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am deeply honoured to have the opportunity to spend time with you in Mount Aloysius College and to renew my friendship with your president Tom Foley. I have known Tom Foley since my years in Washington DC in the nineteen eighties when we were both closely involved in a congressional organisation called The Friends of Ireland, set up by Tip O’Neill and Teddy Kennedy to support the peace movement in Ireland. In those days we called him young Tom Foley-and we still call him young Tom Foley-to distinguish him from Tom Foley senior, the former Congressman and Speaker of the House of Representatives. I confess I have long been an admirer of young Tom Foley. Although he will be mad at me for saying so, I often thought it a remarkable act of courage for a young man from Philadelphia in the nineteen seventies to take himself off, as he did, to the distant and war-divided streets of Belfast to spend two years and join the often thankless job of spreading the gospel of peace and reconciliation.
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I thank him again for that brave initiative, an outstanding expression of engaged citizenship in the service of the common good. I should also say that I am also an admirer of Sister Catherine McAuley. About ten minutes from where I live there is a statue of Sister Catherine with arms outstretched in welcome, inviting the poor of Dublin into her home, the House of Mercy in Baggot Street. Catherine McAuley was an extraordinary woman. Her personal service on behalf of the poor and sick in nineteenth century Ireland is a story of selfless and even saintly dedication. Equally impressive was her inspiration and god-given energy in creating an international movement of good will and Christian charity. Within barely two decades of the launch of their mother house in Dublin, the Sisters of Mercy were well established all over Ireland, including in my own city, Derry, and had foundations in England , Scotland, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Pennsylvania was from the start a special region of concern for the Sisters in health, education and care of the poor. Impressively-and most poignantly as a visit to the little graveyard outside will show -the origins of your own college reach right back to this early flowering of zeal and compassion Given all of this inspiring leadership, I fully understand why the concept of the common good is such a compelling one within this college and I am honoured to be asked by your President
to make a presentation on this theme and the theme of citizenship and its challenges in the twenty-first century. In doing so, I hope you will forgive me if I introduce you to some of my own Irish heroes who have shown real courage as citizens of Ireland and of the world; the Nobel laureate John Hume, former Irish President Mary Robinson and the poet Seamus Heaney. You will also see that I give special place to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the essential direction finder for guiding us towards the common good and in our search for a more engaged citizenship. In preparing for this lecture, I tried to see to what extent there has been at the level of statecraft a rallying around something like a common-sense view of the common good, e.g. the idea that it is the duty of government, among other things, to protect the welfare of the most vulnerable, the sick, the elderly and the homeless in society. No such luck! Just as there is nothing common about common sense, so there is nothing common place about the common good. Despite an extensive and even exhilarating debate about the common good over two millennia, we still have not come up with a single view of what it entails, far less how we can achieve it. Certainly, the concept has a distinguished and antique pedigree reaching back to the age of Plato and Aristotle and encompassing en route the great medieval thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas. In its modern manifestation,
it finds early and eloquent expression in the preamble to the American constitution-the reference to “the general welfare”but after that, debates about fairness and equality in society, certainly within nineteenth century liberal philosophy, have often triggered counter claims of conflict with individual rights and freedoms. Here in the United States, the debate has been further complicated by concerns about federalism and states’ rights, the constraints on government in imposing taxation and, in this same context, the prioritisation of self-reliance and volunteerism. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the sum of good government is, “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and which shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned.” This limited view of government, reflecting the contemporary preoccupations of a generation engaged in thwarting colonial despotism and resisting unfair taxation over two hundred years ago, has become permanently embedded in the American political landscape ever since. Within the Catholic social tradition, above all since the landmark encyclical “De Rerum Novarum” of Leo XIII in 1891, there has been a broadly consensual and dynamic approach to the common good as a natural end of good government. “De Rerum
Welcoming Ambassador James A. Sharkey, from left, are: Mount Aloysius College President Tom Foley; Ambassador Sharkey; and James Lamb, president of the Ireland Institute of Pittsburgh and the City’s Honorary Consul of Ireland.
Novarum,” with its recognition of workers’ rights and its equally strong defence of property, set the scene for progressive Catholic political thinking which over time evolved into the Christian Democratic movement which is still very influential across Europe. Its most fulsome elaboration has been in the writings of the great thomistic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, who sees no room for conflict between the common good and human freedoms, given the natural
symmetry between our role as individual human beings and as members a larger interdependent society. Although Maritain’s approach is grounded in a spiritual and religious view of man’s destiny, it finds parallel expression in more functionalist and secular European political philosophies such as social democracy which emphasize above all the duty of government in building social cohesion.
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When I first came to Washington in 1980 issues of fairness, individual freedom and the role of government within society were the stuff of everyday political debate. In my first weeks in America I attended the Democratic Convention in New York in 1980 where I heard Edward Kennedy make his famous and very moving concession speech in which he advanced the values of compassion and social equality as being at the very heart of the
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American democratic achievement. For Kennedy this was “a dream that will never die.” I also encountered the equally famous statement of Ronald Reagan, made during his inaugural address, which was to become the defining theme of his presidency: “in the present crisis government is no solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan even elevated his concern to the level of a scientific rule. He said, “I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There is a clear cause and effect here as neat and predictable as the laws of science. As government expands, liberty contracts.” Reagan also joked that “the most terrifying words in the English language are - I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” For all my years in Washington, there was a constant political tug-of-war between the radical populist individualism of Ronald Regan and the idealism and inclusiveness of the New Deal and Great Society generation championed by House Speaker, Tip O’Neill. A conservative and a populist, Ronald Regan was an undoubted paradox. Like speaker O’Neill, he came of age during the Great Depression and had known real hardship. He was a strong admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt but by the early sixties he had become the most powerful and the most persuasive advocate for American conservatism. Tip O’Neill called Ronald Reagan the acting President. Like O’Neill, Reagan was Irish American and, apparently, after work hours they
shared the odd joke together. This undoubtedly helped build compromise and O’Neill in this way was able to protect many needy Americans against the full onslaught of the conservative crusade. Of course, they both shared an interest in Ireland and Ronald Reagan was the first American President to visit the Irish Embassy in Washington officially on St Patrick’s Day. My initial assumption was that it could be hard to trump Ronald Reagan’s conservatism. Not so! Once I called by appointment on a congressman from Georgia on a day when the House and Senate were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of President Roosevelt’s inauguration. I was surprised that he was not attending the celebrations and asked him why. He told that he was not going to celebrate the life and achievement of FDR because Roosevelt in his view was a communist. To say the least I was somewhat taken aback. Later I was assured that the congressman, though a very decent individual, was highly personal and unrepresentative in his views. In following more recent political debates in the United States, I have often wondered to what extent these views would still be regarded as unrepresentative. From a European perspective, there is no way, of course, that the moderate social reforms of the New Deal could be regarded as communist or subversive of human liberty. That is not to say that a heightened state of political alert is not a natural or worthy response whenever there is even the slightest hint of totalitarian-
ism, communist or otherwise. Without the assurance and underpinning of democracy and respect for the inviolability of the human person, the exercise of nation building and social reconstruction can degenerate into dictatorship, as the nightmares of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia have brutally shown. That said, there are in today’s world other sinister, insidious and destabilising threats to democracy and human rights which we must also guard against. When I was in Washington in the 1980s, I had hardly heard of the ‘objectivist’ theories of Ayn Rand. Now I am told that in the United States some of her books are outsold only by the Bible. Left unchecked, these, contemporary manifestations of the cult of the absolute self-the excessive adulation of celebrity, the unencumbered pursuit of wealth and the denigration of social conscience-are also corrosive of human dignity and solidarity. We have seen as a recent example how the unregulated pursuit of wealth helped to create the banking crisis which in Europe and America left us badly battered and which we have been able to contain only by massive taxpayer intervention. In the year 2007 the top tier of managers in the leading international financial institutions were paid between 15 and 25 million dollars per year in total income, more than five hundred times the average annual wage in countries like Ireland, Britain, Germany and the United States. The justification was that these huge salaries were merited because of the
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unique banking skills of the individuals concerned and their gift, above all, for risk management. The financial collapse over which they presided makes nonsense of this claim and should teach us care and prudence. Even now it is not clear that the lessons have been learnt. Rather, the massive concentration of wealth among a very few people, nationally and transnationally, continues to grow at such an alarming rate that the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland - sometimes called a rich man’s club-identified it this year as one of the main challenges to the present global order. There are other related problems and dangers. Corruption and criminality. These can and do subvert democratic institutions and pervert the course of justice. In Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America corruption has been a running plague and the poor of these countries have borne the heaviest burden. However, it has been a plague which all of us in the West have also helped to spread in our scramble for scarce resources and special favours. In Russia,
it has complicated and delayed democratic progression and in Ukraine it has undermined the trust of ordinary citizens in public officials and is an important element in the present crisis. Of course, we do not have to be fans of the Sopranos to know that corruption and criminality can exist everywhere in our societies, even in the fashionable and leafy suburbs of Washington, Dublin, Brussels and London.
We have had in our own time in democratic societies to contend with other threats. As the terrible events of 9/11 have shown, international terrorism is a formidable challenge and vigilance is required in protection of the common good. At the same time, vigilance against terrorism also carries with it a need for prudence and common-sense so that we get the balance right between individual freedoms and the protection of society. This is particularly true at those times when society is in profound recoil
Ambassador Sharkey’s wife, Sattie enjoys the Moral Choices Lecture Program while the Ambassador reviews his notes. James A. Sharkey served as both Honors Lecturer and Visiting Scholar.
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from some unbearable outrage and the temptation is there, when the real culprits cannot be found, to strike out against the ethnic or religious minorities they come from. Furthermore, new intrusive technologies make it increasingly easy for governments everywhere to interfere with basic rights such as the right to privacy, freedom of information and freedom of expression. These technologies
have already been harnessed by authoritarian governments to strike back at political protest and dissent. China is a glaring example but not the only one. As we know, democracies have no special immunity from this same temptation. Within democratic systems, grave injustice will also occur when ideas of the general welfare or the
common good are expropriated by one section of society to the disadvantage and subjection of the other. This is what happened in the American south during segregation. This is also what happened in South Africa during apartheid. It is what happened in Northern Ireland where I grew up. There the majoritarian principle-the right of the elected majority in democracies to enact
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laws for society as a whole - was stubbornly applied by the governments of the permanent unionist majority without proper concern for the rights of the Catholic nationalist minority. What resulted was discrimination in jobs, housing and voting rights so that Catholics in Northern Ireland became second-class citizens. This situation might
have gone on were it not for a revolution in access to high school and university education so that a new generation of Catholics, including people like John Hume and Seamus Heaney, became immediate beneficiaries. This new professional class naturally asked for the full rights of citizenship for themselves and their communities. Instead of moving forward and modernis-
ing, the unionist reaction, because of deep rooted insecurities and prejudice, was ill-judged, intemperate and repressive-giving space for the re-emergence of the IRA, an underground organisation committed to the violent overthrow of the connection between Northern Ireland and Britain. This, of course, only made the unionists even more intransigent.
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John Hume, a neighbour in my home city of Derry, was undoubtedly one of the most able, eloquent and courageous leaders of the movement for civil rights in Northern Ireland. Hume dedicated his life - as did his wife Pat, a graduate of the Mercy Sisters in Derry - to the cause of peace and reconciliation, to the creation of a form of government which would allow the two communities to share power and work together for the common good. He sought to persuade the unionists and their supporters in Britain to take up the cause of political reform and inclusion and at the same time to persuade the IRA to give up their arms and engage in negotiations for peace. It was a long and hard road with fearful loss of life along the way. In the end, the persistence and powers of persuasion of John Hume triumphed with the good will and support of powerful friends in the United States. The result was the famous Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 which set up a power-sharing, inter-community government and for which John Hume and his unionist counterpart, David Trimble, were awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. In their struggle for civil rights, John Hume and other civil rights leaders in Northern Ireland were deeply influenced by the success of the American Civil Rights Movement and the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King’s faith in democratic persuasion, his strict adherence to the doctrine of nonviolence and
the forbearance and forgiveness of the American civil rights activists - irrespective of the provocations and persecutions they suffered - is one of the most compelling demonstrations of courage and virtue in modern history. Together with the restraint of the Indian independence movement - under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi - it stands in marvellous contrast to the murderous violence which overwhelmed so much of the twentieth century. Dr. King’s legacy endured long after his death, not just in Northern Ireland but in South Africa through the spirit of forgiveness of Nelson Mandela, and in Burma and South East Asia in the steely stoicism of Aung San Suu Kyi. It endured also in Europe. Throughout the movement away from Soviet communism, leaders like Lech Walesa and Vaslav Havel drew a powerful charge from their faith in nonviolence and from the transformative energy of landmark human rights proclamations like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I was in Oslo as Ambassador the day that Hume and Trimble received the Nobel Prize; 10 December 1998. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations in New York of the Universal Declaration. John Hume made a point in his Nobel Address of underlining the importance of the Universal Declaration in his own political formation and for peace in Ireland. He said that he wished, “to see Ireland as an example to men and women everywhere of what can be achieved by living for
ideals rather than dying for them and by viewing each and every person as worthy of respect and honour.” For Hume, the Universal Declaration is one of the main building blocks of contemporary civilisation, based as it is on the glorious hope, after the horrendous atrocities of the Second World War, that men and women everywhere can finally look forward to a better, more decent, more humane world. In 1948, the philosopher, Jacques Maritain, one of the co-drafters of the Universal Declaration, wrote about this new-found resurgence of optimism after the terrible years of slaughter and despair, “By a phenomenon that responds to profound laws, the degradation of human conduct is accompanied by a progress in human consciousness and moral awareness which illuminates more vividly than ever before the idea of the human person and of human rights.” In a similar vein, John Paul II called the Universal Declaration, “one of the highest expressions of human consciousness of our time.” Another major influence in the drafting of the Universal Declaration was Eleanor Roosevelt, a feisty and outspoken human rights defender throughout her life. She was the very first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. She declared memorably that human rights begin in small places close to home; the neighbourhood, the local school, the
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college, the factory, farm and office.
downgrade, diminish and dismiss the other.
“Such are the places where every man and woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity, without discrimination. Unless human rights have meaning there,” she declared, “they have little meaning anywhere.”
At times of rising prosperity, it may be that we take economic and social rights too much for granted. Yet, they represent the culmination of over a century of agitation, sacrifice and hardship by working families - in the United States, in old mining and industrial states like Pennsylvania - and all across Europe as rapid industrialisation and urbanisation took hold. Here in Pennsylvania, I am reminded that in my own family, there is a tradition of association with the Molly Maguires. They were an early and secret trade union organisation - condemned, outlawed and persecuted by the mine owners and their special police force. By all accounts, the Mollies were no saints either. But in my own family, they were defended as fighters for social justice and workers’ rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt could say this with such conviction because the Universal Declaration proclaims not alone those rights which are of the essence of our individual freedom but also those economic, social and cultural rights which we would regard as indispensable for physical survival, personal development and for the good of society as a whole; in other words, for the achievement of the common good. The Declaration recognizes the right to social security, the right to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to join a trade union, the right to a decent wage, the right to leisure and paid holidays and much more, rights that are to be enjoyed without discrimination as to gender, race or religion. To assert all of these rights at the universal political level of the United Nations and on the same indivisible basis as civil and political rights was a revolutionary breakthrough: one which was not uncontested at the time and which has still not found easy acceptance. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration, however, you can no longer have your cake and eat it; you cannot proclaim one set of rights and
This same unrelenting fight for survival is the reality of everyday life for billions of our fellow human beings who are part of our global community. The terrible statistics of their plight can never be repeated too often. Over two billion men, women and children struggle to get by on less than two dollars per day and more than a billion of those have less than a dollar to live on. People so desperately poor are vulnerable to every minor tremor in their economic and social circumstances. More frequently they have to endure massive disruption and upheaval; drought, flood, famine; the cruel displacement of war and other man-made disasters
as well as repression, exploitation, discrimination and disease. Something like 50,000 people die every day of preventable povertyrelated diseases, two thirds of whom are children under the age of five. President John F Kennedy attributed the persistence of global poverty in a world of plenty to a lack of will on the part of the international community. Fifty years later, former Irish president and former UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, could identify this same collective failing as still being at the root of the problem. She wrote, “The inequalities we face are a terrible indictment of our collective humanity. It is too much even to say we face them. The truth is that most of the time we ignore them or are indifferent to them. Yet these global inequalities should haunt us and shame us. For the first time in human history we have the capacity and resources to eliminate them. What we lack is the political will and the sense of urgency.” Mary Robinson is a truly admirable international figure who all of her adult life has been a fighter for the rights of women and children and for the cause of the dispossessed and disenfranchised everywhere. She was the first international leader to go to Rwanda after the terrible massacre of 1994 and she has dedicated herself tirelessly to international service since that time. As UN Commissioner for Human Rights, she fearlessly condemned human rights violations wherever she found
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them. She has reminded us time and again that today across the world we are part of an ever-diminishing, increasingly interconnected, single, global community and that all our notions of the common good must embrace this international reality. She has been particularly critical of the very uneven progress made in eradicating world hunger and inequality promised by the UN Millennium Summit held in New York in the year 2000. Next year, 2015, was agreed as the target year for the fulfilment of these priority millennium goals. Instead, we will have to settle in 2015 for a year of stock-taking, of seeing what has been accomplished or not accomplished over the past fifteen years Hopefully, 2015 will also be a year for rededication to the war against world hunger and inequality and for the re-prioritisation of the many millennium targets still outstanding. For Mount Aloysius College, with its historic connections and contemporary outreach, I know, this is a special concern. For the rest of us, it will give another opportunity to join with leaders of conscience like Mary Robinson in keeping our governments focussed on the need for urgency and generosity in their engagement. The terrible gap between rich and poor, the contrast between our own world and the biting realities of life in parts of Africa, struck home dramatically for my wife and myself earlier this year when we were on a visit to Sicily. Near the ferry port where we were staying we came across
a semi-inflated rubber dinghy full of worn-out sandals, empty water bottles, old discarded clothes, shredded life jackets and all the sad human detritus of a desperate and dangerous journey from North Africa to Europe across the high seas. Happily, the persons on this raft were saved and under the care of the Italian authorities. But just as easily they could have drowned, led astray by unscrupulous middlemen who put them out to sea with little or no protection against the elements. What struck us was the desperation and courage of these travellers and the benevolent tolerance of the local Sicilian population towards them. Without a lot to give themselves, the local Sicilians were happy to share their town and its resources with these unexpected strangers. I thought this a particularly striking example of committed global citizenship. I am often asked which of the countries where I served as Ambassador impressed me the most and President Tom Foley asked me to address this point also in this lecture. The truth is that this is a very difficult thing for a diplomat to do, given the nature of our trade. A diplomat has often been defined as someone who is permanently paralysed between the risk of being indiscreet and the fear of being totally irrelevant. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan went a bit further and defined a diplomat as someone who is trained to sit on the fence with his ear to the ground. Given the theme of our talk - citizenship and the common
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good - I will make an exception today and say that, leaving aside the United States, it was without doubt the Nordic/Scandinavian countries who most impressed. They offer an attractive blend of political freedom, social compassion, international solidarity and unadorned plaintalking. Time and again, these Nordic countries are found on the top of international performance leagues for high productivity, competivity, industrial innovation, excellence in education, affordable health
care, gender equality, protection of the environment and general quality of life. These societies are by no means perfect; at times local authorities and next door neighbours can be too intrusive in enforcing every single rule and regulation. Certainly, here in the United States, you might call them high taxation countries but in Scandinavia they say that if you want to protect the elderly, the sick and the vulnerable and give everyone an equal chance in society, then you have to be a good citizen and put your hand in your pocket and pay your fair
share of tax. Believe it or not, despite their taxes, the Danes even compete with the Irish in being among the happiest people in the world. The Nordics are by no means the only European countries with protective social welfare systems. Indeed, comprehensive social protection is the norm in Europe and is very much regarded as a basic right of citizenship. This is not - as is sometimes alleged – a consequence of an entrenched socialist bias. Today, practically all the main-stream political parties
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in Europe on the right and on the left accept the principles of social cohesion; the debate is most often about maximizing efficiency, getting the best value at the lowest possible cost. This concern to protect the disadvantaged within society includes a country such as Switzerland, famous for its low taxation, where there is profound suspicion of central government and where every penny of public spending is microscopically scrutinised at the local level to reduce waste, corruption and administrative inefficiency. This European social welfare system began not
with a socialist or even progressive government but in imperial Germany under the authoritarian Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, who introduced pensions, social security and basic health care. His purpose was not to advance socialism but to undercut and defeat it. His initiative was praised by the Vatican – no lover of the anti-Catholic Bismarck - and was followed in due course as a model by most other countries engaged in social reform, including eventually by the United States in shaping the New Deal.
As President Tom Foley has said, I served in Russia on two different occasions. The second time round, when I was Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin had just become president. He was very much a popular international figure; George W. Bush had looked into his eyes in Slovenia and had seen his soul. In 2003 many world leaders came to celebrate with him the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St Petersburg as Russia’s capital by the modernising tsar Peter the Great. Peter’s intention was to end Russia’s isolation as a
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closed, old-fashioned and inward looking civilisation and make it more open to Western ideas and influences, including technological and commercial innovations. Ever since Peter’s time, there has been a constant tension between those elements within Russian society who emphasise Russia’s natural place as a member of the European family of nations and others who argue that Russia is a distinct civilisation with its own separate Slavic identity, grounded in the Orthodox faith and embracing, in its vast geographic spread and eastwards historic expansion, the two continents of Europe and Asia. President Putin’s hopes of setting up a Eurasian economic union feed off this powerful slavophile and eurasian tradition in Russian politics and reflect his nostalgia for the great days of the Soviet Union. Something of the same tension, albeit on the reverse side, can be found in the present Ukrainian crisis. The on-going debate and divisions highlight not alone the east-west geographic divide within Ukraine but a deeper fault-line concealed within the very bedrock of Russia’s political geology; its competing historical traditions, its internal contradictions and its ethnic rivalries. In our official Embassy celebrations of St Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, we were lucky to have the companionship of Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie. Seamus was excited to go to Petersburg because that had been the home of his close friend the Russian poet and Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky. We visited Brodsky’s family apartment and met his old friends and supporters. Brodsky was a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union. Like many others who would not toe the party line, he was accused of social parasitism and was forced to live in a remote arctic village, before being exiled to Europe and America. Those of us who live in democratic societies cannot really guess the pressures faced by citizens whose freedoms are restricted. Nor can we imagine if we would have the courage to reply as Joseph Brodsky did when asked by the Soviet judge at his trial “who put you in the ranks of the poets?” No one.” said Brodsky. Asking the judge instead, “Who put me in the ranks of humanity?” And going on to argue that poetry, like humanity, is a gift given by god. For anyone to stand up to this level of intimidation in an authoritarian state, he or she
would have to draw on every conceivable resource of courage, certainty and conviction, to be able to draw and drink deep from the well of pure conscience. Because of his persecution by the Soviets and the subversion of literature by the communist system, Joseph Brodsky had a deep suspicion of politics and political manipulation. “The only thing poetry and politics have in common,” he once said, “are the letters p and o.” Yet he had a profoundly ethical belief in the restorative, even redemptive value of poetry, in the truthfulness accessible by the inner creative self; in what he once called, “the movement of the soul.” Seamus Heaney knew this same movement of the soul. Throughout the conflict in Northern Ireland, Seamus frequently faced pressures to be outspokenly partisan, to take sides when divisions were at their deepest and make his poetry more political and polemical. Of course, Seamus Heaney was far from neutral on the issues that arose in Northern Ireland or on any of the great issues of conscience of our time. He was generous and open-minded in all things and gave unselfishly of his time and energy to a range of humanitarian causes. However he courageously resisted all pressures to support extremist positions - above all anything that could be regarded as supportive of violence - and he rigorously defended what he regarded as the moral autonomy of the poet. Like his friend Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney drank deep from the spring of pure conscience and found consolation and fortitude in what he came to call, ‘the redress of poetry.’ “The poet,” he said, “is on the side of the undeceiving world. Poetry tries to help you be a purer, wholer, truer human being” In his great poem “From the Republic of Conscience” Heaney wrote When I landed in the republic of conscience it was so noiseless, when the engine stopped I could hear a curlew high above the runway. At immigration, the clerk was an old man who produced a wallet from his homespun coat and showed me a photograph of my grandfather. ………………………
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No porters. No interpreter. No taxis. You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared. Seamus Heaney has written about the background to this poem. In 1987, he was asked to contribute to Human Rights Day - the day commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - by his local branch of the human rights organisation to which he belonged in Dublin, Amnesty International. Seamus had been given for inspiration a dossier of very moving cases of prisoners of conscience but in his modesty he felt he could not do justice to their moral courage and individual suffering. He had almost given up when a slightly different thought came to him to compose a poem about the mysterious country where conscience is born and bred and where it comes of age. As he said himself, it is a poem “about an ordinary guy who ends up in an imaginary place where everybody he encounters brings him back to primary values, where everything seems a reminder of the necessity for probity and integrity in individual and civic life.” I came back from that frugal republic with my two arms the one length, the customs woman having insisted my allowance was myself. The old man rose and gazed into my face and said that was official recognition that I was now a dual citizen. He therefore desired me when I got home to consider myself a representative and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue. Their embassies, he said, were everywhere but operated independently and no ambassador would ever be relieved. Heaney is suggesting, however ordinary each of us may think we are, that we are all ambassadors for the republic of conscience - we must stand by the call of conscience and encourage others also to live by it. He is not asking us suddenly to become heroes or saints but he is probably arguing against the sins of indifference, complaisance and moral inertia and asking us to be aware of our responsibilities to the common good. To heed this call may involve for some of us
a career of service in health and education and on behalf of the poor. For others it may mean a more active political participation or engagement with local charities or perhaps some form of practical support for international causes. It could even involve a position of measured scepticism and critical distance when we are overwhelmed by the torrents of excessive argument and polemic and campaign rhetoric at election time. Indeed, Seamus Heaney reminds us in his poem that politicians also have very clear responsibilities in the republic of conscience. “At their inauguration, public leaders/ must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep/ to atone for their presumption to hold high office.” For all of us, however, the role of ambassador of conscience requires us to be alert and tolerant; to recognise injustice when it occurs and to raise our hand and say out loud; “This should not be happening and should never be allowed to happen again.” Even this, as we know, may not be easy but we can take inspiration from the good example of those who have been heroic in their exercise of citizenship and in their service for the common good - people like Martin Luther King, Tip O’Neill, Mother Theresa, Mary Robinson, Nelson Mandela and John Hume. Catherine McAuley was also one such hero. Her biographer, Sister Mary Sullivan described her heroic call to service in this way. “We are to be and to do what we teach. If we wish to teach mercifulness, we must speak and act mercifully towards others. If we wish to teach forgiveness, we must forgive and ask for forgiveness. If we wish to teach others to serve and respect those who are poor, we must first serve and respect them ourselves.” I have no doubt that the education and leadership which you receive at Mount Aloysius College, in the light of its inspiring origins and heritage, will give you the confidence and the courage as citizens - citizens of the United States and citizens of the world - to raise your hand and speak your mind when the voice of conscience beckons, as someday for all of us it surely will. I have certainly been inspired and rewarded by my stay here and by my encounter with all of you, the students, staff and the neighbourhood community of Mount Aloysius College and I thank you sincerely for that kind gift. §
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James A. Sharkey Bio
J
ames Anthony Sharkey, born in Derry, Northern Ireland, is an Irish historian, writer and diplomat. He most recently served as Ireland’s Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, and chaired the Council’s Human Rights Committee. He has served as Irish Ambassador to a number of countries including Australia, Japan, Denmark, Russia, and Switzerland. Mr. Sharkey also served as a delegate to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (the Helsinki Conference). These first face-to-face talks between Western European nations and nations of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact are credited as
the first step in the long process of ending the Cold War. As Ireland’s Charge d’Affaires in Moscow, Mr. Sharkey was Ireland’s first-ever official representative to Russia. As ambassador to Russia, he served concurrently Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. As ambassador to Denmark, he held concurrent accreditation to Norway and Iceland, and his duties as ambassador to Switzerland included concurrent service to Liechtenstein and Algeria. During his service as political counsellor in the Irish Embassy in Washington, D.C., Mr. Sharkey
was instrumental in building U.S. congressional support for the efforts of Northern Ireland political leader (and later Nobel Peace laureate) John Hume, and others, to find a peaceful resolution to the three decades of sectarian strife known as the Troubles. Working closely with Speaker Tip O’Neil and other congressional leaders, Mr. Sharkey helped shift the consensus among America’s political leadership toward active support of a negotiated settlement to the Northern Ireland crisis. These efforts eventually led to the 1998 peace accord known as the Good Friday Agreement. Its provisions for political power sharing and economic development have given
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Introductory Remarks - President Tom Foley The Mount Aloysius theme this year is: “21st Century Citizenship: The Common Good.” This charge asks us to think about the value of citizenship, the idea of a “common good,” and the special challenges of the times in which we live, the 21st century. This is not a new debate, just a perpetually unresolved one. It is a debate that began at least 2,000 years ago, when Greek thinkers first grappled with the conflict inherent in a vision of citizenship that sought to both protect individual rights and promote the common good. Plato and Aristotle led the early debates, taken up in later centuries by Christian theologians like
birth to a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. Ambassador Sharkey earned degrees in Russian and Russian history from University College Dublin and Birmingham University. He began his career as a teacher in Stepney, Derry and Dublin. He is the author of works on: Scots Gaelic, the folk history of Inishowen, the Russian peasantry, and the writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. He joined the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1970. Ambassador Sharkey and his wife, Sattie, have three children and make their home in Inishowen, Donegal, Ireland.
Augustine and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. Thomas Aquinas felt that the biblical admonition to “love thy neighbor” was a guideline for governance as well as religion. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others took up this debate between individual rights and state sovereignty. Terms like laissez faire and social contract competed for primacy in their writings.
seven all-college lectures like this one. A quick summary of those major lectures: »» Judge David C. Klementik gave us a three part definition of citizenship at Convocation—“the personally responsible citizen; the participatory citizen; and the justice oriented citizen.” »» Vice President Biden’s longtime aid Terry Wright described a seamless citizenship “from the nation’s capital to the neighborhood.”
Early American leaders were also attuned to these challenges. Ben Franklin in Philadelphia and Paul Revere in Boston each had a strong »» sense of civic duty, cast in terms of De Tocqueville’s “greater good,” and those two leaders personally pursued their belief by helping to build libraries, create »» public hospitals, fund mutual insurance companies, start volunteer fire departments, and found colleges, fraternal and even intellectual societies. »» As Americans, we aspire to Supreme Court Justice Brandeis’ claim that “the most important office in our democracy is that of private citizen.” As Americans, we believe that citizenship is a higher calling (even if the percentage of us who vote doesn’t always reflect that belief). At Mount Aloysius, we have been engaging the topic with our community since day one this semester in “Connections” classes, at orientation and in
Sister Marie Michele Donnelly, R.S.M., M.A. focused on the “spiritual journey to the common good” Sister Helen Marie, R.S.M., Ph.D. coordinated a faculty dialogue on the topic from the perspectives of four distinct faith traditions. Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America President Tony Ross talked about Dr. Martin Luther King’s notion of a more inclusive citizenship.
»» Former President and ethics theologian Sister Mary Ann Dillon, R.S.M., Ph.D. argued that the common good and citizenship are fundamental tenets of Catholic Social Teaching. Today, we will hear another perspective “Citizenship in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective,” from someone who certainly has the credentials to opine on the topic.