Michael D Higgins: St Patrick's Day can be start of 'new journey'

President Michael D Higgins: 'On Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, we have been reminded of our shared vulnerability, our interdependence, the need for an understanding that can fly past borders.' Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

St Patrick’s Day is an opportunity to reflect on our migrant history, learn from it, and allow it to be a “source of our ethics”, President Michael D Higgins has said.

In his annual message to commemorate the feast day of our patron saint, President Higgins said the story of St Patrick was an appropriate message, considering the “special circumstances for the year”.

“Patrick arrived in Ireland as a slave, escaped and returned. He is of the stock of our early foundational Irish migrants, which anticipates our monastic messengers, our 19th-century emigration prior to the Great Famine, and the haemorrhage of our people who managed to flee for survival in post-Famine times,” he said.

Saint Patrick’s Day, then, must always be a special day for recalling our migrant history and learning from it; be a source of our ethics and of our policy at home and abroad. 

President Higgins spoke of how Covid-19 has shown a need for co-operation between nations, due to our shared interests.

“On Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, we have been reminded of our shared vulnerability, our interdependence, the need for an understanding that can fly past borders.

“In the message we have received from Covid, surely there is the undeniable insight that we must all, and together, exit the fog of not only the pandemic but all of the hubris, the arrogance, the vanities of assuming the right to dominate, to impose, to exclude; strategies of life which have left us such a legacy of lost communality and a planet in danger.” 

The President said people have had the opportunity in the last year to examine their assumptions, adding there is “much to be discarded”.

“Surely we do not need to make war to find peace; and then when we discover a remedy, an insight of science for the avoidance or cure of disease, it must be for the sharing, rather than the hoarding as a commodity for use in aggressive trade competition.” 

'Capacity for joy'

He said there will be “capacity for joy” in our exit from the pandemic.

“But that joy should be informed by our reflection on the new values we will invoke and practice as we set out on the new journey we undertake together. Out of Covid we must globally share that which we need for a shared journey. Trust in words is fading. That trust must be restored,” he said.

“In this year, no doubt, there will be pain. While there will be a recall of journeys remembered, there will be the disappointment of journeys anticipated but now, necessarily, postponed. Our hearts must be with those many for whom a technological alternative is an insufficient substitute for touch or intimacy.” 

President Higgins acknowledged that the celebration of St Patrick will be different this year, but said it could be a new beginning.

"We can learn from it all as we always do, and when in years to come we parade again and gather in celebration, make a new invocation, no longer needing to be consumed in our consumption, we will recall how we made Saint Patrick’s Day 2021 the beginning of a new journey, one we are happy to share with the whole world and all of its people, and one that helped renew a respect for Mother Earth to which we all belong, and of which our Saints Patrick and Brigid left us such insights and enduring wisdom."