Cathaoirleach Carey, Mayo County Council, thank you; Taoiseach Micheál Martin, thank you for your leadership, your hospitality; Mary, thank you for being here.
Ministers Cleary and Dillon, ambassadors King and Concannon, my good friend and colleague James Maloney; distinguished senators, friends – thank you for this great honour and this great welcome.
Taoiseach, I want to thank you again for, amongst other things, last night’s dinner, which was a beautiful celebration of the kinship between Canada and Ireland.
And I want to thank you for being here tonight, this morning, yesterday – when you’re so busy with so many responsibilities. It means a great deal. And as the Cathaoirleach said, it’s great to be back home.
I’m going to draw on the story that you heard because it means a lot to me, and it’s part of what grounds my thinking.
Forty-one years ago now, when I was applying for my Irish citizenship, I found my grandfather’s baptismal record from St-Patrick’s in Aughagower.
Faded and next to his name, my great-grandfather Patrick had made his mark.
I’ve thought about that mark many times and it’s not a mark of absence, not a mark of something that he didn’t possess, but a mark of presence, what’s available to him. Witnessing, affirming in the way he could.
The child named on that record, my grandfather, Robert, grew up in this county, looked at the life here, and decided to cross the Atlantic, carrying with him that mark and the centuries that crafted it.
Because the history here, the values here, the purpose here, the humanity, run far deeper than written memory.
At the Céide Fields, beneath the bog, lie the oldest known field systems on Earth. Farmers cultivated this land a thousand years before the pyramids.
Saint Patrick fasted on the mountain that watches over this town.
Gráinne Mhaol, the pirate queen, ruled these waters.
When the famine struck, it took one in three people from this county, through death or departure for a new life across the ocean.
When blight returned to Mayo in 1879, it was here that the Land League was born – and within a generation, the farmers of Ireland owned the land on which they worked.
This county has known hardship without being diminished by it, and beauty without being softened by it.
This county made my family.
My grandparents left Mayo and crossed the Atlantic as part of a mass movement of Irish that shaped an entire country.
And Canada, to its great credit, did something unusual with those who came.
It didn’t require them to become something unrecognisable to themselves in order to belong. It’s the same bargain we strike with every immigrant population.
Canada’s founding insight is that unity is not uniformity. That our differences are strengths to be nurtured, not risks to be managed.
In Canada, faith, language, heritage, and tradition are not concessions to citizenship. They are expressions of it. That is why, like Ireland, Canada is a proudly bilingual nation.
Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot – a distinction that matters. A mosaic doesn’t dissolve its pieces. Each is stitched to each, all holding all.
The beauty is in the arrangement, not the blending.
Those Irish who came before my grandparents helped build that mosaic.
Just next to my office in Ottawa, Irish labourers – thousands of them – carved a 200-kilometre canal through forest, rock, and swamp with hand tools and blasting powder.
Disease took many of them before it was finished. The Rideau Canal still stands, it is still used today for recreation.
There are now four and a half million Canadians of Irish descent. That’s not a community at the margins, but a current running through the centre of Canada.
And it is a community – like Canada’s other diasporas – that draws inspiration from its homeland.
When I was Governor of the Bank of England, I kept a small map of County Mayo in my office on Threadneedle Street in London.
As instruction, not decoration.
I kept it there so that whatever came through that door – chancellors, crises, the weight of markets and expectations – I would remember where I actually came from. The map wasn’t sentimental. It was structural. It held something in place.
The Irish are foundational to Canada: structural in what they built, structural in millions of lives, structural in the way a county on the edge of the Atlantic can hold a person in place an ocean away.
And what was true of that map is true of Canada itself. The story of Canada begins in places around the world.
Places like Mayo. Mumbai. Merseyside.
Places that hold the journey in place – because we are a country of kept threads.
One of this island’s greatest poets understood this better than anyone.
Yeats issued a demand in “Under Ben Bulben” that has always felt, to me, personally addressed – even though I am not a poet.
“Irish poets learn your trade. Sing whatever is well made…”
Remember the peasantry, he says. Remember the monks, the hard-riding country gentlemen, the lords and ladies beaten into clay through seven heroic centuries. Keep the thread of those who made their mark.
And then – having galloped through all that history, all that accumulated life – he lands on the result: the indomitable Irishry.
Indomitable: a quality that persists across loss, across displacement, across centuries of being beaten into the clay and rising again.
Not unchanged – but unbroken.
That indomitable Irish spirit is what we must call on now.
Canada and Ireland face a rapidly changing world.
One which is more dangerous and divided.
A world must feel as uncertain as the future must have to my grandparents as they emigrated.
The rules-based order we inherited and from which our countries long benefitted is eroding, the values we cherish are under threat and, as reliable partners become fewer, they matter more than ever.
Canada believes that this moment of rupture can only be answered by positive action, by building that which comes next.
And so, we look first to our closest allies. For Canada, that’s Europe. It’s Ireland.
Ours is a relationship founded on those who built anew.
By women and men who crossed the Atlantic in search of a better future for their children – a future they could not yet see.
It’s their legacy that we must call on today,
So that the values we inherited become the foundation of a better world for those who follow.
To return to Mayo and to be honoured with a civic reception and a welcome such as this is a testament to Robert and Nora.
A testament to the life my grandparents built for themselves in Canada, for their children and grandchildren.
And it is a testament to the indomitable spirit of the Irish everywhere, whose pride in their heritage is unbroken by distance and time.
My great-grandfather could not have imagined the distance an “X” on a page in Mayo would travel before returning. The narrowing of distance is what this evening is about.
The thread that runs from Mayo – from the black soil and the Atlantic light – across the ocean, through the Canadian winters in which Ireland was kept alive, to the map on the wall in Threadneedle Street, to this room, tonight.
Four generations. Two oceans. One thread.
I am grateful for that thread. I am grateful for this room, for the grace with which you hold it, and the honour you give me in your welcome.