that “sunny lucky” metaphorical feeling has been lacking, it risks becoming easy to forget.
Remember, this is an identity that is about not forgetting; balanced by being an identity that’s a culture and history of learning and poetry; more mythopoetic than mythic, it can expand and include (others, outsiders, forgetting, fresh imagining). An Irish mythopoeticity can also be looking forward to gloom so as to be able to search for that glimmer. L’existentialisme irlandais est un humanisme absurde. Kith and kin with all migrants and exiles, our hopefulness is always a richer profounder one, textured with dark humour, drawing deep from the caudron of the Dagda and from Brigid’s springs and streams that all flow into the “well” of well-being.
Juliet O’Brien 