 If we could just get you, ladies and gentlemen, if any of you have got spaces in your seating, can I ask you to move in, please? We need to get everybody seated quickly to get the official programme under way. As soon as we have everybody seated and we're in business. Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this special event. The Chancellor of the University, Scott St John, will be presiding, and so as Vice-Chancellor, all I need to do is ask if you would please join me in welcoming the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins. Te Rangi koe, te ihi te wehi te tapu koe, te mātāpunonga mea tapu kato i te aau i tapo, ka pikau tanu nei i wanatini manakitanga i tukoe i whora e iekirungi i tena i tena i tena o tātau. Ka tangi ake rā, ki ngā mate kei runga i a koutau, ki ngā mate kei runga i a mātau. Ngā mate kato ae fai wahi nei ki tene huirangatira o tātau, tene ka tangi ake kia koutau, te honga ora, e papi nei ia tātau, te wairua hihiko, tena tātau. Haramai rā e te aho tūarangi, haramai rā e te prihitini, haramai rā e ngā manuhiri, haramai, haramai, haramai whakatau mai, haramai rā kirarui te atarau o ngā moungo o Tāmaki e tūwhaka hihi nei, hae te upoko o te kawana tanga o te whenua motu hake te ripaporika o Airani, haramai, haramai, haramai rā, ko ruatahi ko to hoarangatira e te fai e te maereikora, haramai, e te minister o ngā take ture, haramai, haramai, tako tō ope ko haramai nei, ki e nei motu e horoni, haramai, haramai whakatau nei. Tē nei ko te wharewananga o Tāmaki Makaurau e tūwhaka iitini runga o ngā papataka hango o Ngāti Whātua e whakatau nei, e mihi nei, e krangani ka koutou, haramai, haramai, whakatau mai. Whakatau mai rā i runga te hitoria i wāinga i ngā fenua e rua nei, Newtirini, Aotearoa, te fenua o Airani, te mano mano hunga o te rā fenu i haere mai ki te nohokirongi e nei fenua, tē nei ka whakamahara kaita rā nei. O tātau kara e rua nei, e tū nei, te rā o Newtirini, te rā o te ripaparaka o Airani, tē nei ka mihi. Nere re haramai, haramai whakatau nei. E papiana rā te honore, te koata ki tē nei koutou, nere tē nei koutou, tē nei koutou, tē nei koutou katoa. Yr sel sealed mister presiden, yr sel sealed misters Higgins, minister Flanagan in your delegation, the university welcomes you on behalf o te mano fenua, te roi uch haes customary dominion ovitamikimakura, the city of Auckland, Ngāti-Fātua. We welcome you to the city, with the largest Pacific population in the world. We welcome you to New Zealand's most diverse city, and we welcome you to New Zealand's largest and most diverse university. We welcome you on the spirit of the shared history between our two great nations. The Republic of Ireland has deep roots in the historical garden of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and we celebrate those today. We welcome you remembering the interactions between the Māori people and Irish settlers in New Zealand's colonial history. Some of those interactions blossomed into unions and marriages. Some of them evolved into less formal unions, but in spite of that, many thousands of Māori, many generations later, are proud to claim Irish heritage. When we think of such characters present in the time of our colonial history, names such as that of Hake Maaman, Jack Maaman, Cannibal Jack, the tattooed Irishman who was befriended by the Ngāpuhi people come to mind, Judge Frederick Manning of the Hokianga who married a northern Māori woman, and Father James McDonald, the famous Catholic missionary who converted many Māori in the early 1800s to the Catholic faith. Many of us are proud to be of both Māori and Irish heritage. I am one, and as the saying goes among my family, one side is very fond of a little tipple, the other side doesn't know when to stop. For the last 30 years, Māori and Irish linguists and scholars have collaborated to share strategies for the resurrection and renaissance of our two indigenous languages. When President Emman de Valera visited here in 1948, he attracted crowds of thousands of interested New Zealanders of Irish descent. When Mary Robinson visited, she planted a tree in commemoration of Kate Shepard in 1993 in the year of New Zealand suffrage, and when Patrick Hillary visited in the 1980s, he paid a visit to the late Māori Queen Te Atairangikahu at her palace at Turangawaewae Marae. With our fondness for culture, music, sport, the very high value we place on diversity and equality, it is no wonder that when New Zealanders think to Ireland, they think of her as a friend and as a relative. They think of her with much affection and with much joy. Therefore, our dear friends, your excellencies, President Higgins, Mrs Higgins, Minister Flanagan, may you experience much joy while you are here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and we welcome you with warm and loving hearts. Your Excellency, President Higgins, in your lifetime you have received many awards, the Order of the Clans of Ireland being one. Our cheeky Australian relatives took the opportunity to bestow on you an honorary doctorate in Perth. Following your address to us, Mr Jim Peters, the Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori, will present to you the Taunga Paonangu, the symbolically carved greenstone pendants which will link you to this earth we hope for eternity, symbolic of the Ituna relationship which our two nations enjoy. May you and your delegation experience much peace, grace and joy in a country that knows you. You've come here to forge stronger diplomatic relationships between our two countries, so in that spirit we welcome you warmly. Noreireta Rangatira hāramai, e te Māreikura hāramai, e te minister hāramai, e ngā Rangatira hāramai tahi, me te tō tātou Rangatira hāramai tā whakatau mai, e te Matua, e Stuart, e te Tumuaki, e te Matua, e Jim hūri tō tātou whare, Irish Cousins Ma, tēnā tātou, tēnā tātou, kia hāramai tātou katoa. To New Zealand, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, and his wife, Sabina Higgins. There are an estimated 13,000 Irish citizens living in New Zealand, and it is wonderful to see so many of you here today, joining our students, staff and supporters on this important occasion. It is most appropriate that we are today gathered on the University campus. As a former lecturer in political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and in the United States, President Higgins has displayed a lifelong commitment to the support of education and the arts. Michael D. Higgins is also a writer and a poet, contributing to many books covering diverse aspects of Irish politics, sociology, history and culture. He has published two collections of essays, Causes for Concern Irish Politics, Culture and Society, and Renewing the Republic. He has also published four collections of poetry, The Betrayal, The Season of Fire, and New and Selected Poems. A passionate political voice and statesman, human rights advocate, promoter of inclusive citizenship and champion of creativity within Irish society, Michael D. Higgins has previously served at many levels of public life in Ireland, including as Ireland's First Minister of Arts, Culture and the Gueltocht. I've been working on that, and Mrs Higgins, thank you for your assistance with that matter. Throughout his life, Michael D. Higgins has campaigned for human rights and for the promotion of peace and democracy in Ireland and in many other parts of the world, from Nicaragua to Chile to Cambodia, Iraq and Somalia. In 1992, he was the first recipient of the Sean McBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau in Helsinki in recognition of his work for peace and justice in many parts of the world. And on 11 November 2011, he was inaugurated as the 9th President of Ireland. We're honoured today to have President Higgins visiting the University of Auckland and delivering an address to our students, staff, supporters and members of the wider public. Having read a number of your speeches, as I mentioned a little earlier, I'm thrilled to hear that today you'll be addressing the topic Ireland and New Zealand. Some origins and prospects of two nations who share so many experiences and interests, which is so true. Ladies and gentlemen, please join with me in welcoming the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to deliver his address. Mae hans Centrel er leis hans Centrel er gwella chagumorarum ond mei dygurtu, aguson chiangawala luatu, idon mwintana herin, is mwintan nua helin, is gwemgagra agus panakta da winter, idson ato imis, idson ato le giecti, is berbanat. Mae, I say, Vice Chancellor, thank you for your kind introduction this evening, and I just have said in my own language, I represent it for a great number of years the largest number of those who spoke the Irish language as their first language in Gówe West, God you hear, and in the Arn islands. And indeed I do recall very clearly what my predecessor, Emma de Valera, said when he came here, and today I have to tell you our work continues in promoting the use of the Irish language, which is used in the home of the President almost every day. I do thank you for the warmth and depth of the invitation and welcome to the land of which your people were the first settlers and which the people, the first arrivals, the people, they are land both in terms of the spiritual significance of it, and both in terms also of the way in which you are negotiating the present and the future in full consciousness of the rich traditions that New Zealand has the great advantage of sharing. It is an honour to address this August institution and to see so many in university students and staff, and particularly to university which has contributed so much and is continuing to contribute so much to the social culture and intellectual life of New Zealand. And by the way, before I say anything else, my publisher would want to say my last book last year when ideas matter, is in your bookshops. As a former university teacher, I did indeed teach sociology and political science. It is a very great pleasure at any time to return to university. Universities are enormously important as communities of ideas and communities of scholarship, and it's a very particular pleasure to have been asked to address a university from which one of the great literary movements of New Zealand emerged. It had as its image an image that many literary revivals and renaissance movements shared. Indeed, it's an image that sits on top of a monument outside the gate of Aura Sinuk on the home of the president of Ireland. I refer to the publication of that short-lived but seminal literary journal, Phoenix, in whose pages were first published the words of Alan Cornyn, Rex Fairburn, Ronald Mason and Charles Brash, among others, and they used words that were both ambitious and inclusive and words that must surely ring from the difficult 1930s through to the decades of today. They wrote as manifesto for their journal, we are hungry for the words that shall allow us these islands and ourselves, that will show us and that shall give us a home in thought, a home in thought. I recall reflecting on these powerful words, their demand as they are for a public culture and a space for culture as I prepared for my very first visit to New Zealand in 1999. We are hungry for the words that shall show us these islands and ourselves, that shall give us a home in thought. They were very relevant then because as a former Minister for Arts, Culture and the Geltog in Ireland and President of the Council of Culture Ministers of the European Union in 1996, during the Irish Presidency of the European Union, I had been very engaged in matters of cultural policy and I had been invited to address a symposium organised by the Broadcasting Commission and the Institute of Public Policy Studies in Wellington to speak on the importance of creativity, croyoc, as we say in Irish, and in particular the future of public service broadcasting. On that occasion, I spoke based on my experience as an island of the crucial importance and the potential of public broadcasting as an invitation to the citizen to experience the timeless, the universal, the unimagined. Remember, Lord, Rheets-Fray's a nation talking to itself and as so does providing a rich source of creativity beginning to be abused as a term at the time. I spoke too of the dangers of what was then emerging and indeed strittening as a perspective which saw broadcasting as something lesser, as merely a production space for a commodified and homogenised entertainment. I reminded my audience on that occasion of the title of Raymond Williams' last great public lecture, Be the Arrow, Not the Target, with its powerful advocacy for active participatory culture as an alternative to the passive consumption of homogenised product, the outcome often of monopolised production and indeed distorted distribution practices. So it is a privilege for me to return to this great country now, Maru Throni, here in his president of Ireland, and I am grateful for the invitation to address you this afternoon. I was fascinated to learn of the early influence of Irish migrants as we have just heard. The influence of Irish migrants indeed on the development of this university itself. Its establishment in 1882 owed much to the efforts of George Morris O'Rourke, the son of an Irish Anglican parson from County Galway, who would go on to become Speaker of the House of Representatives and Chairman of the Council of this university. As is the case with many of the Antipodian universities, migrant Irish scholars exerted a significant intellectual influence in those early years. If I were as a former teacher of sociology to single out one, it would be Hutchison Macaulay Parsonet, author of what is considered by many as one of the foundational texts in the sociology of literature. He was like many Irish lawyers of his generation, schooled in the comparative jurisprudence of Henry Main, a method which extended to the study of literature and political economy. His first work, The Historical Method in Ethics, Jurisprudence and Political Economy, encompassed a critique of the classical political economy of his day, a matter which remains of enduring interest to me. Indeed, I suggest to you, students and to tell it, to ask the question, where in what journal today would you find all those terms sitting in the same title, The Historical Method in Ethics, Jurisprudence and Political Economy. The influence of Irish scholars and politicians, of course, is but one small strand of a long and enduring connection between New Zealand and Ireland. In the decade prior and immediately following the Treaty of Waitangi, many of the Irish who came to these shores were migrants, sometimes escaped or time-expired convicts from the peal and colonies across the Tasman, seeking to make, and often very often in this city, a new life in the rough and tumble trades of wailing, sealing and timber cutting. It was from such a milieu, for example, that the Sydney-born Irish father of the Maori politician and government minister, James Carroll, emerged. Others were colonial administrators and soldiers who came to serve here during the New Zealand wars. The best known, perhaps, of the Irish administrators may be William Hobson, the naval commander from County Waterford and first governor of New Zealand who gave this city its name and drafted the Treaty of Waitangi. In those early years, the pattern of Irish settlement was concentrated here on the North Island rather than the South Island, which was then developing according to the template of that champion of what was called systemic colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. For despite the involvement of John Robert Gottlie and James Edward Fitzgerald, both Anglo-Irish colonial enthusiasts, the enterprise of the New Zealand company had very few places for Irish migrants or Irish colonial intellectuals. It was the Otago Gold Rush of 1861 that brought the first large influx of Irish migrants, miners, who had first sought their fortune in Ballarat and Bendigo, where alluvial deposits were now exhausted. And 49ers, too, came from across the Pacific Ocean, where gold fever had slowly given way to the imposition of the rule of law by the new state of California. I recall as a sociologist teaching the rights of Josiah Strong about the discord which they addressed. God created man in a garden. The city is the result of the fall. The impact of such a wave is clearly visible when one compares the census returns. In 1861, on the cusp of discoveries at the Tuapika and Waipori Fields, the Irish-born population numbered 8,831. Just three years later, there were 20,317 Irish-born living in New Zealand. The Irish population in New Zealand had doubled. It would be inappropriate for me also to ignore a fundamental fact for that year. That is the year when there is a devastating loss in the Maori population. And it is then the great gap between settlers and Maori begins to emerge in its darkest form. As Angela McCarty, Jock Phillips and Terry Herrin have shown in their research, new arrivals from Ireland followed through what scanners of migration have referred to as a process of chain migration. That is one person following another from families and from friendship networks. As Irish people in New Zealand persuaded and through nomination schemes established by the provinces of the Young Colony secured the subsidised passage of their friends and family members. This process accelerated rapidly in the 1870s under the influence of the ambitious assisted passage scheme championed by Jules Vogel. It is at this stage as well there is a specific request for 1,300 females to head to this city here. This vast project of the early entrepreneurial state dramatically expanded the possibility for nomination and extended the potential of direct recruitment of new colonists from Ireland, which had hitherto been an unexplored possibility. In some provinces still beholden to the legacies of colonial companies such as the Canterbury Association. Indeed it was George Morris O'Rourke who as Minister for Immigration ensured an increase in the number of recruiting agencies dispatched to Ireland. The Irish born population then peaked at 51,406 on the cusp of the long depression in 1886. It would slowly decline thereafter as those with Irish ancestors gradually integrated in what would become Pachahoe society. The new Irish arrivals of the 1860s and 70s were predominantly small farmers and rural labourers, men and women who had grown up in an agrarian society as the historian Donald Atkinson has noted. They also, for example, shifted the concentration of the Irish presence to the South Island, to Canterbury where Irish men fulfilled the same role as they would in the United States, Irish navies, building the roads, bridges and railways of the rapidly expanding province and where Irish women were often engaged as domestic servants. On the west coast, towns like Hockateaker, a booming Goldrush town, developed for a time a distinctive Irish identity which indeed pubs and taverns named after familiar Irish heroes and patriots. The Irish arrivals participated too along with other migrants who came to this land in the creation of what really was a laboratory of social experiment for which the new democracy of New Zealand would become noted. If there was a distinctive Irish contribution to a country famed for its progressive legislation, it was perhaps, I suggest, a certain sense of recoil, a recoil from and an ambition to transcend what was perceived by them to be an oppressive colonial mindset inappropriate for the new setting in which they found themselves. This was deeply understandable given the Irish experience of the effects of oppression and injustice and exclusion, exclusion from all opportunities that were foreclosed by cultural assumptions among other measures as to their cultural assumptions as to their inferiority, exclusion on religious grounds and an unjust political economy. There were, however, perhaps moved too by an impulse to imagine a new world that could be created with freer institutional possibilities in the southern oceans. In the imperial world of the 19th century, this was demonstrated by an unusual parallel and indeed maybe it is a contradiction as the matter of land reform and land redistribution in New Zealand became inextricably linked in the eyes of the colonists with the importance of learning from the failures of landlordism in Ireland. 8,000 main landlords with several agents in between governing a huge state of poverty in which a million people would die while food was being exported and two million forced into exile. A people really submitted to the dictates of hegemonic economic theory which was actually being debated, sometimes referred to indeed as an act of God. Indeed one distinguished economist who was the founder of one of the Australian universities suggested that the Irish people were dying because they didn't understand economics. In 1881, Robert Stouche, a Scottish immigrant born on the Shetland Islands and a future premier published an interesting pamphlet, the Irish question and its lessons for colonists. Advocating the use of the then novel Land Tax as a mechanism to provide land to the small proprietor and prevent New Zealand from becoming an anthropodian replica of the Irish social structure. As I have said, a country of great land at estates, numerous toiling tenant farmers and an expanding grinding poverty that would have devastating consequences. In the same year, 1881, John Balans, the eldest son of an Irish tenant farmer and future premier, attended a mass meeting in Wellington in support of the Irish National Land League which had been established in Ireland three years earlier in County Mayo, 1979. In the words of its founding resolutions, it was aimed at the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers. When the leader of the Irish National Land League, Michael Davitt, some years later toured New Zealand in 1896, he found here a reflection of what he felt were the most advanced ideas of his age, many of which he had advocated in Ireland, a progressive land tax, land redistribution, a determination to ensure that older people were ensured in income and old age, a faith in the pursuit of the public good, and a combination of a definition of welfare that would include those who worked on the land and those who worked in the cities in the factories. He was, in fact, advocating legislation to ensure that Labour, for example, secured a fairer share of the proceeds of growth. And he saw in this a recognition and vindication of a public world that he saw as possible, uniting the efforts, as I have said, of land and Labour. He attributed these policies he saw as successful to the influence of balance and his leftan and John McKenzie, who, of course, had witnessed island clearances as a young boy. And this is how Davitt wrote, an Irish Premier of New Zealand, aided chiefly by a Celtic Highlander, both of whom knew something of Irish and Scottish landlordism instrumental a few years ago in moulding the present land laws of the colony on the broad, just and rational principle of the land of a country for the people of the country and not for any class. We are reminded, by such words, that it was impossible to ignore the role that the clearances, the enclosures, had in creating the huge numbers of vagrants whose crimes would be used to fill the colonies with those transported in humiliating and degrading conditions. And as to dispossession in the country he was visiting, Michael Davitt would also write of the Māori land leakers and of Te Fiti and of how they, as he put it, were beaten by overwhelming forces, but the principle underlying their brave struggle was not crushed. If Ireland demonstrated to New Zealanders then an imposed destiny that was to be averted for Irish observers such as Davitt, New Zealand in its turn showed, by its willingness to experiment, to engage in quite new forms of thought and action and to challenge and overturn the failing orthodoxies of the old world and it was thus indicating that he thought an alternative pathway to the future. And indeed, according to the parity of esteem, going beyond simply recognising differences of culture, doing that, going that extra mile, that is a real achievement to be celebrated in the contemporary political space. Such values and impulses are surely needed too, now more than ever, for we need a global, national and international level, a morally informed sense of the importance of human dignity. A scholarship that is able to absorb the impulses of the human street and the human spirit that is able to craft alternative theoretical and policy models that can integrate a moral intent in ethics, ecology and economics. Good scholarship is inclusive scholarship and I suggest that we need to reframe, for example, economics as political economy in such a fashion as will generate responsibility, as will allow transparent participatory policy formation and give us the capacity to reconnect with our publics and their best ethical intent. There is much that we in Ireland can continue to learn from New Zealand like David and perhaps much we may learn anew and rediscover together as we face the great challenges of coming decades from which neither of us must shirk our responsibilities, the urgency for just and sustainable development, the necessity to address the causes and consequences of climate change, the prevention and resolution of conflicts, both ancient and new, the imperative to welcome those fleeing war, persecution and famine, the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons and the growing inequalities in wealth, income and opportunity and their contemporary threat to social cohesion in so many parts of the world. For citizens of Ireland and citizens of New Zealand, given our shared characteristics and what I suggest are our shared values, I believe there is so much we can continue to achieve together. We are both small countries in terms of population, population countries who value our democratic traditions and who seek to be authentic in our commitment to international institutions, a commitment expressed best perhaps by our shared abhorrence of the threat posed by nuclear weapons. It was the Irish representative at the General Assembly of the United Nations who first proposed in 1959 a resolution that would lead to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which has been from 1968 up to this year the primary international legal instrument designed to prevent the dissemination of nuclear weapons and to achieve their disarmament. The virtues required for this achievement were certainly tact, tenacity and a quiet and stubborn persistence. And as we look forward, what a great gift to humanity and to present and future generations it would be, if as was originally committed, a reduction in nuclear missiles and their eventual elimination was achieved for humanity. New Zealanders can be proud too of those virtues I have mentioned as they recall a steadfast and courageous of a kind that were required to refuse the presence of the USS Buchanan and secure New Zealand status as a nuclear-free nation, namely courage, bravery, and in the face of the oblique and sometimes open hostility of the two nuclear-armed states of the day. Fortitude was needed and it was shown. And fortitude is surely the word that comes to mind when one thinks and recalls the shocking bombing in July 1985 of the Rainbow Warrior, not far from here in Auckland Harbour. I think that many small nations in the face of such intimidation might have sought some kind of discreet compromise. It is rare in international relations to find what was an inspiring display of moral clarity. In June of this year, our two countries in cooperation again with many others co-sponsored the General Assembly resolution mandating the Convention of a New United Nations Conference to negotiate a new treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. This treaty adopted in June and opened for formal signature last month prohibits the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. It represents the most widespread acceptance of the total threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. Some have decried this recent treaty, signed by so many members of the United Nations as being without merit, I quote. They have suggested that it lacks force because it does not carry the approval of those who insist on continuing to possess nuclear weapons. Now, let us be very clear what these critics are suggesting. It is no more and no less than claiming a right, the right to hold what is a veto for the existing nuclear arms states on policymaking in this area. Such a view simply echoes what is already an abuse of veto holding permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations. Our mutual faith and trust in multilateral institutions, Ireland and New Zealand and the cooperation between nation states finds expression in our longstanding commitment as well to the contribution of personnel to United Nations peacekeeping activities. Indeed, may I suggest that the principles that have underpinned peacekeeping for six decades, the requirement for consent of the main parties to the conflict, to implement the United Nations mandate without fear or favour and the non-use of force, acceptance, self-defence and defence of the mandate are more apposite to the sensibility of smaller nations such as ours. And then as to some current challenges, many of which we share and will share, our two island nations have been endowed by nature with a temperate climate, enabling a kind of past agriculture that is to some degree a product of past dependency, reflecting our history as suppliers of primary products in our case to Britain. The entry of Britain and Ireland into the European economic community with its common agriculture policy was a significant change for both of us but with different consequences. The structure and success of our agricultural industries brings with it, of course, a unique challenge for both our countries in the battle against climate change. Agriculture accounts for nearly a third of Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions and I understand somewhat more here in New Zealand, which makes both of us outliers when compared to the other industrialised countries who participated in the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We have both adopted emissions trading schemes as a policy measure to reduce fossil fuel emissions. These schemes exclude the emissions generated by pastoral farming, which, due to our unique emissions profile, will require distinctive novel and sometimes difficult policy measures to be directed to dairy and beef farming even as the temptation is now to increase our national herds to meet rising wild demand. We should not and must not underestimate the depth or nature of this task. The recalibration of our agricultural industry to meet obligations we have accepted by international treaty is an obligation we must and which I believe we can meet. We can enlist the benefits of science and technology but it will also require being resolute in the tough decisions we may need to take and for which we must educate our publics. The agreement signed at the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015 is an enormous achievement representing an important moral milestone as imperfect as it may be in recognising the demands of climate justice and what is the imperative for survival for so many people in this century, particularly in the developing world. The decarbonisation of our societies demanded by the pledge to pursue efforts to limit the global temperature increased to one and a half degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels will not be easy nor can it be made without sacrifice. It will require the provision of all members of our society engaged in the production, distribution, consumption and exchange of agricultural products to ensure that our countries can contribute to the effort truly required under the Paris Climate Accord. Yes, it will require new ideas, skills and methods, the opening of new frontiers of science into technology, a renewed commitment to the exchange of technical expertise and may I suggest the recollection too of much of the wisdom of ancient methods, balances and symmetries of ecological management of ancient societies. The agreement of the Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September of 2015 constitutes what is the potential to be as important in achievement as the Paris Climate Accord. Over 193 states resolved to in poverty and hunger, combat inequalities and economic incumbent opportunity to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies and to create conditions for a shared prosperity. We have used this language before but as we face 2050 we're 24% of the young people under 21 years of age that will be on the continent of Africa, 40% of the young people under 21, 24% of the total population of the planet. Can we face what is really a great opportunity with our existing models of economic development? The answer of course is no and therefore we should consider in universities like this as I have said in other universities how we can enable the benefits and consequences of science and technology to leap over borders, not wait if you like to be the tail end of investment from existing structures internationally, locate themselves in the continent of expanding population and create new possibilities. We must not, I believe, be dislodged or dissuaded from these objectives that I have mentioned. No matter how powerful that seek to eshu the global common good in the service of narrow sectional interests, there will always be those who will make the case for what they regard as the tyranny of the contemporary sectional interests that will defeat if you like the longer term common goals. Tomorrow I will have the great honour too of visit to the Waiatangi Treaty grounds and I could not help but be put in mind of our own treaty to the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland. The cornerstone of a peace process for which demands our continual attention in Northern Ireland. In both cases, it is when we see these treaties as living treaties, as processes towards the achievement of a shared dignity of recognised differences and belief in the possibilities of the future that we can in fact see what they can deliver most for us. The suggestion that indivisibility may not be the sole defining characteristic of sovereignty imagined by Thomas Hobbes and Jean Boudin, but that sovereignty may be instead a matter of perpetual renegotiation and debate. Something shared, carried out in a democratic, respectful and inclusive spirit is both profound and liberating, especially when it is imagined in practice. I've spoken in other places of the necessary caustices of discourse, the complex and intricate relationships between peoples embodied in these respective agreements that I've mentioned. They require a constant commitment to ensure that they remain living documents capable of achieving the full promise of their possibilities. Both our nations are small open economies, highly open to wild markets, yet also because of that very openness vulnerable to changes in international commodity prices, the structure of global value chains, and the sudden shifts in shocks to capital and financial flows. The forms of both capital and the nature of their flows have changed radically in the recent decades of deregulation. They have created what I suggest is a dystopia. I also have found in recent years been speaking on the issues of indigenere, and nowhere have I seen a more blatant disregard for international law than on the part of certain corporations who have sake to indigenous communities defending themselves against the poison in their waters. We will fight this case until hell freezes over and then on the ice. I have seen in fact where in countries like Ecuador, peasant communities have been faced with aname of lawyers themselves remember products of universities who have in fact said that they will follow such a set of practices, deficient that this is what I mean by what I have said earlier by restoring a moral context to these subjects which some of us have had the privilege of teaching. The economic forces are referred to are not natural phenomena and neither are they inevitabilities. They are the product of negotiated institutional design and public policy. And concerted action by states acting in cooperation with each other can, as they have in the past, constrain, control and bind such forces in the service of the common good. But it requires regulation. It is in the capital flows that are outside regulation that are not and never were available for productive use, that the greatest uncertainties in global conditions for economies large and small are so. As we have learned in Ireland where our productive economy stayed strong in 2007 to 12, but the speculative consequences were had to be visited on our people. The economics of the future, it will, I believe, inevitably deal with the challenges of building and securing social cohesion. More equal societies, as one study after another shows, in every part of the world, more equal societies are healthier societies. Societies with deep inequalities are neither viable in terms of a stable, cohesive citizenship nor are they healthy societies. Wild capital can yield short-term benefits for the few but be destructive for the many. And the forms of capital which prevail within an economy, they're not the same as each other in terms of their consequences, in any part of the globe. We need then to privilege productive capital flows that lead to investment strategies that are socially accountable, job-creatic, sustainable. And this requires allowing economies and the societies which they serve to level up. And may I repeat, we must reject the suggestion that there is anything inevitable about the practices of any dominating hegemon in terms of international trade. This has been manifested most recently in the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to which New Zealand has already subscribed and of which Ireland is now a member. If these measures have to be at their best, such institutions must channel flows of capital that will enhance the long-run economic growth potential of developing countries and finance sustainable and sustained development. And yet in this, the 10th year since the global financial crisis, the broader international financial architecture has yielded only most painfully and gradually to change. We should question whether the institutions charged with regulating global flows of capital and finance have sufficient resources, the appropriate capacity, and most importantly, the agreed mandate that is necessary to achieve the economic and social objectives to which we are committed. There have been small revelatory but welcome changes in the advice as offered by the International Monetary Fund on measures of fiscal policy and the control of movements of capital and the report of the Commission on Global Poverty established by the World Bank, which recommended broadening the concept of poverty to include non-monetary measures of deprivation, all welcome. But we must ask as many in the global street are ever more vociferously are now asking and most painfully experiencing as to whether some of the ideas which led to the global financial crisis still underpin global policy. Those who still believe that private financial markets will allocate resources to their best most efficient use and must be allowed to do so without regulation, they have not gone away. And those that serve them are back on bonuses and the universities that are producing the rationalisation for such bonuses are still in business. I think taking into account the necessity for sustainable and just development, me were well asked on behalf of whos and which interests do they speak and act these international institutions. May I suggest that the great matters before us in the coming decade cannot be met with the ideas or assumptions of what are now failing. Failed paradigms of a less than democratic, often authoritarian, frequently patriarchal past. Our new challenges in new circumstances must be addressed drawing on the best of the new morally engaged scholarship that values social cohesion. And this is something we must pursue collectively at a global level with the same vigor and spirit with which our two countries have addressed the threat of a nuclear armageddon. Can we in these difficult times, I ask, summon again the same openness and admiration for new ideas and willingness to break with old orthodoxies that Michael Davitt noted here in this country a century ago. Can we bring the same determination to share, to debate, to contest and to constantly renegotiate sovereignty in a democratic manner shown by the peoples of Ireland and New Zealand have shown in these recent years? Can we bring the same moral clarity and ethical vision, the same courage and fortitude, the same willingness to confront unaccountable power that has been shown by the peoples of this country in declaring and enforcing a nuclear free zone? Can we bring this freshness of thought to matters as economic internationally? I ask this question of both of our peoples. How we answer such questions will determine whether we can confront and overcome the challenges of a new century. It is essential in all of this that we retain our optimism, the necessary courtesies of ethical discourse, I suggest, our will, but a good beginning might be to combine our efforts in achieving for our peoples what is little less than a new literacy on economic and fiscal matter. And all of this brings me back to that first paper in New Zealand in 1999 which was to a conference debating how we might, by defending public service broadcasting, secure and deepen the public world. That struggle continues in new conditions. And I suggest that we must not merely hope. We must imagine. We must change. And we must achieve. Thank you so much for listening. Ladies and gentlemen, President Higgins has kindly consented to take some questions from the floor. So I believe there are some microphones. Yes, in fact, I can see them now out there in the audience. So if you have a question, if you could raise your hand and we will do our best to find you. Sir. Yes, President Higgins. Yes, thank you, President Higgins. In 1923, when the Irish Free State had been formed, they introduced Gaelic as a compulsory subject in schools. I'd be interested if that turned out to be a help or a hindrance to the Gaelic language. You'll understand I'm a Maori language student, although far from fluid. It's a very good question. And I think that what you need to think about, in Irish, we call it Gaelic agentuk, compulsory Irish. And the debate about compulsory Irish is a very important one. Just to give you context, I think that the cultural revival movement of the late 19th century is very, very important in understanding the formation of the new Irish state. It's a moment of intense cultural activity with men and women writing, publishing pamphlets, exchanging essays, producing works. This is the Irish revival, roughly from about 1890 to 1910, as it's intense period. Why was it said there is a very famous essay by the first president of Ireland, Douglas De Hether, on replacing English with Irish? You have to understand what lay behind Creven-Even, Douglas De Hether's essay. English had been imposed on Ireland in a number of ways. At one time, you wore a stick around your neck and you put a notch in it every time you used an Irish word. And when you went to school the following day, you were punished on the basis of the number of marks on the stick. And then again, I remember as well, even in my time when I was in active politics, people referred to the Irish language, people referred to English as what you needed for the bush or chiankatata chastat on board, what you needed for the bush because our people were had to learn English to go abroad because of the migrants. So that's the background point people said, then we will restore every... In many ways, it created a mythology that suited an old... They're drawn from ancient times and that you could in fact put it into place and so on. I think myself that it was a mistake. I think that the essay might have been, I understand how it came to be written, but I don't agree with it. For the very reason, Haidamself, for example, spoke five languages, including he was very influenced by Hebrew and how it had been brought back. But he also spoke, his wife was German, he spoke at least five that I know of. So then what happened then, I think, was very interesting. At one stage, another of my predecessors, I think it's in Eamon de Valera's time as Prime Minister, as Tishok, we would say, a number of all the state servants changed their names into Irish. And if that was going to revive the subject. And I actually wrote a poem about that one time, called Revivalous, which I couldn't publish when I was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaelter. But you then move on and where are we now? Our issue now is not basic knowledge because it is taught in all the primary schools, which I think is very good. You also have some schools at second level, which are all Irish, they teach all the subjects through Irish. I myself would have learned Latin and Greek, for example, through Irish and all of the subjects at different stages. And then I'm not a native speaker, but when I was in England, there was a gap in my use of Irish when I was in America at the same. But I represented my constituents, which are about 30% at one stage, Irish was their first language every day. And I was speaking around in a gait at the morning at eight o'clock. And also I'm the Minister-Responsor for the establishment of the Irish Television Service, tijika harnawadu, i'r rai telefisi na Gaelter. All of this, what I'm really saying is, I'm in favour of maragot me, I've said in Irish first because it's easier for me, maragot me, kind of ondini a vala dhan changa, encouraging people, bringing people to the language rather than forcing it. And let us say the language, the television service that I established between 1993 and 1997, which is now going strong. The reason was I said to Toghanshan, give the language a second chance because they had been taught in a rather authoritarian way in some occasions, and people had a bad experience. So therefore I would say, give it another chance. So you would see everything in Irish, you see the subjects in English and so forth. And in many ways, if you're asking me, it's a long answer, I've given you a question which was washed, I think, for it to answer you properly. And that is, if you said to me, you must encourage and lure people to the language, make the language attractive. The language also needn't stand for every antiquated authoritarian idea that was ever dreamed up and imagined. The ancient Irish were people, for example, who in relation to, if you were unhappy in your marriage, you walked several times around your partner and you said, I'm off. So at the point about it is that the language has never, unfortunately at different times, I do remember people foisted onto the language, attitudes that really had nothing to do with the essential Irish spirit. It is a language of life and thankfully it's been spoken more and more and more by young people. And I am really pleased to see the significance that is given to the Māori culture and to the fact that there is welcome in the public space. It's in the public space it must be recognised and that's good. So as Minister you used to have the culture portfolio and you know nowadays we see the kind of development of a transnational or regional identity such as the European identity. How do you see as the kind of European identity? How does that interplay with, say, the Irish or other national identities in your view? I think again another wonderful question in a way because this is what I mean by the European street. Noted that I quoted Raymond Williams' article Be the Arrow Not the Target. That is for participatory active culture rather than being a passive consumer of homogenised product. I remember the French president, Meet Home once said that some of the finest films in the world were made in the United States but it was unreasonable to suggest that all films of the world that would be seen by Europeans would come from a small corner of the west coast of the United States. And I myself as culture minister had this debate with Jack Valenti and others and I used to remind him, for example, of the new wonderful black film directors in Harlem and places like that which because he represented west coast filmmaking. Heterogeneity is an essential part. That is, what would a European culture be like? It would be informed by some basic ideas in relation to democracy, in relation to discourse. I think very often what I think should have happened. Remember now about the European Union in a way? It didn't deal with culture and the founding treaties. First of all, it had a bad experience with the abuse of culture as an ocean through fascism. It also assumed that the Council of Europe would deal with culture. And then a number of times as it came up when I myself was attending council meetings, people thought the culture was something you should keep close to education at home. So therefore it was an ideal matter for subsidiarity. What I think people need to do when it would have been, it would have been, what is very, very wonderful would be the idea that there are core values in relation to equality, rights, participation, gender equality, respect for the environment. We in Ireland gained from our membership of the European Union in relation to equality of men and women in relation to the environment, in relation to fair wages, all of this. But the values got lost in a way because I think the Lisbon Treaty, when you look at the history of the treaties, remember it had two great principles, the competitiveness and cohesion. Cohesion got lost along the way in my view. And thus I think that at the time of the crisis recently, it was something very un-European to hear some nations speaking of other nations with language that was simply not the language of a union. I had discussed this with the President officially. I've discussed it with heads of state in other countries in Europe. And we are all of the same mind that the language wasn't generous. And therefore I think as well, it is called spade spade. If you're talking about a union, you're talking about all of the members sharing the possibilities going forward together. You're not talking about a hegemon. And you're not talking about a hegemon and chief acolyte. You're talking about all of the countries of the European Union with shared values moving forward together. And what people in South America, Asia, elsewhere, when they look at the European Union and they're very positive, they want a region that could be exemplary in relation to rights, decent work, eliminating poverty, participating internationally in the best interests if you like of global security and that. Really the idea that you somehow or another patch together a union as a kind of a complement to a set of fiscal arrangements isn't really sufficient to restore confidence. And I think that the conversation with the European Streets is the thing that has to be restored. You cannot abandon those who didn't participate in growth, those who didn't participate in income, and those who are unemployed, and particularly the young unemployed in so many of the states, and abandon them to a discourse that is anophobic, potentially racist, and so on. That's why in my speeches I've been mentioning about in the same way as literacy was important to parliamentarism across Europe, the new fiscal and economic literacy, making this realm a countable and participatory by publics is where you will in fact parliament. I've spoken to the European Parliament, to the Parliamentary Assembly, the Council of Europe, and I said to them, if you allow these decisions to be leached out of parliament and out of the parliamentary discourse onto the spaces where they will be abused, there will be a terrible price to be paid for it. And I totally agree with you when people of your age enter the rest of it, is you can make... The Europe can be met... Europe can in fact actually be that region, but so also can the other regions around the world in ways. But culture in the end, it's not a matter of... It's... I think if you asked us, those of us small countries like us, I make many invitations to people to examine what I call the ethics of memory and fall in polarity and Hannah Arendt and others like that. The hardest journey many people have is in relation to impart examining its conscience and tendencies to domination being made critical and people examining the consequences. Do we need hegemons or do we need a peaceful world? And how much will have to be given away at the level of ideas and so on? Sometimes I actually think, I was thinking the other day when I often have referred to gaited communities. What would it be like if our world and the great cities, like our descended, into a scene where you had gaited communities of the rich and the people out on the street perceived as those who want what we have and won't give to them? And in the same way, you could get gaited conversations. In the international diplomacy very often, we're getting gaited conversations. That is, there are certain things which can't be raised with those who are perceived to be powerful. And that, in a way, is something that will have to change. That is what will give energy once again to the United Nations and its agencies. That we have time for today. But before they depart, the University of Auckland would like to present a gift of Toanga Ponamu to President Higgins and Mrs Sabina Higgins. It's a tricky business, this, ladies and gentlemen. I just to give you a little bit of background on what just occurred. The toki is a symbol of chiefly dignity and mana authority. The toki were worn by Māori elders as a symbol of power and wisdom. The toki was a chisel tool used by the Māori people of Aotearoa, New Zealand, to carve the great canoes and carve detailing on their meeting houses. The koru is a spiral shape based on the shape of a new unfurling silver fern frond, symbolising new life, growth, strength and peace. It is an integral symbol in Māori art, carving and tattoos. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could ask you to just remain seated while the official party leaves the theatre, please join me in thanking the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins and Mrs Sabina Higgins.