On Thursday, November 26, 1998, Tony Blair made history by becoming the first British Prime Minister ever to address the Irish Parliament. That Parliament had been created 80 years earlier in open defiance of the British government which Blair now headed. Ireland had won its independence from Great Britain after a bloody insurrection in the early 1920s, marking the beginning of decades of intense animosity and outright violence. In this speech, Blair recalls his own Irish roots and declares an end to more than 800 years of enmity between England and Ireland. Members of the Dail and Seanad, after all the long and torn history of our two peoples, standing here as the first British prime minister ever to address the joint Houses of the Oireachtas, I feel profoundly both the history in this event, and I feel profoundly the enormity of the honour that you are bestowing upon me. From the bottom of my heart, go raibh mile maith agaibh. Ireland, as you may know, is in my blood. My mother was born in the flat above her grandmothers hardware shop on the main street of Ballyshannon in Donegal. She lived there as a child, started school there and only moved when her father died; her mother remarried and they crossed the water to Glasgow. We spent virtually every childhood summer holiday up to when the troubles really took hold in Ireland, usually at Rossnowlagh, the Sands House Hotel, I think it was. And we would travel in the beautiful countryside of Donegal. It was there in the seas off the Irish coast that I learned to swim, there that my father took me to my first pub, a remote little house in the country, for a Guinness, a taste Ive never forgotten and which it is always a pleasure to repeat. Even now, in my constituency of Sedgefield, which at one time had 30 pits or more, all now gone, virtually every community remembers that its roots lie in Irish migration to the mines of Britain. So like it or not, we, the British and the Irish, are irredeemably linked. We experienced and absorbed the same waves of invasions: Celts, Vikings, Normans -- all left their distinctive mark on our countries. Over a thousand years ago, the monastic traditions formed the basis for both our cultures. Sadly, the power games of medieval monarchs and feudal chiefs sowed the seeds of later trouble. Yet it has always been simplistic to portray our differences as simply Irish versus English -- or British. There were, after all, many in Britain too who suffered greatly at the hands of powerful absentee landlords, who were persecuted for their religion, or who were for centuries disenfranchised. And each generation in Britain has benefited, as ours does, from the contribution of Irishmen and women. Today the links between our parliaments are continued by the British-Irish Parliamentary Body, and last month 60 of our MPs set up a new all-party Irish in Britain Parliamentary Group. Irish parliamentarians have made a major contribution to our shared parliamentary history. Let me single out just two: Daniel OConnell, who fought against injustice to extend a franchise restricted by religious prejudice; Charles Stewart Parnell, whose statue stands today in the House of Commons and whose political skills and commitment to social justice made such an impact in that House. So much shared history, so much shared pain. And now the shared hope of a new beginning. The peace process is at a difficult juncture. Progress is being made, but slowly. There is an impasse over the establishment of the executive; there is an impasse over decommissioning. But I have been optimistic the whole way through. And I am optimistic now. Let us not underestimate how far we have come; and let us agree that we have come too far to go back now. Politics is replacing violence as the way people do business. The Good Friday Agreement, overwhelmingly endorsed by the people on both sides of the Border, holds out the prospect of a peaceful long-term future for Northern Ireland, and the whole island of Ireland. The Northern Ireland Bill provides for the new Assembly and Executive, the North-S
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 08:20:31 +0000
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