FROM THE ARCHIVES:IN HIS St Patrick's Day message to the Irish abroad 50 years ago president Eamon de Valera trusted in their continuing support "of the motherland's just claims to the unity of her national territory".
While taoiseach Sean Lemass said that unity would be achieved ultimately but, meanwhile, he wanted practical economic co-operation and neighbourly relations with “our separated fellow-countrymen”. He also declared that the government was continuing its efforts “to restore full vigour to our national language and to foster, among all our people, a sense of pride in our heritage”.
In London, the minister for external affairs, Frank Aiken, also dealt with unity, saying that the government relied confidently on the consciousness of being Irish which was common to all inhabitants of the island and of the efficacy of goodwill and tolerance to achieve a solution.
He also stressed the government’s new programme for economic development. He found a positive factor in Irish emigration, claiming it was not an entirely dark picture because the emigrants arrived in other lands fortified by the example of, and armed with precepts implanted in the race by, the national apostle.
In its comment on these messages and the day that was in it, The Irish Times focused on the practical in this brief editorial.
ST PATRICK’S Day provides a fitting occasion in which to review, in the broadest terms, the achievements and hopes of the Irish people.
On those who have been entrusted with the conduct of the affairs of State, there falls on this day the unenviable task of issuing messages which must at once provide comfort to the millions of Irishmen scattered throughout the world and inspiration to the courageous and hopeful – or timid and unenterprising, depending on the point of view – who continue to live at home.
It is useless to deny that we, as a nation, are a strange mixture – of pessimism and cynicism and even downright apathy on the one hand, and of initiative and imagination and even genius on the other.
Perhaps it is so with all peoples, but to us on this day our concern must be ourselves, our heritage, our social condition and especially our future, both as Christian people and as hewers of wood.
There is nothing shameful in sentiment at such a time but it must be a sentiment founded on truths.
There is a peculiar kind of honesty in both Mr Lemass’s message and Mr Aiken’s address to the Irish Club dinner in London last night.
Both pay due tribute to the festival of our patron saint, and to its religious and national significance and both turn then to the economic aspect of Irish life.
On a day of popular rejoicing, it may seem incongruous to mention material affairs. Who can question the fact that the future greatness of our country depends on its attainment of parity, in the practical business of achieving prosperity, with our neighbours across the channel and on the continental mainland?
We are an ancient race, much wronged in the past, but we would fail utterly to live up to our civilised conception of ourselves if we allowed the penalties of the past to inhibit or prevent the flowering of the future.
When one comes to count the blessings bestowed on this island, one is seized with an acute consciousness of the futility of bigotry and hypocrisy, and with a sharp sense of the fruits to be obtained from harmony – domestic, national and international – and hard work.
If that is the message which our present political leaders have given us, it is one worth heeding. http://url.ie/5akz
Due to pressure of space, Newton’s Optic has been held over