 I will say this question shortly. Parliament, good afternoon and thank you all for joining us for this special session. Before we start, given the significant international focus of today's proceedings, I just like to reflect that the thoughts of all of us today here are with those affected by the tragic attack in Istanbul in Turkey last night. Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, present Higgins, on behalf of all my colleagues in the Parliament, can I offer you and Mrs Higgins a very warm welcome here to the Scottish Parliament today? I'm absolutely delighted to be your host, Falcher Gw Parliament Nihalba. I'm absolutely delighted to extend the hand of friendship to you and to have this opportunity to hear you address this meeting of the Scottish Parliament. Scotland and Ireland, as we all know, share a common heritage, a Celtic industry that goes back centuries. More than that, I believe that we share a bond, an outlook in life and a set of political, social, cultural and economic interests that tie us together. Our two countries, for example, both enjoy the support of a large diaspora, tens of millions of Scottish and Irish citizens found right across the globe, and our shared enthusiasm for sport, whether that be rugby, shinty or hurling, or for football, is evident for all to see. If I may say so, President Higgins, your own enthusiasm for football was evident for us all to see on our TV screens last week following the Ireland-Italy match. I'm sure that I speak for many, if not all, Scots when I say that we took great vicarious delight in your victory that evening, and we commiserate with you now and with the national side at finally succumbing to the host nation. If it makes you feel any better, can I point out that you're not the only country coming to terms with your exit from Europe this week? I actually think that you could unite leavers and remainers here in this Parliament if you could offer any advice on how Scotland could qualify for the next European Championship in the first place. President Higgins, I don't believe any of us would wish to downplay the complexity or the significance of the EU referendum vote for the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, but I very much hope that our two countries maintain a strong and continuing relationship regardless of where recent events might take us. Scotland and Ireland both gain from co-operation in areas as diverse as energy, culture and tourism. Our parliaments, our MSPs and committees already enjoy the benefits of mutual exchange and I'm very keen to promote and continue that interplay of ideas and information. In fact, it is very much my wish that not only are you able to offer us your thoughts and insights on the political challenges that lie ahead, but that your visit here today helps to cement that relationship. President Higgins, I've already touched on your sporting interests, but away from football you have a fascinating career. You are a passionate political voice, a poet and writer, an academic and statesman, a human rights advocate, a promoter of inclusive citizenship and a champion of creativity within Irish society. You have served at almost every level of public life in Ireland. I believe that you are the first president to sit in both the Doyle and the Senate. In 1992, you were the first recipient of the Sean McBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau in Helsinki in recognition of your work, campaigning for human rights and for the promotion of peace and democracy from Ireland to other parts of the world, including Iraq, Somalia and Cambodia. Yours is a life of public service and commitment. I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of all my fellow members of the Scottish Parliament to congratulate you on receiving your honorary degree of doctors of law from the University of Edinburgh. Once again, I would thank you for accepting our invitation, and it now gives me great pleasure to invite you, Michael D Higgins, president of Ireland, to address the Scottish Parliament. Presiding Officer, First Minister, members of the Scottish Parliament is a great honour to be here in this moor in the north. Ask who at the Parliament are, of course, or who at the Parliament now. Presiding Officer, First Minister, I think, may I say first of all, very much I would like to be associated with your remarks about the terrible recent loss of life in Istanbul. All of us must regret that. As president of Ireland, it is such a great honour to address the Parliament of our close neighbours and dear friends, the Parliament of Scotland. It is a great pleasure to address this house, not merely because of its already proud history, which makes this august institution-worthy of the respect of all Democrats, but because of the people who have served in it and who incarnate and perpetuate the ancient political and democratic tradition of the Scottish people and who are giving it such full contemporary expression. You have already referred to the bonds of kinship in history between our peoples. They are woven thick. They find expression today in a deep affection and empathy between Irish and Scots wherever our parts cross. For ours is a friendship, which I deeply value, as I know you do and as I have been experiencing this visit so far this week, wonderful meetings with people who value that friendship that exists between us. You might even say that given our shared and complex history, it has often been difficult to say where the Irish ends and to where what is Scottish begins or the other way around. Fundamentally, we are all intermixed migrants whose shared existence owes more to the transience of our migrations than to the sedentary experience of processions or property. From the ancient tribes who pass between our nations to farm, to fish, to trade, to preach and to pray or to make war or to conquer, to take possession from the Celts and the Picks to the Scots and Galoglass, the patterns of migration between Ireland and Scotland are dense and overlapping. They even extend back before history to the age of legend. By the time Scotland emerged onto the pages of written history, Gaelic culture was thriving and gave this land its very name, Scotia, the land of the Scotia, the original preferred Latin name for the Gales or the Irish. So whilst there may have been quite stark differences between Scotland and Ireland from the middle ages onwards, there is no escaping this one overriding link that for many centuries the Irish and the Scots or rather to say the dominant political elites within Scotland traced their ancestry back to a common Gaelic origin. We see this expressed, for example, in a letter in Latin that Robert Bruce sent to Ireland, probably about 1315, as he was seeking an alliance with the Irish so that our nation Nostro-Naziel, the Scots and the Irish nation, might be able to recover her ancient freedom. And he wrote the king sends greetings to all the kings of Ireland, to the prelates and clergy, and to the inhabitants of all Ireland, his friends. Whereas we in you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent over to you our beloved kinsmen, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining in vile at the special friendship between us and you so that with God's will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty. Thus, in this defining period, the Scots and Irish saw themselves as being of the same nation and spoke a common gaelic tongue. A circumstance that prevails certainly right into and past the middle of the 14th century. Over the intervening centuries, we have both come to add the English language to our spoken tongues. But there, too, we have taken that language of Shakespeare and moulded it in our own unique ways, giving it back to the world, changed, I believe, and enriched and enlivened with our own sounds and syntax. Barns and Yeats, Haney and Mark Dillmouth, Stevenson and Joyce, Wilde and Duffy, Welch and Doyle, all have shaped the English language as it is known today. Often think of Derek Walcott putting this, how treat I this tongue of Shakespeare. The intertwined nature of our shared past has had a reciprocal influence on the destiny and the fabric of each of our countries. Perhaps more than we realise. Perhaps we have both too often been defined and too often we have defined ourselves through the prism of our relationship with our neighbour England, to the detriment of a full appreciation of the rich historical links that unite our two lands across the north channel. We are, after all, social and migratory creatures who carry multi-led identities which do not and should not in prisoners from new imaginative worlds, or curtail either our curiosities, our curtesies and above all our hospitality. Of course our overlapping histories have not always been characterised by harmony. Our national stories have been marked by discord, divisions and at times great tragedy. In the 17th century the plantation of Ulster by mainly Scottish farmers would irreversibly alter the history of Ireland and Scotland. In the 18th century, one of Ireland's best-known and best-loved laments, Moghilymar, captured the sorrow felt after the battle of Culloden and the flight of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The sadness of exile, as we would say in Irish, jorioch, the sense of loss experienced by those left behind, captured in so many of the shared themes of our songs, stories and poetry are feelings which will always resonate with nations such as ours. The intense pride that we both take today in our diaspora, and I'm accompanied on my visit by the Minister for the Diaspora and International Development, Jo McHugh, that interest in our diaspora has some of its roots in the tragedies and suffering of past centuries. When famine devastated Ireland, for example, in the 1840s, the Scottish Highlands were also being brought low by hunger and the great Irish famine and got the more. With that difficulty in putting a name on it, as whether it is the year of the failure of the pedestrian, the great famine, the great hunger and so on, it had that impact on the Irish psyche. But it did not just reshape the Irish nation, it reshaped our relationship with Scotland. In 1841, the Irish represented just 4.8% of the population of Scotland. Yet by 1848, just seven years later, just in the height of the famine, it was estimated that an average of a thousand Irish people arrived in Glasgow every week, second only to Liverpool, and by 1851, 7.2% of the population of Scotland was Irish, whereas in England and Wales it was just 2.9%. The story of these movements between peoples is complex, and the adjustment in the figures I've just quoted did not occur without difficulty. The 19th century, with its economic upheavours and ideologically driven policies, pitted an insecure, settled poor against the impoverished migrants arriving in such numbers, often using confessional difference as a wedge to sow enmity. I've often in my own references used the work of such as Professor Bernard Aspenwall, who's among those that I've drawn on when examining the experience of those Irish migrants in the 19th century, with their associated conflicts, with their sourced and perceived economic threats, fundamentalisms of various sorts, or simply stereotype exclusions. Thus, the famine memorial that is planned for Glasgow promises to sensitively and inclusively memorialise that time when famine stalked the land, and both peoples were solely afflicted, thrown on each other as it were by hunger. I think this is an exercise in ethical remembering that is appropriate, for I do believe that an informed and respectful recognition of the complexities of our common past, an ethical remembering and transaction of old hearts rather than any affected amnesia, can best help us build a better future. And thus, events of the past lose any capacity to damage our present or limit the possibilities, ddedrukthe, the possibilities of the future that both of our peoples might enjoy. Today, we do stand together in very different circumstances, confident and prosperous nations, with shared challenges that are, as you have said, both regional and global. Divisions of creed or religions have to a very great extent melted away or at least abated to such an extent that we can appreciate more clearly this long history to which I've been making reference, and above all, it's often neglected, migratory quality that we both share. We can see before us now the enormous potential for partnership and co-operation, grounded in the values that we share as peoples who cherish creativity. Our word in Irish that we both had, croiacht. As a social creativity, croiacht. As a socially sourced and shared resource. Values that, yes, can lead to innovation and economic benefits, but which constitute most of all a valuable imaginative bedrock of citizenship. The innovative person does best in a creative society, one that has structures and institutions that allow for and enable creativity to emerge in all its forms. And we are both now seeing creativity as a departure point for policy, rather than in any residual or narrowly utilitarian sense. Before I became president of Ireland, Prime Minister, in my role as a member of the Olairin, I had the opportunity to discuss these issues here in this Parliament with some of your cultural institutions and communities. And I'm so pleased to see that cultural and intellectual institutions continue to enjoy strong support and are a courted priority in Scottish public policy. In 2013, I also had the privilege of making my own personal pilgrimage to the island of Iona where I was able to pay tribute to Saint Colomkyl, the ferryman, and the founder of the island's greatly influential abbey, a monk who valued the creation and acquisition of knowledge and, even more importantly, its dissemination. Values which both Ireland and Scotland have taken to heart and have made manifest across the centuries through a commendable commitment to generalised education. On that tradition of education and learning, Ireland and the devolved Scottish Executive in Parliament are now identifying exciting new areas for co-operation where our two nations and their peoples with their unique skills and talents can combine to meet the challenges and opportunities of a technological age. As too small in population terms, that is, yet highly skilled countries with highly skilled workers on the edge of Europe, we share a belief that our combined resources, expertise and experiences can create a dynamism that is greater than the sum of our two separate economies. Today, we see great progress, as you have mentioned again, in trade and co-operation in areas such as the creative industries and information technology, as well as in areas as renewable energies and, of course, in the agrifood sector and in tourism. The ease with which citizens of both of our countries can place these economic and material dimensions of shared life within a frame of culture and social cohesion, accepting the value of mutuality, wars and remains a distinguishing feature of the connection between political economy and ethics that we associate with Scotland and, in contemporary terms, for both of us it is a very powerful asset. We are both, in terms of our peoples and their institutions, committed to deepening this bond. In the past year alone, Ireland has grown its diplomatic representation in Edinburgh and the Scottish Government has established a representative office in Dublin. I welcome this, as I believe that the potential for growing our work together is in culture, in economic and social development and in promoting the peace, stability and sustainability that have marked the transformative recent decades between these two islands. Indeed, I was also pleased to have a meeting with the First Minister on Monday and, in the last fortnight, the First Minister hosted a meeting with the Thysioc and representatives of all administrations in the British Irish Council in the hometown of Glasgow, in which key challenges of today were to the fore, social inclusion, educational attainment, provision of housing. This is work that we must continue together and I want to commend Scotland's leadership in this body and the work of all the developing structures for cooperation between our governments and our peoples. We see, too, Ireland and Scotland as nations with a particular history on the wild stage can also play an important role in addressing issues which are of an inescapably global nature. Scotland has long been a source of illumination for the other nations of the world. I spoke of this at the University of Edinburgh yesterday when I was awarded a Doctorate of Laws on Oris Causa. But whether it is the lighthouses of the Stevenson family or to the dazzling early promise of that early period in philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment with its trust in reason and its grounding in the early period in a balance between science and ethics, Ireland, too, has for a long been an outward-looking nation committed to the principles of internationalism and multilateralism. Yesterday I said in the university yesterday evening universities are remembered for the ideas they produce allow and release into the world. That's the key issues of our time, global development, global poverty, climate change, building peace and the achieving or the prevention of conflict and the resolution of conflict. These all demand all of our engagement and those of us with our different capacities and histories and resources must challenge ourselves to come up with solutions to the unresolved issues of global poverty, food insecurity, desertification, unsustainable levels of debt, distorted trade and well-documented abuses of power. We have in recent years in all regions of the world seen the consequence of unsustainable economic models which have fermented instability, widened inequalities. We recognise that we live in an unjust world where those who consume are not the same as those who suffer the consequences of excessive consumption, where the burden of climate change falls all too often on those least equipped to bear it, where conflicts rage while the outside world looks on, seemingly at times indifferent, a world that trades in the rhetoric of reason while living with irrationality in unaccountable financial markets and speculative economic flows and that allows a near impunity for massive ecological devastation visited on the poorest peoples and particularly on vulnerable indigenous peoples. Insatiability far beyond the wealth of nations and indeed of course the theory of moral sentiments was the greater book eight years earlier of Adam Smith and the insatiability has been unleashed with consequences that have flowed from a fractured relationship between nature, science, economy and ethics. The quenched voices of the spirit and the heart that informed political economy at its best moments and those glowing moments as I think in the early Enlightenment including its Scottish moments. They are a miracle now, dismissed as normative and therefore easily excluded from discourse and is narrowly utilitarian and intolerant. We may be at a turning point. The sustainable development goals which are recently agreed upon by the United Nations are of course an opportunity for engagement and they contain an urgent excitation to action. They call for new economic and development models to be brought forward, ones that are aimed at ensuring that development, be it here in Europe or in Africa, serve the basic needs and human rights of communities rather than being subservient to someone restrained and unaccountable financial markets without accountability, assumed ideologically to be self-balancing. Taken with the Paris Agreement on climate change governments and parliaments now have a blueprint towards which to direct a radical shift in thinking that is so pressingly needed. In addressing issues like global poverty and I said to the young graduates yesterday I hope that you succeed where my generation and other generations failed in addressing so many of these issues. Those brilliant young people with science and commerce and law degrees who are capable of, I have suggested, of creating a new enlightenment to give us the new theories, the new thinking, the new policies that we need. It will be insufficient to rely, as some do, on however it is presented, however palliatively philanthropy I might have to offer. We must summon all of our creative and innovative capacities to find new solutions both moral, technological and social to the problems affecting our planet in order to meet the basic needs of populations. I have spoken in some speeches abroad of a civilisation of sufficiency and these solutions must be delivered as a question of right rather than as a concession of charity on an imposition of unsustainable models of consumption that are offered and imposed in the name of a contestable form of modernisation. This means challenging entrenched ways of thinking and understanding, understanding the world in a different way above all allowing the space for pluralist discourse and scholarship. Ireland is committed to playing its part in reimagining our approach to these questions and I believe that Scotland with its strong intellectual tradition will have an invaluable role in enhancing these great issues as well and that once again I think you are showing leadership in your ambitious targets for climate change and renewable energies. That great intellectual tradition of this country grounded in a fine appreciation of that most necessary of balances between reason and morality is an invaluable wellspring from which we can all draw. I have referred earlier to Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and to the importance of his earlier work The Theory of Model Sentiments where he argued that ethical concerns must underpin our social and economic systems. His eight-year work of eight years later The Wealth of Nations is perhaps the work that has generated the most frequently miscoated and abused count of both text and intention. Indeed, it was Smith in that earlier work who argued that our understanding of what is right and good is formed by living in communities alongside other people by learning to value their happiness and to share in their sorrows to feel as they feel to cultivate what Adam Smith called moral sympathies. That is the atmosphere of Scottish moral thought and the spirit and humour and so many others. Today, their words glow like coals. Regrettably, the international economic order which would be invoked on the abuse of, for example, The Wealth of Nations would find neither approval or space for ethics. Yet Smith's idea of moral sympathy resonates powerfully today. Our Irish and Scottish communities are very much as participating in a series of concentric circles. The innermost circle is made up of the national collective with whom it is easiest for us to empathise through the instincts of familiarity. The next layer is the European collective. People are bound together by values, values of lifestyles and institutions. Next, they are our diaspora which you have referred to with whom we share not only a culture and a history but our shared aspirations for a sustainable life and a fragile planet and a security based on the elimination of fear that is based on the absence of the necessities of life. We must challenge ourselves, I suggest, to extend our moral sympathies beyond these proximate circles to those with whom all we share in our common humanity. As Smith put it, our goodwill is circumscribed by no boundary but may embrace the immensity of the universe. The challenge then is to take that goodwill and translate it in contemporary terms into action. Around that period too is the period of that great phrase, man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands more. If we imagine ourselves in the position of those currently fleeing war-torn Syria or trapped in an unending cycle of conflict in the democratic republic of the Congo or future generations condemned to live in toxic and hostile environments, we cannot acquiesce with inaction or deliver an averted gaze. For a long time, the Irish and the Scots found that our own people were forced to seek sustenance abroad. The strength and vitality of our diaspora today can be attributed to the bravery and indomitable spirit that motivated our ancestors to seek not only better lives for themselves and their families but also to recognise the value of community and to appreciate the welcome they received on foreign shores and then to go on and make their own contribution to the common shared welfare of all. Perhaps then, these are the great resources of tradition and values that we have and from them we might be expected to play leading parts and showing the ethical leadership that is so needed at this moment in our history. Ma'r fawch o'r sgir cw'r cwric a caelys i'n meddwl taw'r rhwng as I come to the end, finally. May I say, as a former Member of Parliament, as you have said, for three decades, may I speak directly to you as parliamentarians. I congratulate you on the recent landmark of the fifth election to the Scottish Parliament and I want to wish the new members of this house well. I wish you all, every one of you, success in the next parliamentary sessions which will see additional powers default to Scotland for the many challenges you face. The French philosopher Michel Foucault tells us that three things were key to the functioning of that ancient democracy, that Athenian democracy of which he wrote. Isonomia, which means that all are equal before the law. Isogoria, that all have equal rights to speak. And finally, Parisia, perhaps the most complex of all, usually translated as free speech. I betray my age in quoting these Greek terms. But Foucault understood it as something else, an imperative to speak the truth even especially if you suspect your words may not be well received. Think of Plato's displeasure, for example, at Socrates' question and his method. It is not surprising to me that in this city that I might call the Athens of the North we find such a fierce commitment to equality, to allowing people to use their voices to speak their mind and to having the tough conversations. We Irish and Scots have a reputation for this and we should not shirk from it. We must continue to assert the necessary importance of critical thinking, pluralist scholarship and necessary institutional changes for what we must have the courage to call again emancipatory living. As I have previously said in addresses to the European Parliament and to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Parliament is where the invaluable tradition of deliberative politics is put into practice. In Parliament it is imperative that we engage in robust debate and discussion. We are not afraid to challenge outdated policies, received and often untested wisdoms and inequalities which have ceased to shock us by how widespread and familiar they have become. Parliamentarians cannot abandon the necessity of such discourse, leave a vacuum that will be exploited often by uncohate and more usually bywyr populism and the street. The democratic tradition was most recently exercised on the question of course on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and while these votes were explicit expressions of support for one or other of the two sides there were also affirmations of the important citizens attached to exercising choice within the democratic system. It takes bravery to challenge consensus but it also requires courage to commit to governing cooperatively, collaboratively and with respect. The growth of a temporary incohate populism in Europe and America shows that the values we have strived so hard to put into practice in our democratic systems and the forms of communication the language of respect and action upon which they are relied are not impermeable. So we must respond to demagogary with an informed, open, respectful, tolerant and engaged discourse and with respectful debate we are challenged to do democracy better rather than resile to old and divisive myths based on exclusion and often to what is thinly veiled hate or racism. We must reflect on whether we believe or not in a new expanded form of literacy that expects that simply states that nothing is beyond the capacity for understanding or comprehension of our citizens including economic, social and fiscal matters. But running like a golden thread through political theory and practice at home and abroad is an old enlightenment concept the concept of empathy this is where Scotland has led by example but now our responsibilities are greater than ever we are all of us as parliamentarians as democrats and as citizens for are shocked by the recent death of one of our number Joe Cox who was murdered while carrying out her democratic functions as a representative of the people Joe exemplified the very best of principled public representative politics and we all of us who share her fearless commitment to principled and respectful political debate owe it to her to her memory to work harder than ever at this crucial moment to strengthen our democratic system to make it work and not to surrender to fear or bend before the politics of fear. As you begin your parliamentary term may I wish you all well in your efforts for your constituencies and for all the Scottish people and for all of the people as I said on our fragile planet may I conclude by saying that the welcome on false creel that I have received in Glasgow and now here today in Edinburgh has touched me very deeply and I take it as a mark of the warmth of the relationship between our peoples a relationship that as I have described it and as you know it better has such a rich history but most importantly it has such a promising future maybe two nations as we are often described at the edge of Europe but we are both to borrow MacDiermuth's great line infinite multi-form we share a moral vision and anethical impulse based on empathy that great word and unrelated to any other forms of influence we might yield we can be influential advocates for those who struggle to make their voices heard and stridden by our ancient democratic traditions and now their contemporary expressions our present institutions we can ensure a sustainable and peaceful future for all of our people it has been such a great honour as president of Ireland to have the opportunity to accept an invitation of speaking to you and thank you so much for listening to me, thank you I've got my steez directions entirely wrong there thank you very much president Higgins I think we were incredibly touched by your comments there it's rare that we have someone of such eloquence speaking to well so no offence to my parliamentary colleagues such thoughtful eloquence thank you very much can I call upon the deputy First Minister to respond on behalf of my parliamentary colleagues Deputy First Minister President Higgins the president seems to be most people it's an enormous pleasure President Higgins to welcome you and Mrs Higgins to Scotland and as has been demonstrated by all of my parliamentary colleagues across the political spectrum to express our heartfelt thanks for the most magnificent contribution you have made to the proceedings of our Parliament not just today but since this Parliament was founded 17 years ago a contribution that all of us will never forget for its depth and its thoughtfulness and its reminder to us of the powerful philosophy of moral sympathy given to the world by one of our great sons Adam Smith as a reflection of words and thoughts formulated hundreds of years ago but of greater relevance today than at any other time it could have been crafted President Higgins is a timely opportunity for us to celebrate the deep and enduring relationship between Scotland and Ireland you have made an enormous personal contribution to encouraging these connections you made reference in your own speech to your visit in 2014 to Iona the spiritual heart of Scotland to mark the 1450th anniversary of the arrival of St Colomba a visit that reinforced the common roots of the deep heritage of our two countries it was a beautiful day in Iona but it was a beautiful day of hope and friendship that has left a lasting legacy not just in the islands of Argyll but throughout our country a generation earlier you delivered a seminal address to the 1982 Celtic film and television festival in Glasgow that mapped out an ambitious and creative approach to encourage cultural co-operation in countries the concert in Glasgow on Monday evening that you attended along with the First Minister and with Mrs Higgins celebrated those cultural connections and were a testament to the vision that you encouraged us to imagine over 30 years ago and the encouragement of cultural co-operation has been such a powerful and effective approach in overcoming some of the barriers and obstacles and the divides that have blighted relationships between people and organisations in the past during your current visit you have been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh and I read this morning your magnificent narration address to the graduates of the university yesterday you told these fine people yesterday that Scotland and Ireland are nations who facilitate and value dialogue nations who wield moral authority rather than a sword and we are also nations that believe in the power of education to change the world well these words are particularly timely as we come to terms with the implications of the EU referendum the First Minister is in Europe today to pursue the mandate that she was given by Parliament yesterday to work to protect Scotland's valued and precious relationship with the European Union and its member states in this respect the First Minister appreciated her conversation with the T-shirt yesterday this Parliament also united yesterday to express its solidarity with people from other countries who have chosen to come and to live and to study and to work here in Scotland we as a country are at ease with the free movement of people, why why because we have all had such a long standing experience of people from many countries originally and principally from Ireland coming to make their lives here and to enrich our country as a consequence we value the deep economic ties that bind us together and last night you and I were given a glimpse of those economic ties by the principle of Edinburgh University who informed us both that 15,000 Irish navies took just one week to lay the original tram lines in the city of Edinburgh there are many of us that wish such an approach could have been replicated the second time that we tried say the planning regulations were slightly less restrictive but Ireland is the sixth largest export market for Scotland with an 11% increase in the value of trade between 2013 and 14 we value the trade activity that takes place on food and drink on low carbon, on energy and finance and IT we co-operate on a range of EU transnational programmes that have brought valuable research resources to our two countries and have created much stronger institutional collaboration as a consequence we were delighted as a Government to open a new innovation and investment hub in Dublin which demonstrates the importance the Government places on our relationship I'm proud of the progress the hub is making so far and we welcomed a trade delegation in May led by the British Irish Chambers of Commerce and look forward to a reciprocal mission of Scottish exporters later this year I'm also delighted that we now have an Irish business network in Scotland which was launched earlier this year and which will help to connect our businesses and identify and explore new collaborative opportunities the Scottish Government strongly believes in working together with our neighbours in times like these where there is uncertainty about the UK's relationship in future with Europe our co-operation is more important than ever we are determined to do all that we can to foster a deep relationship with our neighbours inspired us in our purpose as we look forward with enthusiasm to the further flourishing of Scotland's relationship with Ireland thank you President Higgins and Mrs Higgins for your visit to Scotland it has been a wonder to receive you into our country and to start off our parliamentary proceedings of this term with the grace and the eloquence which you've shared with us today can I thank you Mrs Winnie particularly for sparing my blushes and rescuing me from that situation and particularly for expressing our gratitude to you President Higgins thank you very much, I now close this special session of the Scottish Parliament