President returns to Ark cultural centre 16 years after opening it

AS MINISTER for the arts in 1995 one of Michael D Higgins’s first activities was to open the Ark Cultural Centre for Children in Dublin’s Temple Bar.

Sixteen years later, he returned yesterday to visit the Ark in one of his first acts as President.

Mr Higgins posed for pictures with children reading an updated version of Oscar Wilde's famous story The Happy Prince.

“Isn’t reading a great thing,” he said warming to his theme. “I’m going to give a speech and I hope it doesn’t bore you.”

Mr Higgins, who has made the promotion of the arts a corner-stone of his presidency, gave a speech which was partially pitched at the adults in the audience and partially at the children.

Like many people of his generation, he lamented the prevalence of “computer games”, digital television and pre-programmed electronic toys instead of children fully appreciating the joys of “taking refuge in their own imaginations”.

Harking back to his own childhood, which must have seemed like prehistory to so many of the assembled children, the President said the advent of modern technology made him think about the games he had played and those he and his friends had invented.

“It is the wonderment that matters. The materials to hand are but the means to release the creativity,” he said.

He quoted Albert Einstein who said: “Logic can take you from A to B but imagination can take you anywhere.”

Children, like adults, should never be passive about culture, he said. Instead, they should be the “arrow not the target”.

He reminded the relatively fortunate mixture of children engaged in the arts and their mentors that in places like Africa the concept of childhood did not really exist.

The President met Dublin schoolchildren from Holly Park Boys School in Blackrock, the Divine Word National School in Marley Grange and St Mary’s Boys School.

The Ark was set up to give children between the ages of two and 12 the chance to explore the visual and literary arts.

Ark director Eina McHugh said it was “wonderfully symbolic” that the President would visit within a fortnight of being inaugurated.