Ireland and Mexico in the Twenty-First Century: A Legacy of Friendship and a Shared Future, Mexico

Ireland and Mexico in the Twenty-First Century: A Legacy of Friendship and a Shared Future

Address by Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Matías Romero at the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico

Wednesday, 23rd October, 2013

Embajador Carlos de Icaza, Sub Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, Embajador Alfonso de María, Director del Instituto Matias Romero, Dr. Fernando Castañeda Sabido, Director del Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Embajador Enrique Berruga, Y, en particular, quisiera saludar a los estudiantes aquí presents, Señoras y señores,

Es con sumo placer que me presento ante ustedes hoy como Presidente de Irlanda para reflexionar sobre el pasado que entrelaza a Irlanda y a México y para mirar, desde ese pasado compartido, hacia un futuro en común.

Deseo agradecer a la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y al Instituto Matías Romero por invitarme a brindar este discurso. Hago extensivo este agradecimiento al Sr. Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, José Antonio Meade Kuribreña, por su apoyo e interés en mi vista a México y por esta oportunidad de dirigirme a ustedes en la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores.

[I am delighted to have this opportunity to address you today as President of Ireland, to reflect on Ireland and Mexico’s intertwined pasts, and to look from that shared past towards our shared future.

I would like to thank the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Matías Romero for inviting me to deliver this address. May I also thank Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, José Antonio Meade Kuribreña, for his support and interest in my visit to Mexico and for this opportunity to deliver this address in Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.]

Here, in this modern Foreign Ministry, we are surrounded by the rich and varied strands of your past history and great culture, and I am conscious of the immense scholarship of the great Octavio Paz in submitting that rich tapestry to a scrutiny that was both moral and marvellous. Just a short distance from where we are lies the Templo Mayor and the ruins of the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan – the site of so many contradictions of beauty and cruelty, of the seizure of power and the destructive consequences of colonising forces, while your auditorium, named for one of your great historical figures, José María Morelos y Pavón, also evokes Mexico’s deep and strong revolutionary traditions.

Visitors to your country, such as my wife Sabina and I, feel privileged to have this opportunity to encounter in Mexico City an extraordinary legacy of pre-Colombian and colonial treasures located next to bustling modernity.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to visit again Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology. Since my last visit to this remarkable collection of pre-Colombian Mesoamerican treasures, when I was a student at the University of Indiana in the 1960s, I have often reflected on how the extraordinary heritage of Mexico and your neighbours in Central America adds such a rich complexity and depth to your contemporary societies. That heritage offers a wealth of sources without, as Octavio Paz might wish, surrendering or being determined by any one period or influence, always staying open to new possibilities. I feel greatly honoured to have this opportunity to return as President of Ireland.

Through that rich tapestry of Mexican history and culture a strong Irish thread is visible at many of the more fateful moments of your history, reflecting the presence in Mexico of countless Irish exiles and immigrants, the ‘wild geese’ who had fled from Ireland’s own seventeenth century wars of conquest and religion to find a new life and new beginnings in what was then ‘New Spain’.

Adventurers, soldiers, traders, administrators, or simply farmers and workers seeking a better future, many

Irish people came to Mexico and settled here during the colonial years, bringing their own values and stories to these shores.

An example from the seventeenth century was Guillém de Lamport, born in Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1615. After an adventurous life in the Spanish Netherlands, Spain and eventually Mexico, he died at the hands of the inquisition here in Mexico City in 1659. Though sentenced for heresy, his real crime had been to author the first declaration of independence in what was then the Spanish Indies.

It was a remarkable document that promised land reform, equality of opportunity, racial equality and a democratically elected monarch; all this a full century before the French Revolution, and surely an inspiration for the famous Mexican “Grito” of 1810.

While many myths have grown up around de Lamport’s colourful but ultimately tragic figure, not least that he was the inspiration for the legendary figure of “El Zorro”, it is his visionary contribution to revolutionary and independent thinking that must be considered his true legacy, and it is for this that he is of course honoured on your Column of Independence here in Mexico city.

Yet another man of Irish descent was Seville-born Juan O Donohú, the last Viceroy of New Spain who also played his part in your independence movement. On 24th August 1821 he remained true to his liberal principles and recognized Mexico’s independence and the Plan de Ayala. He knew that in doing so, he was risking, at the very least, his own hitherto stellar career in the Spanish royal service, if not his life. A somewhat solitary figure who died shortly afterwards, he continues to hold an honoured place in your history as one who did the right thing, at the right time when it was not an easy choice for him to make.

Following independence, many more Irish people came to Mexico, and their names and descendants are everywhere to be found today.

In a true reflection of the strength of Mexico’s unique blend and union of cultures, many of their names have become so Spanish that their modern day descendants may not even be aware that their ancestors, in the distant past, hailed from Ireland.

Thus, while everyone recognizes and is aware of the Irish links of your great actor Anthony Quinn, how many people know that the apparently very Mexican name of Álvaro Obregón, President of Mexico from 1920 -1924, was in fact originally the proud Irish surname of O’Brien?

Many Mexicans know, of course, of the history of John O’Reilly and the Batallón de San Patricio. Those gallant Irish fighters, having first settled in the USA in the nineteenth century, chose to join the Mexican cause and gave their lives for their adopted Patria in the war of 1846-1848. I know that in Mexico the memory of their heroism and sacrifice continues to be celebrated in Saltillo, in Monterrey, in Mexico City at San Ángel and in Coyoacán at the site of the Battle of Churubusco.

In the Irish town of Clifden, Co. Galway, my home county and John O’Reilly’s birthplace, these brave men and their honoured place in Mexico’s history are also remembered in September of every year. I had the pleasure of visiting Plaza San Jacinto on my arrival in Mexico City on Sunday and of viewing the plaque and statue honouring the San Patricios and their contribution to Mexico. It was deeply moving to see that they remain of such living and immediate relevance to so many Mexicans.

Others of Irish descent came to Mexico in more recent times, including the great Juan O’Gorman who has contributed so much in his unique way to the architecture of your great city. More recently still, we can admire the work of the late Phil Kelly and the artist Leonora Carrington, whose startling mix of Celtic and

Mexican influences is currently bringing its light to our Dublin autumn at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In addition, the Irish artist Brian Maguire is representative of an art that engages with the contemporary lives of Mexican citizens, including women and families, in Juarez and elsewhere.

This rich blending of Irish and Mexican cultural life has intensified as our network of global communications has made people to people contacts easier. An interesting aspect of our joint projects is this spirit and ethos of collaboration. We – the Irish and Mexicans – have a legacy of being a portal of translations, transmission and interpretation of the work of each other, both from Spanish into English and English into Spanish.

In Paris in the 1940s Octavio Paz and Samuel Beckett, both later to be Nobel laureates, collaborated on an anthology of Mexican poetry. Some decades later, in Dublin, Mexico City and Oaxaca, another Irish Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, worked with poet Pura Lopez Colome and artist Francisco Toledo in the translation into Spanish and the production of a beautiful edition of Station Island – Isla de las Estaciones.

I know that Pura and Seamus worked closely together on other translations into Spanish of Heaney’s work and that, through this close and fruitful collaboration, full of mutual respect, many in Mexico and in the Spanish speaking world have been brought into contact with this great man’s work through the sensitive interpretation of his Mexican friend.

Pura is here with us today and I want to thank her for all that she has done to bring our two great literary cultures closer.

When I consider these notable examples of great art being created and enhanced by Mexican and Irish collaboration, I am struck again at the rich seam of influence and enrichment that is shared by Irish and Latin American culture and writing.

Me viene a la mente cómo el escritor argentino Jorge Luis Borges en su ensayo de 1951 “El escritor argentino y la tradición” utilizó la tradición irlandesa como modelo de cómo países considerados como periféricos a otra tradición podían tomar la lengua hegemónica de sus vecinos y, aún impuesta, recrearla y reinventar una literatura a su propia imagen y semejanza. Él escribió:

“Tratándose de los irlandeses, no tenemos por qué suponer que la profusión de nombres irlandeses en la literatura y la filosofía británicas se deba a una preeminencia racial…Sin embargo, les bastó el hecho de sentirse irlandeses, distintos para innovar en la cultura inglesa. Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situación análoga; podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin supersticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas.”

[I am reminded of how the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1951 essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, used the Irish tradition as a model for how countries which may be regarded as being on the periphery of another tradition could take the neighbouring hegemonic language and, even if it was imposed, recreate and reinvent a literature in their own image. He wrote:

“In the case of the Irish, we have no reason to suppose that the profusion of Irish names in British literature and philosophy is due to any racial pre-eminence, however, it was sufficient for them to feel Irish, to feel different, in order to be innovators in English culture. I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.”]

Borges was, I believe, conscious of the pleasing irony that the people of Ireland, a country in which the language of English was imposed as a product of colonisation, were sufficiently resilient and adaptive that they used that imposition to release the creative genius among a gallery of writers including four Nobel laureates in literature: Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats.

The same capacity to adapt, to shape, to reimagine is, I know, true of Mexican writers and artists with extraordinary depths of talent, be it the visionary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, or your new generation of gifted writers and poets.

Today our two countries celebrate the strong ties of history and friendship which bind our two peoples in many ways: economic, educational and cultural, and also through our pursuit of our shared values on the global stage.

Mexico is Ireland’s biggest trading partner in the Latin America and Caribbean region. Irish firms have invested in Mexico, most particularly in agribusiness where Ireland’s strengths and reputation for excellence have found a ready welcome and a co-operative partnership. Cooperation is growing in many other sectors too, as Ireland continues its recovery from the economic crisis of recent years. Our recovery is being based on what we do well: our dynamic and outward looking export sector, our world class agriculture, our creative industries, our strength in technology and innovation, aviation, financial services, and a dynamic, focused third level education sector.

I know that these are the main sources of the recent growth in economic cooperation between Ireland and Mexico and that through such solid and sustainable economic and educational links our two countries will continue to deepen and build our relationship.

Already some 1,600 Mexican students are studying in Ireland. We are so pleased that they have chosen Ireland as their destination country for acquaintance with Europe; and that they have elected the land of Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, O’Casey and Heaney as their place to acquire and master the English language, as well as engage with our own ancient Irish language, music and culture. As a result of that engagement, each one of them becomes in turn a new and invaluable human link in the relationship between Mexico and Ireland.

Nothing can be so important, or enriching for the future of our relationships as the connections now being forged between Irish and Mexican educational institutions, academics and students. I am hugely encouraged by the fact that five of our leading Universities have travelled with me to Mexico to further strengthen and deepen the links they have with Mexican third level institutions and make new connections with new partners.

Mexico and Ireland have had very different economic experiences in recent years, with your economy, like many in the wider Latin America and Caribbean region, forging ahead and delivering growth and increased wellbeing to your people, ending the misery of extreme poverty for many and bringing countless more into the productive economy.

In Ireland, we have experienced acute economic difficulties in very recent times and our people have been asked to make great sacrifices to enable our economic recovery and a return to sustainable growth. That recovery is now at last in sight, a true recovery based, not on speculation, but on the real economy of work, production and value, on our commitment to working together to overcome our problems, and on the creativity, innovation and talents which are our young country’s best strengths.

The recent setbacks have also evoked a new sense of solidarity and community, as people seek to find new ways to move forward together and find constructive sustainable approaches to move beyond the crisis that has so affected the global economy since 2008.

One experience we both share is the history and legacy of living in the shadow of a powerful neighbour. In the case of both Ireland and Mexico, the historical relationship with our more powerful neighbour was often, and understandably, the cause of tension and conflict. Happily, in more recent years, those critical relationships have been placed on a more constructive and mutually-respectful footing. In the case of Ireland, our relationship with the United Kingdom is no longer exclusively defined by what separates us but is viewed through the prism of all that we have in common in terms of our economy, our culture, our sport and our people to people connections.

Another phenomenon that Ireland and Mexico share is our experience of migration. This pattern of emigration is deeply etched in the recent history of our two countries. Our respective diasporas are a hugely important part of the Irish and Mexican national consciousness.

We both feel a great sense of solidarity with our migrants; we seek to stay connected with them in their adopted countries; we are proud of their achievements and we hope that future circumstances will allow many of them to return to their homeland. I know that both of our governments share the hope that comprehensive immigration reform in the United States will offer new vistas of hope and possibility for our respective citizens who live and work there.

In different respects, therefore, our recent economic and social histories both converge and diverge. However, our two countries and our two regions, Ireland and Mexico, the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean, along with the wider world, continue to face common and increasingly serious challenges as we begin to look beyond the 2015 milestone for the achievement of the UN Millennium Goals, set with such purpose and hope by the world’s leaders at the turn of the century, and who were called on …

For the European Union, Mexico is one of its ten global strategic partners. As a long standing advocate for regional integration and the European project, Ireland welcomes the strong role that Mexico plays within the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which is now the regional framework for the European Union’s collaboration with your region.

I believe there is much to be gained in a structured, pro-active and mutually respectful dialogue between Europe and Latin America.

The value of such a dialogue in the past may have been constrained by mindsets and assumptions that understandably arose from the legacy of colonialism. However, it is abundantly clear that both regions have a huge amount to learn from each other in the contemporary period and that this learning can and should be a genuinely open and reciprocal experience.

As the European Union grapples with the economic recession and the daunting levels of unemployment, especially youth unemployment, in some Member States, I believe a lot can be learned from the policy models adopted by some countries in Latin America that have successfully implemented strategies that have simultaneously delivered economic growth, employment creation and poverty reduction.

The current global crisis is not only about recovery or the appropriate economic policies to implement for a return to where we were before the crisis started. It is also about the right ideas being considered, new thinking, new models advanced, assumptions tested and debated. Of one reality we can be certain that is that unregulated markets have given us the most serious economic meltdown since 1929, in global terms. As former President Lula da Silva of Brazil told the United Nations in 2009:

“More than a crisis of big banks, this is the crisis of the big dogmas.”

When it comes to deconstructing these dogmas, I believe that some of the freshest and most creative thinking is coming from Latin America, where economists, political and social scientists are not afraid to question prevailing orthodoxies and are bringing forward for discussion and debate alternative models and paradigms for the connection between economy and society and for the relationship between the market and the state.

There is an intellectual fall-down often missing in those parts of the world where antipathy to the role of the state has offered unregulated markets as an ideology to be followed without question while the consequences in poverty and unemployment ravage their societies.

Encouraging progress has been made on the achievement of the UN Millennium Goals, to which I referred earlier, not least in Mexico which has had exceptional progress in reaching them. Nevertheless, across the world, enormous challenges remain.

Another area of common concern to Mexico and Ireland is climate change, which is having an ever more visible impact, as your recent tragic losses here in Mexico have shown. Everywhere, the increasing fragility of the world’s ecosystems is becoming apparent, even as we work to create resilience and provide sustainable livelihoods and paths to prosperity for our people.

Then too the world`s resources are deflected by the arms industry from the tasks of feeding the world`s citizens. Wars and conflicts remain, with their related humanitarian disasters and human rights abuses. Nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction proliferate while conventional weapons and easy availability of small arms also wreak their havoc. The issue of drugs and drug related crime also threatens the security and well being of all our societies but most particularly the regions of production and transit, with such huge social and human costs as you, in Mexico, know only too well.

Ireland and Mexico, working together on the basis of our shared values, have forged a series of partnerships on these and related issues in recent times and we are working together to move the international agenda forward on these major questions for our future.

When it comes to forging, initiating or building a consensus on many international issues, Mexico is a partner of choice for Ireland as we seek, through the United Nations and other international mechanisms to find solutions to the serious issues which confront our world today and which cannot be solved on a national or even on a regional basis.

We are in agreement on the need for a new development paradigm and on a new inclusive approach to development which will place sustainable patterns of production and consumption, inclusion and equality, at the core of global policies beyond 2015.

Mexico and Ireland are united also in our focus on hunger and nutrition as we seek to ensure a world where this most basic human need of all is met. Ireland has been a founding supporter of the ‘Scaling Up Nutrition Movement’ and the links between hunger, nutrition and climate change have been a major focus for the Irish Presidency of the European Union earlier this year.

Even today for Irish people, over one hundred and fifty years after the end of our Great Famine, Irish people are shocked that people should still suffer, in so many countries, from malnutrition and indeed die of hunger daily.

Mexico too is strongly focused on ending hunger, and this is an area where we can draw from each other and work together so as to put an end to this fundamental affront to humanity.

On disarmament issues, Ireland and Mexico have a strong history of like-mindedness and cooperation. Both our countries have been regional leaders on these crucial questions for today’s world and tomorrow’s future, often leading the way for our respective regions in exploring better and more successful outcomes for intergovernmental approaches to disarmament.

Historically, both Ireland and Mexico have been to the fore in nuclear non-proliferation, both in relation to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and also, in Mexico’s case, in the ground-breaking regional Treaty of Tlatelolco.

More recently we have worked together to ensure the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty with its aim of fostering peace and security through the regulation of the transfer of conventional weapons and ending the destabilising arms flows to conflict regions.

Ireland and Mexico were among the first states to sign this new Treaty which we believe represents a substantial contribution to international law and the mitigation of the scourge of unregulated arms traffic.

I congratulate the Mexican government on depositing Mexico’s Instrument of Ratification at the UN last month.

I also look forward to our further cooperation on the Humanitarian Dimension of Nuclear Disarmament and welcome the follow up Conference which Mexico will host next February. Like Mexico, Ireland will continue to participate actively in this significant new focus for international disarmament efforts.

Señoras y señores,

Ireland and Mexico are two ancient countries with very young populations. We represent ancient civilisations who were colonised by powerful forces, and who yet succeeded in retaining as legacy some of the essence of what was best and enriching from those ancient times, including the blending together of people, language and ideas, to create the unique fusions that are Irish and Mexican cultures today.

We have both inherited a legacy of revolution and change from the twentieth century, with many significant anniversaries occurring for us in recent decades. From our troubled past we have learned many lessons, including those from our famed diasporas, who have gone on to contribute so much to their new home countries.

Most of all we have inherited a sense of responsibility to those who have gone before us, and to those who will come after, to leave to them a world that it is a more equal, secure and inclusive place in which to live. The Irish and Mexican cooperation on the world stage of which I have spoken is strong evidence of this commitment to our shared history, common values and a belief that a better future for all our citizens can and will be achieved.

I will end on a note that emphasises our mutual historical and cultural links and one of the lesser known stories of Irish-Mexican literary connections. While at his diplomatic post in Paris in the late 1940s, junior diplomat and poet Octavio Paz was approached by UNESCO and asked to produce and translate an anthology of Mexican poetry. For the translation into English of the poems, they recommended to Paz a little known Irish writer called Samuel Beckett who, it turned out, did not actually know much Spanish.

Neither man appears to have approached the task with any great enthusiasm. Paz was unhappy with the editorial restrictions imposed by UNESCO and the OAS who were sponsoring the project, while in Beckett’s case financial considerations were apparently the main incentive for him to take on the task. The result of

this unlikely collaboration between these two men, who were both to go on to win Nobel prizes for literature, became one of the definitive twentieth century collections of Mexican poetry in English and it is still available today.

Beckett’s approach to this work was to try to produce a translation which would be as rich and as subtle as the original. I will leave this distinguished audience to judge if he succeeded and if, true to our Irish and Mexican traditions, in this blending of the original with the translation, he succeeded in producing something that was in fact, a new and wonderful poetic creation.

Sol de Monterrey by Alfonso Reyes, translated from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett:

Cuando salí de mi casa con mi bastón y mi hato le dije a mi corazón ! ya llevas el sol para rato Es tesoro y no se acaba no se me acaba - y lo gasto.

When I with my stick and bundle went from here, to my heart I said: Now bear the sun awhile! It is a hoard - unending, unending - that I squander

Continuemos desde aquí, irlandeses y mexicanos, con nuestro bastón y nuestro hato transitando juntos por esta gran obra que consiste en enriquecer nuestras culturas y forjar un futuro mejor para nuestros pueblos y para el mundo.

[Let us, both Irish and Mexican, go from here with our bundles and our sticks, and continue together this great work of enriching both our cultures and seeking to create a better future for our two peoples, and for the world.]