Remarks at the Conferring Ceremony, University of Liverpool, 5 December 2017

I cannot tell you what a pleasure and privilege it is for me to be here this afternoon in the company of so many new graduates of this University as well as the members of your families who have done so much to help you reach this proud educational milestone.

I want to thank the University of Liverpool for bestowing this very great honour on me. It was especially gratifying for me, as an Irish civil servant, to sign my name in the register of the University's Honorary Graduates a few pages after the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, who was honoured here two years ago. 

Ever since my student days in Ireland, I have been an unswerving supporter of all that universities stand for. I have enjoyed a close association with this distinguished place of learning stretching back to 2013 when I arrived in this country to take up my assignment as Ireland's Ambassador in London. 

I hold in great esteem the university's commitment to the study of Ireland and am proud to be an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies. The light of scholarship is the best possible antidote to the darkness of stereotyped images and mutual incomprehension that can arise even between close neighbours. 

The last time I had a degree conferred on me was in 1979 when I received my M.A. in Irish History from University College Cork. That was at the beginning of my professional life; you are now on the brink of yours. 

I have enjoyed a wonderfully varied, challenging and exciting career in Ireland's diplomatic service, during which I have represented my country in Europe, Africa, Asia, and now in America, having lived in ten different cities during the last four decades. It has always been a joyful privilege to look after Ireland's interests, to tell Ireland's story and to promote my country's values wherever I have been.  

While I do not lay claim to any special set of virtues, I do count curiosity and open-mindedness as some of the qualities I have brought to my work as a diplomat and that, I believe, have served me well. I have never ceased to be curious about the countries where I have been assigned, their cultures, languages, political and economic systems. 

Each of my host countries has stimulated my interest and generated in me a wide-eyed enthusiasm which has not gone stale with the passage of the years. I have learned through experience that no one place and no one people have a monopoly of knowledge or wisdom. 

I cannot, of course, match the scholarly accomplishments of the staff of this University, but I have maintained a serious interest in the subjects in which I specialised at University College Cork - history and literature.  This interest has, I believe, enriched my life. Now that it is your turn to leave this intellectual sanctuary, I hope that you will continue to deepen your understanding of your chosen fields. 

The only piece of advice I have for those graduating today is for you to see today as the beginning of a new phase in your lives and certainly not as an end to your education. 

When I reflect on how much has changed since my last graduation - in a world that knew nothing of the computer or the mobile phone, in which Europe was divided between East and West and China was an isolated, economically feeble country - I can scarcely imagine the extent of the changes that you are set to encounter in the years and decades ahead.  

Lifelong learning and adaptability to new circumstances seems certain to be an even more pressing requirement in your lives than it has been in mine. 

There are two final points I want to make. The first is how important it is to preserve respect for knowledge and learning in our societies. Universities are institutions that rightly pride themselves on the maintenance of rigorous intellectual standards that have stood the test of time. These remain indispensable today. 

Our civilisation is based on the premise that things can be worked out rationally, that evidence needs to be presented and analysed as the basis for sensible decisions and good public policy.

We ought never to be complacent about the knowledge and the skills we possess. It is important to be open to the views of others no matter how far out of left-field they may appear to come. Respectful dialogue is an irreplaceable ingredient for a successful society.  

There are those in every country who would seek to devalue expertise and subordinate fact to faction.  Universities and their graduates have a particular responsibility to defend reason and tolerance at a time when there are so many diverse sources of information and opinion. On the whole, however, and notwithstanding the risks posed by those who exploit social media for nefarious ends, information overload seems to me to be preferable to scarcity and paucity.

A second point is the supreme importance of maintaining an international outlook. Not everyone would, or should, want to have the kind of peripatetic life I have had, but we are simply too interconnected for a one-country approach to life to be tenable. 

There has never been a time like today when knowledge of what is going on in the world is so accessible. But, with that has come a tendency to retreat into our separate national and ideological silos and to feel threatened by the interests and identities of others. The notion of an international society of peoples linked by broadly shared values is one that is well worth defending and I commend its defence to you. 

Liverpool, as a major port city, has always been an outward-looking place. It was a city to which countless Irish people came over the generations, in transit, or to settle. In accepting this great honour, I think of their lives and their struggles, and the adversities of those who have followed in their wake down to our time. 

The Irish poet, Eavan Boland, who now teaches at Stanford University, but who spent part of her childhood at our Embassy in London where her father was one of my predecessors, has written about the Emigrant Irish, which seems particularly apt for our times and to other migrant peoples:

Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights 
better than, newer than and then 

a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example: 

they would have thrived on our necessities. 
What they survived we could not even live.  

I am delighted to accept this Honorary Doctorate and want to wish all who are graduating today happy and successful lives.  As citizens of the world, it is part of your responsibility to help shape its future in the likeness of those values to which you have been exposed here at the University of Liverpool. 

 

Daniel Mulhall, Honorary Graduate (Doctor of Laws), 5 December 2017