PRESIDENT Michael D Higgins has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester.
Ireland's President was conferred with the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa by the Chancellor of the University of Manchester, Nazir Afzal on April 23.
The honour is in recognition of “his extensive and significant contributions to literature and public life” and the citation was read by Professor John McAuliffe, Reader in Modern Literature and Creative Writing and Co-Director of the New Writing Centre at the University.
President Higgins has received an honorary doctorate from the University of ManchesterThe President attended the University as a postgraduate student from 1968 to 1971, a time which he referenced yesterday, while giving the inaugural lecture of the John Kennedy Lecture Series.
His talk, titled 'Of the consciousness our times need in responding to interacting crises and the role of Universities as spaces of discourse in facilitating it', spoke of his experience in the city as well as the experience of Irish migrants more widely and of the migrant community globally.
"It is a great honour to return again to this university, as President of Ireland, and to have been conferred yesterday with an honorary Doctorate of Letters for which I am deeply honoured," he said.
"The invitation to deliver the inaugural lecture of the John Kennedy Lecture Series is a privilege that takes on an even more special significance for me having studied at Manchester more than 50 years ago.
President Higgins gave the inaugura lecture of the John Kennedy Lecture Series yesterday afternoon
He added: "Today, Manchester University, with a student body of over 46,000, and with approximately 5,300 faculty staff, constitutes an impressive seat of knowledge with an illustrious past.
"As to my own personal experience here, the first direct connection with Manchester was circa 1960 when I was about 19 years’ old.
"We were, as a family, about to begin what I have referred to as our “scattering”.
"As a boy I lived near a railway station, Ballycar, Newmarket-on-Fergus in County Clare, from which so many would depart to England to work as navvies, to train as nurses, or indeed take any job that was offered.
"British Rail offered a train ticket and accommodation to those working in their cafeterias, an offer taken by my twin sisters at 19 years of age.
"I came as a postgraduate student to Manchester University in 1968, staying on and off for three years, moving regularly between two worlds, that of an Irish construction worker’s family in Manchester and that of the teaching and research of British anthropologists recently returned from Africa and a Sociology Department of just a few years’ old with which it interacted."
A captive audience as President Higgins gives the first John Kennedy Lecture at the University of ManchesterMr Higgins went to explain how his time in Manchester sparked a life-long interest in migration.
"From this period, I developed an ever-deeper interest in urban sociology, above all in migration," he said.
"In my lecture at Manchester University in 2012, I spoke of the experience of the Irish in Manchester in the mid to late 19th century, of the ‘eulogists’ of industrialism and their critics, of how the well-intentioned pamphlet of James Philips Kay on their condition came to be used as a tool against the poorest people in Manchester.
"All of the experience of my own as a migrant studying migration at the end of the 1960s was long after the great tidal waves of Irish arrivals at midpoint and the end of the 19th century," he added.
"Standing in the historical background too was the infamous Manchester Outrage in which three Irish Nationalists (William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien, known as the Manchester Martyrs) were hanged in 1867 following their conviction for murder of a police officer in Manchester.
President Higgins and wife Sabina pictured with University staff and Irish Government representatives at the John Kennedy Lecture"There were terrible events to come which would be inflicted on the warm-hearted people of Manchester, including the IRA’s horrific Manchester bomb in 1996, and a people to whom experience later again hearts went out following the Manchester Arena bombings of May 2017. Thankfully we are now in better times."
The President explained that his own migrant experience had begun well before his temporary move to Manchester.
"Long before my years at Manchester University in the late 1960s, I had been familiar with the migration experience of the Irish in Britain," he said.
"I had a particular interest from my summer work in Sussex, while I was at university in Galway, in how anti-Irish stereotypes continued through the centuries."
He added: "Migrants have always been at particular risk from gross stereotyping, regarded as marginal people, insufficiently grateful, reluctant to acknowledge the virtues of the point of destination, forget their origins and practices, unwilling to assimilate.
"The stereotyped stage depiction of the Irishman is as old as the first production of Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee produced in 1662 on the Restoration stage, and it is a stereotype that continued through the centuries thanks to racist, xenophobic Punch cartoons."
While in Manchester President Higgins will meet with members of the Irish community living in the city.
