'Man amidst Inhumanity': The Centennial of the Birth of Raoul Wallenberg
Neill Hoey Theatre, Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Minister, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
You are all most welcome to the Trinity Long Room Hub for this conference commemorating the centennial of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg. With us today are participants from Israel, Hungary, Sweden, and Britain, as well as from Trinity College and the Holocaust Education Trust in Ireland.
In attendance, we have the Ambassadors of Hungary, Israel, Denmark and Sweden. And the Minister for Justice, Equality, and Defence, Alan Shatter. Who is, I’m happy to say, a graduate in Law of this university - the Minister will address you shortly.
The governments of Sweden and Hungary declared 2012 ‘Raoul Wallenberg year’ and this conference is one of several events and academic conferences taking place in various countries to commemorate Wallenberg and to assess his role from a historical perspective. I understand that this is the first time that Wallenberg has been discussed in an academic context in Ireland, and I am very pleased that it is happening here in Trinity College Dublin.
We have the Hungarian Embassy to thank for this initiative, together with the co-sponsors, the Swedish Embassy, the Israeli Embassy and Trinity's Centre for European Studies.
I am most grateful to the Hungarian Embassy and the other sponsors for bringing this conference to Trinity.
It was one of my predecessors as Provost, the great Trinity historian, F.S.L Lyons, who provided one of the most famous, if most damning and controversial judgements on Ireland’s role during World War II.
Referring to the government policy of neutrality in his book Ireland Since the Famine, Lyons wrote:
“The tensions - and the liberations - of war, the shared experience, the comradeship in suffering, the new thinking about the future, all these things had passed [Ireland] by. It was as if an entire people had been condemned to live in Plato’s cave, with their backs to the fire of life, and deriving their only knowledge of what went on outside from the flickering shadows thrown on the wall before their eyes by the men and women who passed to and fro behind them. When after six years they emerged, dazzeled, from the cave into the light of day, it was to a new and vastly different world".
This is one of the most cited, if one of the most contentious judgments, by any Irish historian ever, and since I’m neither historian nor political theorist, it is not something that would be wise for me to comment on.
But I can say, for the benefit of our international visitors that, while all sides might argue the reasons, consequences and mitigating factors, all would agree that Ireland was indeed removed from the general European experience of the Second World War. This may indeed have been the right thing for Ireland at that point in our history - but nonetheless it is clear that this need not have prevented us from, at a crucial time, offering shelter to refugees from the Holocaust. For this failing, our then Taoiseach, John Bruton apologised in 1995, and our then Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, at Ireland’s first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2003 - and they were right to do so.
Many Irishmen joined the British or American forces in World War II and fought and died in the fight against fascism in Europe. Nevertheless as a country - as a body politic - we were observers rather than participants or sufferers in that tragic conflict.
F.S.L. Lyons’s analysis, though controversial, does help us understand the past, and helps us to shape the future, to change our way of being in the world. He would, I think, be moved and would applaud that such an important evaluation of significant wartime events was being held in Ireland and in Trinity.
We are honoured to have with us distinguished speakers from abroad, whose range of disciplines throws new light on many aspects of Wallenberg’s life and legacy.
I would like to welcome in particular our keynote speaker, Dr Robert Rozett, Director of Yad Vashem Libraries in Jerusalem, who will address why, among the 24,000 ‘Righteous among the Nations’, Wallenberg has received so much attention. I would also like to welcome the Hungarian-born Israeli poet, Yaakov Barzilai, who is a Holocaust survivor. We are truly honoured to have both of you with us in Trinity today.
In concluding, I would like to thank Dr Balazs Apor for his kind invitation to me to welcome you here this morning.
And finally, I do wish to take this opportunity to welcome Professor Jurgen Barkhoff as new Director of the Long Room Hub - Trinity’s Arts and Humanities Research Institute where we’re gathered today.
Jurgen was appointed just two months ago. He comes from our School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, where he is a Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies. He was previously, Director of our Centre for European Studies, and for many years filled the role of Registrar of the College with great distinction; as Registrar Jurgen oversaw the procedures for the election of the new Provost, and one of my favourite photographs is of the two of us exiting the election venue after four long hours of successive ballots - I don’t know whose face showed the greatest relief!
I wish speakers and attendees a most stimulating conference.
Thank You.