President Higgins, in Paris with from top: French President François Hollande, and with Irish generals at a wreath laying ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe .

Extracts From a speech President Higgins gave at the Sorbonne last night.

James Joyce’s manifesto to ‘Hibernicize Europe and Europeanise Ireland’ – was, we must remember, anticipated many centuries earlier by, for example, Columbanus and Gallus who brought precious scriptures and treatises from Bangor through France in the early 7^th Century; John Scotus Eriugena who brought Greek back into Europe after the dark ages; travelling all the way to the French King in the 9^th Century to translate the Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek into Latin, Peter of Ireland who taught Acquinas philosophy, and later Berkeley the ‘Irish Cartesian’ who engaged with French thinkers like Malebranche in the 18^th Century – and since I am advocating a rethinking of economics –  the Franco-Hibernian thinker Richard Cantillon, born in Kerry in 1680 whose essay      ‘L’Essai sur la nature du commerce en general’ in 1730 was described by William Stanley Jevons as constituting ‘the cradle of political economy’ and which influenced Adam Smith and Karl Marx…

...I feel, now more than ever, at a time of economic crisis and loss of trust in institutions and decision-makers, that if Europe is to have a discourse informed with all the energy, concern and creativity that the times demand then surely, the lives, the conversations, the anguish, the hopes, the beliefs, and the commitment of those of previous centuries who believed, in their day, and in response to the circumstances of their times that not only was a world with the stamp of humanity necessary, but that it was possible, are relevant to us as examples of the moral courage we need in facing the contradictions of our times.

Fair play though in fairness.

Full text here

(Aras/Photocall Ireland)