Ambassador's Corner
ADDRESS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, JOHN BRUTON, PRIME MINISTER OF IRELAND
To the Joint Session of the US
Congress, September 11, 1996
Mr. Speaker, Senator Thurmond, Members of
Congress, it is a great honor to Ireland that I
have been asked to address this joint session of
Congress today, as only the 30th head of State or
government of an European country to do so since
1945. But it is a particular honor to be asked to
speak here on this day, the 11th of September.
For it was on this day, the 11th of September, 210
years ago almost to the hour, that delegates from
New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and
Virginia met just 32 miles from here at Annapolis
in Maryland, and it was there, at Annapolis, that
they decided to convene the convention in
Philadelphia that gave the people the Constitution
of the United States of America, the world's first
Federal constitution, the constitution that made
Americans "the first people whom Heaven has
favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon,
and choosing, the form of government under which
they shall live,'' making America the pioneer of
that most powerful of all political ideas:
democracy under the rule of law.
Two hundred and ten years later Americans can look
back with pride at what they have given to the
world. Never before in that long period have more
of humanity lived under a system based on
democracy and the rule of law than do so today.
Even in the case of countries as afflicted as
Burma, people are standing up for democracy and
the rule of law. For the first time in their
history, the Russian people have freely elected
their own President. The American model,
constitutional democracy, has succeeded and spread
because it is built on a realistic view of human
nature.
Checks and balances are needed.
As James Madison said: "You must first enable the
Government to control the governed, and in the
next place, oblige it to control itself.''
American democracy has worked because it has
controlled itself through the separation of powers
in a written Constitution, and through a strong
and independent Supreme Court that interprets that
Constitution.
As President Andrew Jackson, a man of Irish
ancestry, said in 1821:
"The great can protect themselves, but the poor
and humble require the arm and the shield of the
law.''
I speak today as President in office of the
European Council, a body that is aiming to do for
the 15 member states of the European Union what
the men who met, and they unfortunately only were
men who met at Annapolis and at Philadelphia, did
so long ago for the 13 colonies of America. The
European Union, through an Inter-Governmental
Conference launched last April in Turin, is
seeking to write a new constitution for Europe
that will enable the European Union to add new
members to its east, just as your constitution of
1789 enabled this great union to add so many new
members to its west.
The establishment of the United States of America
was the great constructive constitutional
achievement of the late 18th century. The
establishment of the European Union out of the
devastation of World War II could be described as
the great constructive constitutional achievement
of the late 20th century.
We in Europe have much to learn from American
experience. Americans came together because of
necessity. Very few of the eventual Framers of the
US Constitution who met at Annapolis were inspired
by the theories of Montesquieu or Locke, wanting
to build the perfect state, a model democracy, a
castle built in the sky. They came together rather
because they had to reach urgent agreement on a
framework to sort out immediate problems about
shipping on the Potomac, about how they would pay
for the army, about who was going to pay taxes and
how they were going to be collected, how they
would get their goods to market, and how their
frontiers would be protected, very practical
problems.
Americans in 1786 knew at Annapolis that they
could not agree on commercial reforms to protect
trade without making political reforms as well.
That is why the men at Annapolis 210 years ago
decided to call a constitutional conference in
Philadelphia the following May. By working
together to find the means of solving the
practical problems of life for their citizens, the
Framers of the US Constitution forged the most
durable and perhaps the fairest system of
government the world has ever seen. They came
together as people who were each loyal, first and
foremost, to their own States. But they knew that
that loyalty and allegiance could find its best
expression as part of a wider American continental
loyalty.
Mr. Speaker, it was necessity that brought Europe
together too, the necessity of reconstruction
after World War II, the necessity of resisting
communism, and the necessity to resolve national
conflicts that had caused 3 wars in just 80 years.
That dynamic, that necessity, continues in Europe
today.
It is often said that politicians and politics are
made to serve commercial needs. The European Union
has done the reverse. It has made commerce the
servant of a great political objective. By
creating a single coal and steel industry, a
single agricultural market, a single commercial
market, the European Union has created economic
bonds that bind its members together politically.
The European Union has undermined the economic
base of that force that causes wars, national
chauvinism, but the psychological base of national
chauvinism still remains a threat in Europe. If
Europeans do not constantly work at bringing their
union closer together, the strains arising from
remaining differences will gradually pull their
union apart.
Can the European Union create economic bonds that
are strong enough to persuade European states to
make sacrifices and take risks for a common
objective? That is an important question for
Europe, and it is also an important question for
Europe's allies and the United States.
And it is a question that Europe has to answer for
itself. And depending on that answer, we will know
whether the Yugoslav violence of 1992-93 was just
the last convulsion of an old and primitive Europe
or a sign of wider threats to come. And Europe has
to answer that question while simultaneously
bringing in new members, with a different
political tradition from Central and Eastern
Europe. That problem, that precise problem of
bringing existing members closer together, while
also expanding membership, is a familiar problem
to anyone who has studied the 19th century history
of the United States.
Europe's task of constitution-building today is
particularly difficult. Europeans were on
different sides in past wars, whereas America's
Founding Fathers had all been on the same side.
But, Mr.
Speaker, we are determined to make the European
Union work, to make it work for peace, to make the
European Union a firm friend and partner of this
great American union.
The United States has built a union that is robust
enough to accommodate radical disagreements and
still take tough decisions when tough decisions
have to be taken. Europe must do the same.
This union, the United States, has worked because
it is based on freedom. As Thomas Jefferson said,
"Error of opinion may be tolerated, so long as
reason is left free to combat it.''
Conformism of thinking, political correctness, if
you will, is the great enemy of democratic
discourse. We must not be afraid to disagree.
We must not dismiss other people's opinions just
because they have used the wrong words to express
them. Equally, we must accept that some people's
views are so profoundly different from ours that
we will never agree with them or them with us.
Living with difference. That's the challenge for
the United States today. It's the challenge for
Europe. It's the challenge for Ireland as a whole,
but in a very particular way, it is a challenge
for Northern Ireland--living with difference.
In Northern Ireland we see two communities, each
offended by the views of the other, and by how
those views are expressed. Two communities, each
feeling itself to be a minority, a minority that
has been oppressed or a minority that may be
oppressed in the future. The fears of each
community mirror those of the other.
Two minorities, equally justly proud of their
heritage, each believing that their heritage is
founded on tolerance and civil liberties, and each
believing that sincerely. Two minorities who yet
will always be different from one another, but who
have not yet been able to see that, on many
important issues, they already agree with one
another far more than they disagree, and far more
than either agree with others. They have
exaggerated their differences and minimized their
similarities.
Thus, if there is to be a peaceful and fair
accommodation in Northern Ireland, each tradition
must be willing to sit down and listen for long
enough to the views, the worries, and the concerns
of the other tradition, to uncover the common
ground.
Thanks to the efforts of so many people here in
the United States, the President and Vice
President Gore, Speaker Gingrich, and other
leaders of both Houses of Congress, most of the
parties in Northern Ireland have been sitting down
and listening to one another since the 10th of
June, under the able chairmanship of Senator
George Mitchell, whose skill and commitment I
salute today. They have had about 6 weeks of talks
together, and they have reached agreement on
important procedural issues, and laid the
foundation for forward movement.
Against the background of 25 years of barbarity of
every kind, and almost four centuries of distrust,
it is hard to expect rapid agreement between nine
different parties in the space of only 6 weeks. My
own view is that the harmony that we seek will not
come overnight. It will come in stages, from the
experience of working together to solve practical,
immediate problems.
But, if that is to happen, it is the strong view
of my government that the talks must now move
beyond procedure and soon discuss really
substantive issues, substantive issues of
disagreement. This must happen quickly. This must
happen quickly if we are not to miss the window of
opportunity, so often highlighted by President
Clinton during his recent visit to Ireland.
On that occasion, the President spoke for all
Americans. Almost as much as the Irish themselves,
Americans welcomed the political efforts that gave
us a ceasefire of 17 months. But now all of us
want the IRA to stop for good. True negotiations
can only take place in an atmosphere of genuine
peace.
The all-party talks, for which we have all worked
so hard, have been delivered. We must have
everybody there at those talks now, genuinely
willing, and able, to negotiate. That can only
happen when everyone has been convinced that
violence will never be used again to intimidate
opponents or to control supporters, never again.
That means a cessation of violence by the IRA that
will hold in all circumstances, and I know that I
have the full support of the US Congress for that
vital objective.
In trying to work out a system of government that
all can share in Northern Ireland in quality and
parity of esteem, we are not asking Unionists to
cease to be loyally British, any more than we are
asking Nationalists to cease to be loyally Irish,
any more than the original Framers of the US
Constitution ceased to be loyal Virginians or
loyal members of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. We are asking Nationalists and
Unionists to agree on a political framework which
will allow them, together, to take on
responsibility for solving the day-to- day
problems that affect the lives of the 1\1/2\
million people who live in Northern Ireland, and
to do so in harmony and cooperation with Britain
and with the rest of Ireland.
Let the parties build on what they already agree
about. All parties in Northern Ireland already
agree that the form of government should be
democratic. All agree that there should be a Bill
of Rights. All agree that there should be links
with the rest of the island. Each tradition agrees
that the other should be respected, and each
agrees that the other tradition cannot be coerced.
The Irish Government has no interest in propelling
anybody into an arrangement that they do not wish
to be part of. We are not motivated by any
interests of our own other than that of obtaining
an agreement which is reasonable and fair to the
aspirations of both communities in Northern
Ireland.
Mr. Speaker, as a historian, I know that you are
very conscious of the fact that Europe has many
psychological boundaries that go back to the
Thirty Years War and further, boundaries of
religion, boundaries between one world view and
another. One of those psychological boundaries
does indeed run through the ancient province of
Ulster. Yet similar boundaries in Europe have not
prevented the development of agreed political
structures across boundaries, which allow regions
and countries, majorities and minorities, and
within states, to work together in partnership, to
the mutual benefit of their people.
We in Ireland can admire our history. We can
regret aspects of it, too, but we certainly cannot
erase it. We don't owe our history any debts. We
can't relive our great-grandparents' lives for
them. We are not obliged to take offense on their
behalf, any more than we are obligated to atone
for their sins.
It is our task to live in this generation, as
people who live in Ireland and whose children will
live there too.
Northern Ireland needs a political system that
allows the people there to take responsibility
together for their own future. Taking
responsibility, something that you, Mr. Speaker,
and many other Members of this Congress on both
sides of the House have emphasized time and again,
taking responsibility. Thanks to the generous
support of Congress, the people of Northern
Ireland, of both traditions, already take
responsibility together for economic projects,
aided by the International Fund for Ireland.
They also have taken responsibility together at a
local level this summer by agreeing in very
different circumstances in many areas the routes
of contentious marches. Unfortunately, agreement
was not reached in every case, but one should not
underrate the importance of responsibility having
been taken in many other cases.
But a wider political agreement is what we need
now. The destructive force of sectarianism is all
too easily fanned. It can quickly get beyond the
control of those who fan it, making compromise
impossible, and eventually coming back to consume
its authors.
That is why we need an agreement, within a
workable timeframe. Such an agreement is within
reach. The Irish and British Governments were able
to agree last year on a detailed model or
framework of such an agreement. The parties can
add to that. They can subtract from it, or they
can come up with an entirely new draft. But the
core problems that the two governments, the
British and Irish Governments, have plainly
identified last year must be tackled and overcome
by this present generation of political leaders. I
am absolutely determined that that will happen.
Mr. Speaker, a number of the men who met in
Philadelphia to frame the US Constitution were of
Ulster Scots ancestry. Some of their distant
cousins sit on the Unionist benches at the Belfast
talks, just as some of their ancestors defended
Derry's walls in 1689.
If men of that ancestry could devise the fairest
and greatest democratic Constitution in the world,
surely they can work with neighbors today to
devise a fair and just system for their own
country.
Agreed institutions for Northern Ireland must be
ones that enforce fairness and check the arbitrary
excesses of whoever happens to be in the majority
in any area at any particular time.
Your second President, John Adams, made a bleak,
but not altogether unrealistic, comment on
universal human nature, when he said:
The people, when unchecked, have been as unjust,
tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any
king or senate
possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority
has
eternally, and without exception, usurped over the
rights of
the minority.
Mr. Speaker, that is why the enforcement of
fairness through law has been one of the keystones
of the American Constitution.
That is also why we need rules, and a balanced
system of institutions, in Northern Ireland. Rules
which limit uncontrollable power. Rules that
require people to share power. Rules that allow
people to build trust through small successes.
Rules which recognize that people are different
from one another, and that people's allegiances
may be many and varied.
That is a lesson that the world as a whole needs
to learn, if it is to live at peace.
Political theorists of the 19th century assumed
that a person could only have one sovereign
allegiance to his or her territorial nation state.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries,
territorially based natural resources, agriculture
and mineral, were crucial to the economy, so
nation and territory normally had to be one and
the same.
In contrast, knowledge, instant communications,
multiculturalism, or at least a multiplicity of
cultures, and mobility, people moving from one
country to another, money moving from one country
to another in an instant, these would be the
characteristics of the 21st century, and
nationalities will inevitably become more and more
intermixed, one with the other. That is why in
many parts of the world, a new political model is
needed to organize this new social reality, a
model that recognizes that people can have more
allegiances than one, and yet live and work
happily together.
The European Union reflects that new concept. In
the European Union one can at the same time owe
allegiance to Flanders, to Belgium, and to Europe,
and yet share the same working and living space
with someone who has the different set of national
allegiances.
If such a model can work for Europe, it can work
for Northern Ireland too, and if we can get it
right in Northern Ireland, we will be setting a
model for similarly divided communities across the
world, just as men of Irish descent set a model
for the world 210 years ago today, when they met
at Annapolis and decided to draw up the
Constitution of this United States.
Yes, both Ireland and the United States have
responsibilities to the wider world, to the 6
billion people who inhabit this globe. There are
three times as many people in the world today as
there were when the Irish state was founded in
December 1921, and six times as many people as
there were when the United States was formed.
Africa had half Europe's population in 1950.
Thirty years from now there will be three times as
many Africans as Europeans.
All of these people will have to be fed and
clothed. All will need around 2,000 calories per
day, some will want to consume more, some ought to
consume less, and will need, and this is even more
important, two liters per day of clean, I
emphasize, clean, water. There will be 2 billion
more people in the globe 30 years from now, all of
whom will have those requirements, and we know
that that is going to happen. And all of them, if
we are to have peace, will need to feel that they
are respected parts of the world community, that
they are not second class.
The world is a better place today than it was 50
years ago. It can be even better 50 years from now
if we build freedom, freedom for all, within rules
set by democratic consent.
Lawmakers everywhere must remember that rules work
best when there is consent to the way in which
they have been played, and when everyone has had a
recognized input to the making of the rules. That
is why we need to reform the United Nations,
because we cannot impose rules unilaterally. If
the United Nations had not been set up in San
Francisco in 1946, we would have to be inventing
it today, because given the scale of the world's
problem, given the extreme increase in world
population, we must have a means of making rules
which allow us all to share the world together,
rules in which all nations have had a part in the
making.
Let me take one area as an example of where world
rules are needed.
We need global rules against terrorism, terrorism
which exploits the freedom of our media. As
President Bush said, "simply by capturing the
headlines and television time, the terrorist
partially succeeds.''
Violence and democratic politics can never mix.
Civilized states do not negotiate under threat.
That is why those who wish to win respect through
democratic politics must give up all connections
with terror, give up the threat of terror, and
give up even giving coded warnings about terror.
Terror cannot be part of the political calculus of
a democracy. That is why Ireland strongly supports
the United States efforts to create world rules to
combat terrorism, terrorism of which United States
citizens have been victims in recent times.
Freedom and democracy work, because in a democracy
change must be based on consent, and because it
gives space to individuals to innovate; creating
the best conditions, freedom, for economic growth.
Ireland is a good example of a democracy that
works. Ireland's economic growth rate last year
was the highest in Europe for the third year in a
row. Inflation in Ireland is amongst the lowest in
Europe.
Government spending came down from 52 percent of
GNP in 1986, to just 40 percent today. Four times
as many Irish people go to college today as did so
in 1965. The proportion of Irish children who
complete high school have quadrupled since then
and the numbers have more than quadrupled.
As a result, as a direct result, one-third of all
US high- technology investment going to Europe as
a whole comes to Ireland. One- third.
Education is the key.
We do have problems. Too many Irish people are
unemployed.
But the biggest common factor amongst the
unemployed is that they left school too early. It
is not enough that 85 percent of Irish children
complete high school, or to use the Irish term,
sit the Leaving Certificate, we need 100 percent
to do so. Not just to acquire a technical
qualification but to understand their place in the
world, where they are coming from, who they are,
and as much as possible about the other peoples
with whom they must share this increasingly
crowded globe.
Mr. Speaker, I thank all Americans, and Americans
of Irish heritage in particular, for their
contribution to Ireland's success. I salute the
contributions that men and women of Irish heritage
have made to this great Nation, in every walk of
life.
Mr. Speaker, I ask Congress to continue to support
the peace process in Ireland. And, Mr. Speaker, I
ask Congress, representing this great American
union, to work together with the European Union to
build a structure of peace for the world as a
whole.
Thank you.
