Ireland’s President Mary McAleese visited Emory April 30 to speak at a reception held in her honor. The visit was part of a daylong tour of Atlanta which included meetings with local business leaders as she expressed hope to “build bridges” that would place Ireland and Atlanta at the “forefront of the knowledge revolution and knowledge economy.”

Emory College Dean Robert Paul said during his opening remarks that “in many ways, President McAleese is among friends at Emory since our Irish literature collection includes the papers of fellow Northerners,” such as Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson.

Acquired in 2003, Emory holds the world's largest and most complete collection of Heaney's work. McAleese’s visit included a guided tour of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) with Director Steve Enniss.

During her lecture at Emory, McAleese emphasized that being a part of the next industrial revolution, while desirous, is not all that a country requires for success. “You need soul, you need emotion, you need spirit and you need to feed that. That is why we need the metaphysics, that is why we need the poets, that is why we need the poems,” she said.

McAleese continued to describe the importance of education to the transformation of Northern Ireland. Reciting a portion of Heaney’s poem “From the canton of expectation,” she described how the Northern Irish youth began “penciling and paving, using pens instead of plows and using brains instead of crowbars” to move Ireland away from the past towards a new future. She also spoke of the importance of the humanities as an emphasis for education institutions. “We want our kids to be technologically proficient, don’t we? We want them to soar in this world,” she said. “But we want them also to be metaphysicians and that is what I know you work for here [at Emory].”

McAleese's visit to Emory was initiated by James Flannery, director of
the W.B. Yeats Foundation and Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities,
and Geraldine Higgins, director of the Irish Studies Program at Emory. “As a catholic who grew up in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland, her presidency has shown me that the imagined Ireland can become the real Ireland,” Higgins said.

The reception, held in the Jones Room of the Woodruff library, also included a theatrical interpretation of Heaney's “St. Kevin and the Blackbird,” performed by five Emory students and a harpist.

In closing, Emory President Emeritus William M. Chace, a noted Irish literature scholar, presented McAleese with a broadsheet copy of Heaney's poem "The Comet at Lullwater," written after Heaney’s viewing of the Hale-Bopp comet from the roof of the Emory President’s house in Lullwater Park. Chase interpreted the meaning of the gift to be that “Emory is always pleased to witness the visit of a rare, valuable, and immensely attractive guest."

McAleese is the first person from Northern Ireland and the second woman to be elected president of Ireland. She was first elected in 1997 for a seven-year term and was reelected without contest for a second term in 2004. Born in Belfast, she served as a barrister, journalist, and academic before being elected president. Click here to watch the video of President McAleese's visit to Emory.