"Today, following as it does so many remarkable days, is a new and glad departure in an old and extraordinary relationship." With this eloquent statement of how British-Irish relations have changed fundamentally for the better, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern opened his address to the Joint Houses of Parliament in Westminster yesterday.
This was a moving occasion and an outstanding tribute to him personally for his 10 years of productive work with prime minister Tony Blair on Northern Ireland. Mr Ahern used it to give a rich overview of a troubled past and to say how Britain and Ireland can now make history instead of being doomed to repeat it.
Speaking as "the elected leader of a young, modern and successful country" Mr Ahern explained that recent changes in Ireland's international economic and political position have given Ireland a new self-confidence. This makes for a deeper awareness of our history allowing new approaches to political identity and sovereignty. Without such an enlarged self-confidence, the compromises needed to transform relations between nationalism and unionism on this island and to link them to shifts in British-Irish relations would not have been possible. On both sides it is a matter of transcending narrow and introverted approaches to our intertwined histories, so as to understand why these relationships have been so divisive and are now changing so much for the better. We should remain conscious of that history but no longer captured by it.
This is a psychological point with major political ramifications. The departure of recent days in Northern Ireland referred to by Mr Ahern and Mr Blair yesterday opens up into a much broader set of changes between the two islands. Mr Ahern recalled the many members of the House of Commons, from Edmund Burke to Daniel O'Connell to Charles Stewart Parnell who were "a voice for the voiceless of Ireland and at times a conscience for Britain too". The Irish Question was shorthand for a nuisance, a problem and a danger at Westminster. It has been transformed by the Belfast Agreement and its full implementation in a "triumph of common interests over inherited divisions".
This long-term perspective is welcome and necessary and was put exceptionally well yesterday. It is now time to concentrate on the new opportunities opening up between these islands and their peoples. Mr Ahern usefully recalled that over 100 Westminster MPs have an Irish ancestry, representing millions of similar constituents, and that over 100,000 British citizens reside in the Republic. British exports to Ireland are more than twice those to China, India, Brazil and Mexico combined, while roughly half of Ireland's food exports and half the exports of our indigenous companies go to Britain. There is a close partnership of culture in the broadest sense, from literature to sport. And the wider setting of the European Union has enabled many of these changes and has much potential for future co-operation.