Good afternoon. How are you all? You're good? You're looking really good, looking really good.
Can I thank the university first for this honor and to share the platform with two such wonderful sisters and to share it with you, also wonderful sisters, and your families. It's a very, very special and moving day for me.
President, trustees, members of the college community and especially today's graduands. Ladies and gentlemen, there literally is no happier day in the life of a college than the day of graduation, when family, friends and faculty gather in celebration of the success of this university, this college of students.
Students, you've had to do the relentless work. Convincingly you have met all the tests set over these past years and now you will carry away in a few short minutes the valuable, hard-earned documents that will open doors to you, opportunities to you that will lead to very exciting chapters in your lives. I'm so proud to be able to share this day with you, when each of us in a really very special way becomes a trusted ambassador for Saint Mary's.
It's over 50 years since I sat where you're sitting, though in a much, much different place. Like you I had earned—unlike being offered an honorary doctorate—I'd earned my degree the hard way, the way you did. After four years of books, libraries, papers, cramming, crying, and very occasional student shenanigans, honestly I hadn't the foggiest idea of what life held for me. I certainly never imagined a day like this when my lived life would prompt a wonderful college of this caliber to offer me an honorary doctorate in this great this great occasion, and I value it so deeply. I'm so very grateful.
I've come to you today from Trinity College in Dublin, founded in the 16th century in 1592. Women were not admitted until the early 20th century. The provost of the day, a very eminent and great man we are told, had decreed women would enter the college over his dead body. So he died in 1904 and obviously had the gift of prophecy because in 1904 the first women entered the college. At that time Trinity, like many similar institutions, catered to an exclusively wealthy, male, entitled elite.
But this college—Saint Mary's College—broke that mold many, many years before Trinity College, insisting on the importance of educating women and making sure that a lack of financial resources would not, could not disempower anyone. This place from its inception was the gospel in action, a gospel that promises a crucial transformation of our world, when love of all humanity, empowerment of all humanity, a welcome for all humanity and opportunity for all humanity floods the earth, unimpeded by all the old human barriers that kept and still keep God's great family from fully flourishing.
On the day I first graduated, my grandmother, father and mother sat in the audience. I was the eldest of nine children, one of 60 first cousins, because my family thought they had to increase, multiply and fill the earth all by themselves.
My mother left school at 15 and became a hairdresser. My father left school at 14 and became a barman. Both had great brains but in their day access to education was severely limited. Its cost was prohibitive. Their ambitions to become a teacher—in his case a nurse, in her case absolutely impossible.
But I belonged to the fortunate first generation to benefit from massified free second- and third-level education in Ireland, a generation memorably described by the Irish Nobel laurate Seamus Heaney as having “intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.” That line is from his poem entitled “From the Canton of Expectation.”
The generations immediately before me had their expectations severely limited by lack of opportunity and in our case political oppression. For them, the chance that I was given was literally like winning the lottery. How they would have loved to have had that chance. But with great foresight and generosity, they encouraged me and my generation, funded me and my generation to embrace the opportunity and to let our lives flourish in ways unimaginable to them.
So this gift of education is something really precious still even today when sometimes we can too easily take it for granted. I know that none of you do. You know how hard-earned it has been on this day, and your families surely know the sacrifice and investment it is. Education is the leaven in our lives that allows us to rise to become the best we can be, to shape our own destinies, to shape our world for the better. So to be here today is in one way to be very lucky but then as my grandmother very wisely used to say, you make your luck.
And you, members of the class of 2025—you have made yours by investing in your education; by taking on the challenge of a degree, a diploma, a certificate; by seeing the course through despite often encountering potholes on the way—illness, loss, bereavement, financial problems, self-doubt, broken relationships—all the messy things that can interrupt a life and make us ask of ourselves what exactly am I made of, how can I cope?
And now you know. You coped. You came through. And your strength is now a resource that is not just personal but is an inspiration to others, a reassurance to the family and friends who accompanied you. And it's a light for all the lives that you have yet to encounter.
You matter in this world of ours that so deeply, so urgently needs people of endurance, resilience, focus, determination, achievement and above all
sheer goodness. People who as Seamus Heaney says in that same poem, “will not swerve from all that your instincts tell you is right action.” People who will stand their ground.
My own university days were interrupted. I could say they were blighted, in fact, by the outbreak of sectarian warfare, essentially a civil war on my own doorstep, for I was unfortunate enough to be born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a sectarian quagmire centuries in the making, where Catholics were second-class citizens. The working-class parish where I grew up was the scene of daily violence and regular sectarian murders, the greatest incidents of sectarian murders in the troubles that you heard mentioned.
My family were Catholics living in a Protestant area where we had, thank God, many Protestant friends and great Protestant neighbors. But it was dominated by anti-Catholic Protestant paramilitaries. They attacked and left for dead my profoundly deaf brother, who thankfully recovered, just about. They murdered our neighbor. They machine-gunned our home. They car-bombed my father's pub, intending to kill him but instead they killed a young mother who died in my father's arms as he went to lift her from the ground thinking she had just fainted. Her death drove him into a deep and longstanding depression.
These were my university days. How was I to cope? In my home and in my church, I heard only words of forgiveness. No words of vengeance. I heard words of pursuing peace not vengeance, of loving our neighbor no matter what, even those who hated us because of our religious identity.
And today I'm so grateful I heard those words over and over. And with the divine grace that came from my baptism, they calmed my youthful righteous anger and they helped me to become an apologist for peace, for reconciliation, for good neighborliness and forgiveness.
Some of my friends were not so fortunate. They were recruited into paramilitary organizations and a number of them have served many years in prison. Many others have died as a result of the conflict.
When I became president of Ireland, I dedicated my 14 years as president to building bridges across those centuries of estrangement and bitterness between neighbors. My homeland thankfully now enjoys peace, helped in particular by good friends here in the United States, drawn from both sides of the political divide.
From first principles I experienced the phenomenal power of the great commandment to love one another. It allows me to hope that despite the gravitational pull of violence, hatred which overwhelms generation after generation in century after century in our world, the message and the momentum of that great commandment to love one another will prevail because we will make it prevail. I hope and pray it will infuse your lives as it has mine, for honestly I have never encountered anything to equal it.
This is your day. Enjoy it and all it signifies. It's an end and it's also a beginning all in one. I said at the start that it is a very happy day and it is, but this gathering also marks, of course, a scattering as the dear friends that you have made over these very intimate student years as they all move on to new pastures.
But please do stay strongly in touch with each other, for 50 years later it's those friends that I made all those days, years ago when I sat where you're sitting now, from all backgrounds, all politics, all faiths—those people that I sat beside on my graduation day—today they are my rocks, my joy, the laughter in my life. And if back then we talked about the football matches they were going to play, today we talk about the knee replacements, the hip replacements, and in the case of the men, the prostate problems.
But the time between those days and the days today was unmercifully short, so enjoy every one of them. Make the most of all of them. I hope you will be to each other all of that—the rock, the joy, the laughter, the support in each other's life, because that is what Saint Mary's is to each of you—it's the gift that it is to each of you.
I wish you all so well and leave you with a very well-known Irish blessing: May the roof above us never fall in and those beneath it never fall out. God bless.
Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.