President Michael D Higgins has expressed alarm at escalating developments in the Middle East and Ukraine. In an address yesterday to the John Hewitt summer school in Armagh city, he described the situation in Gaza as "a tragic example of the failure of diplomacy".
Mr Higgins called for innovation in the search for peace. He believed “that the enormous increase in unsettled conflicts at the present time represents a great challenge to the international community.”
It "surely must be a matter of profound concern to citizens across the globe and their heads of state and leaders that so many conflicts – in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and elsewhere – have endured to the point where loss of life is now increasing on a daily basis, security is decreasing and refugee numbers are escalating as displacement drives on relentlessly with horrific consequences on the most vulnerable.
“It is a time,” he said, “when we are challenged to innovate in the search for peace, realising that a status quo of unacknowledged failure within a diplomacy of narrow interests is threatening all of our human achievements.”
Mr Higgins said “the appalling and escalating loss of life” in Gaza was a “tragic example of the failure of diplomacy. There is an awareness among our citizens of the importance of building and securing peaceful resolution to such conflicts which challenge us all.
“In recent weeks, I have received a great volume of correspondence from members of the public expressing their horror at what is happening in Gaza and I share their horror at the perceived failure of language itself, as I know you do.”
He felt that “in celebrating the life and work of John Hewitt – one who cared so deeply about peace and the relations between peoples – it is wholly appropriate that we reflect on the relevance and resonance of Hewitt’s work in the atmosphere of today’s conflicts.”
Hewitt, the President added, “was a man who understood that we all are the carriers of multiple allegiances, multiple identities, empowered by hopes and ideas yet to be realised.” He understood “that to find peace, he needed to know his own place in the world. His lifelong work was to understand himself and his place – his identity, his culture, his region.”
