Thank you, Provost. That was extraordinary. I’m not sure I have much to add, I’m afraid, but I’m going to.
Dear Deputy Prime Minister Simon, Provost Doyle, fellows, students, distinguished guests, my brother.
It is a great privilege to join you all here at Trinity College for this inaugural lecture named in honour of a truly remarkable individual.
After a lifetime of service, General John de Chastelain’s seminal work helped forge and implement the Good Friday Agreement.
Peace is never guaranteed. It cannot simply be signed into reality. It is brokered, built, and embodied by brave and compassionate individuals like General de Chastelain.
It is my honour to be speaking under the banner of your name.
As it is my honour to be at Trinity College Dublin. This is much more than a university. It is a veritable wellspring for ideas, inventions, and moral clarity.
Some of the western world’s greatest contributions to science, art, and literature have their roots here.
Trinity alumni invented the steam turbine and the modern stethoscope. They pioneered radiotherapy and linear algebra, and coined the term “electron”.
They introduced the world to Count Dracula, Dorian Gray, Gulliver, and Godot, who should be here any minute now.
Trinity students are building on this legacy. And Canadians are sharing in this quest.
Today, I will talk about the importance of the relationship between Canada, Ireland, and Europe.
About our shared, unique transatlantic vision.
About the choice before us: to be decisive, influential, and a force for good over the next century.
And about our common imperative: to build ambitiously and build together, guided by the values and the perspective we share.
Canada and Ireland are transatlantic nations.
Fifteen centuries ago, the Irish Saint Brendan the Navigator stood on Ireland’s shore and looked west.
He built a currach and, with his companions, set sail into the unknown, guided by little more than faith, curiosity, and the conviction that whatever lay west was worth discovering.
Those Irish voyagers realised the Atlantic did not separate worlds. It connected them.
Centuries later, as western civilisation went through a period of profound upheaval, Irish monks collected, illuminated, and preserved the books and ideas that were being lost in tumult.
Plato and Aristotle for reason. Horace and Homer for poetry. The Book of Kells for prayer.
That tradition continued here in Trinity College, which became a centre for the Irish Enlightenment, first as a refuge for debate and knowledge, then as a beacon of wisdom and truth.
In these classrooms, Irish authors, artists, economists, and philosophers used ideas just as Saint Brendan used his currach – to connect worlds.
It is not recorded whether Saint Brendan and his companions landed in Canada, but the first Irishman to officially make the journey was Tadhg O’Brennan of County Kilkenny, who arrived in Québec in 1661.
I will also note that his 11th grandson Scott Gilmore is here today.
O’Brennan was followed by waves of migration, as the Irish became one of Canada’s largest communities. They didn’t inherit a country complete. They helped build it into the unique, strong, and proud nation it is today.
The Irish revolutionary, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, became a Canadian Father of Confederation – a contribution we have memorialised by bestowing his name on the pub closest to my office.
John McCaul, alumnus of this college, became the University of Toronto’s second President – shaping the university’s early years and setting the high bar for its ambitions.
Louise McKinney, whose family emigrated from County Cavan to Alberta, became the first woman elected to a legislature in the British Empire.
Irish labourers built one of Canada’s first nation-building projects, the Rideau Canal, which I cross on my way to Parliament every day, and on which locals skate every winter.
With each decade, our relationship has become stronger.
Today, our two nations have never been more connected – by the Atlantic, by blood, by ideas, by commerce.
Over the last 10 years, our trade grew 150%.
Canada is now Ireland’s fourth largest trading partner outside of the European Union (EU).
Over 75 Canadian companies operate in Ireland, with over 26,000 employees. Irish companies employ over 30,000 people across Canada.
Every year, almost half a million journeys are made between Canada and Ireland, as students, tourists, entrepreneurs, and friends stitch our nations ever closer.
We should not be surprised at this.
St. John’s, Newfoundland, is 1,700 km closer to Ireland than it is to Vancouver. It takes three hours less to fly there.
We are more than partners, we are family – brothers and sisters – literally and figuratively.
Our troops have served together on peacekeeping missions, from Cyprus to East Timor.
Our scientists have made discoveries together, in quantum physics and geology.
We share the values of sustainability, inclusivity, solidarity, and dignity for all. We’re both proudly bilingual nations.
We’re passionate about building strong economies as the means to just societies.
Just societies where we take care of the vulnerable. Just societies where you can love who you want to love. Where everyone can be their entire selves and all have a chance to thrive.
With our common history and shared values, we have developed a unique transatlantic worldview rooted in a simple but profound conviction:
That we are stronger when we are connected.
That our prosperity grows when it is shared.
And that we’re stewards of our lands.
Trinity alumnus Edmund Burke described society as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.
Long before globalisation, Burke understood that societies thrive not in isolation, but through webs of connections, obligations, and trust stretching across borders and generations.
That means adapting and improving institutions while preserving what works.
It means building with speed, scale, and ambition while remaining anchored in enduring values.
And for Canada and Ireland, it means harnessing our deep relationships as sources of strength.
This is an urgent task, because the world is changing rapidly.
Ireland and Canada are navigating a global rupture, not a quiet transition.
The post-Cold War rules-based order is breaking down.
Multilateral institutions have weakened. Economic integration is being weaponised.
The international trading system we have relied upon for decades is disappearing.
At the same time, new technologies – from artificial intelligence (AI) to cyber and quantum – are changing the nature of war, the structure of economics, and the possibilities of human advancement.
Climate change is no longer a warning – it is here. Last month, Ireland experienced its hottest May on record. Last year, in Canada, forests larger than Ireland burned in the drought and the heat.
Global conflicts are expanding and evolving. They are more than kinetic, they are economic, social, and technological.
Canada, Ireland, and Europe are increasingly and immediately vulnerable to once-distant threats.
Amid this disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful – a force for good.
Pivotal – because we are the most connected region: to each other and to the world.
Canada has 16 free trade agreements across 51 countries, covering 1.5 billion consumers and nearly two-thirds of the global GDP. We are on course to double that market access this year.
The EU maintains preferential access to over 80 partner countries, making it the top trading partner for 80 nations globally.
Powerful – because we have the capacity to act together.
Combined, we have a population more than twice the United States’, a larger cultural export industry, a similarly sized GDP, and a comparable R&D spend.
Our collective defence budget is twice that of China’s.
We are home to the majority of the world’s top 100 universities and half of its Nobel Prize winners.
Together, we are one of the largest economic, cultural, technological, financial, and military blocs in the world.
And purposeful – a force for good – because we safeguard the values of human rights, dignity, and pluralism that our people hold dear.
As with Edmund Burke’s maxim, Canada and Ireland recognise our debt to those who built what we have inherited, and the duty we hold to those who will come after.
Just as Irish monks preserved, copied, and taught classical knowledge amid the dark ages, we must preserve and defend our values, our traditions, and our interests during this rupture.
For this to happen, we must build again as we did before.
In 1866, engineers laid the telegraph cable along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean – from Valentia Island, off the coast of Kerry, to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland.
It was considered wildly ambitious and hugely expensive at the time. Previous attempts had failed. It pushed the boundaries of what was possible.
That cable made the modern world possible. Messages and ideas that once took weeks to travel by ship could now arrive in minutes.
Consider that Trinity College’s library holds six million printed volumes – the accumulated knowledge of centuries.
In the time it takes me to finish this sentence, the entire contents of this library will have passed back and forth across the ocean more than 40 times.
This is what is possible when Canada and Ireland choose to build with ambition and build together.
To make this practical, let me highlight three principles to help us build key elements of a new order that encompasses our values.
First, as the requirements for sovereignty evolve, so must we.
Right now, many countries are concluding that they must develop greater strategic autonomy – and that impulse is understandable.
When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options.
In the 21st century, the economic security and prosperity of our countries extend far beyond food, conventional energy, and defence – as important and fundamental as these are.
Today, sovereignty requires reliable access to space-based communications and semiconductors. It requires unhindered access to AI, critical minerals, payment systems, clean energy technologies, and vaccines.
Because governments and businesses long prioritised efficiency over resilience, we have all developed supply chains and trading relationships that create dependencies that can turn economic integration from an advantage into subordination.
Canada’s strategic imperative is to build sovereign capabilities and resiliency in these critical sectors.
Canada is fast-tracking $1 trillion of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, and new trade corridors. We’re doubling our electricity grid, investing in quantum, and building our food security.
Second, building true sovereignty cannot be achieved in isolation; it requires diversification and partnership.
Canada is focused on building a dense web of connections – ad hoc coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners that share enough common ground to act together.
It’s why we were the first non-European country to join the EU’s Security Action for Europe defence procurement programme.
It’s why we have signed over 20 new economic and security agreements across five continents over the past year.
It’s why we’re championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union – something that would create a trading bloc of 1.5 billion people.
And to help solve global problems as the rules-based order is under threat, we’re pursuing variable geometry.
In other words, building coalitions focused on specific issues.
From AI with India and Australia; to critical minerals with the G7; to nuclear energy with South Africa.
In a world of great power rivalry, middle powers have a choice: to compete for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.
The nations that invest in their own capabilities across strategic sectors – and partner with like-minded allies – will multiply their strength.
They become a more effective bloc to deter aggression, protect their supply chains, and realise their core economic interests.
Canada and Ireland are well placed to seize this moment.
We can build across technology, biotech, and agrifood – leveraging our strengths, our trust, and our ambitions – because we share the values that bind our communities and businesses together.
We know it’s not just what we build, it’s how we build. We must build inclusively, sustainably, and in solidarity.
We can build a more resilient, more prosperous, more sustainable world for our children.
A world where a web of connections better prepares us for future shocks.
A world that is truly multipolar, where middle powers play a moderating role.
And above all, a more humane world that is just, honest, and compassionate.
Allow me to close this first de Chastelain lecture by reflecting on the manner of the General’s great achievement.
He imagined better possibilities that others did not see.
He was ambitious.
He understood the power of connection, obligation, and trust.
For us, gathered here to honour his legacy, this is our charge:
We must imagine better possibilities.
We must recognise the importance of our shared world view and weave webs of connection, obligation, and trust – across borders and generations.
If we can do this, if we build together and with his ambition, we can arrive at a future worthy of “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.
Thank you.
Go raibh maith agat.