|
Princess Grace Humanitarian Award : 8th
October 2006
Monaco, Sunday, 8th October, 2006: The Ireland Fund
of Monaco has announced that the second bi-annual
Princess Grace Humanitarian Award has been awarded
to Her Grace, the Duchess of Abercorn. The Award
was presented by His Serene Highness, Prince Albert
II, at a special gala dinner in The Hermitage, Monaco
last night. The Princess Grace Humanitarian Award
is the only one of its kind dedicated to the memory
of the late Princess.
Her Grace, the Duchess of Abercorn was chosen as
the second only recipient of the award in recognition
of her efforts to encourage creative writing among
young people across the Island of Ireland through
the Pushkin Prizes – founded in honour of Alexander
Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet and ancestor
of the Duchess. The presentation of the bi-annual
award is made by Monaco's Ruling Family. His Serene
Highness, Prince Albert II, is patron of the Ireland
Funds of Monaco, a role which he took over from his
late father, Prince Rainier III.
Speaking about the Award, Mr. Michael Fitzgerald,
President of The Ireland Fund of Monaco, said, “We
are honoured that His Serene Highness, Prince Albert
II, agreed to present the Award which is named in
honour of his late mother, Princess Grace. We are
delighted to be able to present this prestigious
award to The Duchess who is a most fitting recipient.
Her resolute determination and relentless commitment
to Ireland and its young writers have resulted in
thousands of children and teachers benefiting from
the Pushkin Prizes.
“It is supremely apt that the award is being
made to a women who has used her talents for the
betterment of Irish society in memory of a women
who used her office for the benefit of humanity.
“The late Princess Grace was adored in Ireland
and by Irish people everywhere. Through her renowned
style, elegance and status she promoted compassion
and care for those less privileged. We are very honoured
that the Ruling Family has allowed us to commemorate
the late Princess by naming this Award after her”.
Responding, Her Grace said, "Receiving this
award is like a fairy tale come true. This is consistent
with the philosophy of the Pushkin Prizes which is
to show young people that, using their creative energies,
they can make their dreams into reality."
The award comprises of an original sculpture of Princess
Grace and a $25,000 grant to a charity of the recipient’s
choice.
The inaugural winner of the prize in 2004
was Irish entrepeunur, writer, motivational speaker
and philanthropist, Mr Bill Cullen.
Duchess
of Abercorn : Monaco, 7th October, 2006 |
Your Serene Highness; Ladies
and Gentlemen;
I am deeply indebted to The Ireland Fund of Monaco
for bestowing upon me this most special award.
I could never have imagined that the spark of
an idea which began as ‘The Pushkin Prizes’ in
Ireland some 20 years ago, would bring me to
the Principality of Monaco for such a splendid
evening as this.
It is the stuff of ‘fairy-tale’ and
fairy-tale is the subject on which I would like
to dwell with you tonight.
When Alexander Pushkin, my great, great, great
grandfather was a boy, he would escape from his
parents home to visit the dacha of his beloved
nanny, Anna Rodionovna. There, by the fireside
in her little wooden house she would tell him
the tales of his motherland: witches, ogres,
bears and wolves would come to life in the flickering
firelight and Pushkin's’imagination would
take flight. This wondrous imagination inspired
him to write stories and plays and poems, many
of which we know through the operas for which
Tchaikovsky composed such extraordinary music:
Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Ruslan and
Lyudmila, Boris Goudunov.
Pushkin brought the soul back to his people. He also gave them back their native
language. He conveyed their thoughts, their feelings, their innermost lives in
a way that enabled Russians of all classes and backgrounds to feel he was speaking
for them, expressing them to themselves. Even during the dark days of Communism,
when the spirit of the great Russian Orthodox Church was driven underground,
Pushkin was the channel through which hearts and souls were nourished. He was
their 'voice.'
Thanks in large part to my grandmother, I grew up with an awareness of how profoundly
Pushkin’s poetic voice was loved by his countrymen. I did not realise then
that I would soon find myself in another land where the poetic voice enjoyed
a similarly powerful resonance.
Before that,
however, I spent many happy childhood holidays
in the highlands of Scotland. One particular
memory lives in my mind with an especially
luminous quality. Your Serene Highness, it
was exactly fifty years ago this year, in
1956, that your mother and father were married. My mother and I made ambitious
plans to follow every moment of the three-day ceremony that unfolded in Monaco.
At that time we had no television. We therefore took ourselves down the valley
to the only shop for miles around where there was a television set. There we
sat on hard wooden chairs transfixed by the magical spectacle, by the fairytale
enacting itself before our eyes and by the beauty of your mother. In my mind’s
eye, Monaco has continued to shimmer as a fairy tale kingdom, its enchantment
enhanced by the lustre your mother brought to it from Ireland, her own fairy
tale realm.
I came to live in Northern Ireland when I married in 1966. Ireland continued
at first to be imbued with a fairy tale quality. Shortly after it became
my home, however, Northern Ireland – which had seemed, on the surface
at least, a serenely beautiful and peaceful domain - descended into thirty
years of sectarian warfare, death and destruction. The only way each faction
of the populace could make itself heard was by the bullet or the bomb. Rancour,
hatred and fear erupted in the most frightening ways, bringing grievous loss
and bitterness to the whole of the land’s divided and stricken community.
Despair and mistrust contaminated the very air we breathed, transforming
the fairy tale realm into a nightmare in which, to paraphrase Yeats, the
blood-dimmed tide was loosed.
As a result, my children were born into a land of profound desolation. My
daughter’s
childhood, to cite one example, was beset by terrifying nightmares. It was
this that made me wonder what was happening to every other child in Northern
Ireland. And who was bothering to question the damage being done to the souls
of these children – these children who were destined to become our future?
One
possible answer crystallised for me in 1987. In that year, the 150th anniversary
of Pushkin’s death, Luton Hoo, my grandmother’s home in England,
became the venue for a weekend of events to commemorate the life and works
of Russia’s greatest poet. People from diverse backgrounds and ideologies – representatives
of the Soviet regime of the time, as well as émigrés who had
fled the Revolution, their children and grandchildren - were united for a brief
enchanted moment by the beauty of Pushkin’s words. Russians who had previously
regarded each other as mortal enemies found common ground. In the course of
that brief magical weekend, poetry and music achieved what seventy years of
diplomacy had failed to do.
It struck me that just as Pushkin had brought Russians of different factions
together, so he – or his spirit – might kindle a similar spark
in Ireland. I wondered whether it might be possible, under his guiding spirit,
to bring together children from different traditions in Ireland, from North
and South, from urban and rural schools. I wondered if it might thereby become
possible to help them to express their thoughts and feelings, their inner lives,
by creative means.
The Pushkin Prizes began with just eight schools – four Catholic and
four Protestant; four from County Tyrone in the North and four from County
Donegal in the South. Since then, our enterprise has spread across the entire
island of Ireland. More than 12,000 children have participated in it. The power
of the creative imagination has brought them together in ways that traditional
political and educational structures could never have accomplished. That power
has helped to break down at least some of the old barriers, some of the old
boundaries and frontiers, and has encouraged the development of lasting friendships.
It has encouraged a reintegration of Ireland’s fragmented reality, a
reunification of heart and head. It has made numbers of children – many
of them now grown into adults – aware of how much they have in common,
how much they do indeed share.
In his introduction to one of Lady Gregory’s works, Yeats wrote that ‘Children
at play, at being great and wonderful people’ are the true reality of
what we are and what we should become. ‘Mankind as a whole,’ he
continued, ‘had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the
dream bit by bit and the story-tellers are there to make us remember.’ But
the children of the twentieth century had put away these ambitions for one
reason or another and grew – or dwindled - into ‘ordinary’ men
and women. Yet poets, storytellers and artists of every kind are there to keep
the dream alive, to blaze a trail leading to the brave new world that once
beckoned to us. The aim of the Pushkin Trust is to keep that trail marked and
illuminated for every child in Ireland.
As we will all remember from our own childhoods, many of the best, the most
evocative and powerful fairy tales incorporate an element of fear. There are
certain kinds of fear that appeal to all of us, and especially to children – the
thrilling fear of the roller coaster, for example, or the horror film. But
such fear is appealing only because we know that it is safely contained – that
it can’t actually or literally harm us, and that everything will come
right in the end. In the fairy tale of our reality today, however, these rules
no longer apply. The fear is no longer safely contained. It has broken loose
from its bonds. It pollutes the air we breathe. How can we contain this fear?
How can we restore to ourselves a perspective that reduces the fear to its
appropriate proportions? Only through the creative imagination can fear be
recognised and acknowledged and, at the same time, prevented from overwhelming
our individual and collective fairy tales. I would like to think that it is
on behalf of this creative imagination that I am speaking here tonight.
This brings me to a final fairy story that I would like to see as the talisman,
lucky charm, or beacon, showing us the way forward. In 1926, there lived, in
one of the beautiful houses of County Kerry, a little boy. One day a famous
poet came to visit the house and stayed the night in a room just below the
room where the little boy was sleeping. By mistake the boy had left the tap
on in his bath and the water overflowed into the poets room below. Awaking
from the deluge, the poet was inspired to write one of the greatest poems of
the 20th century - ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ The boy responsible
for that wonderful mishap was none other than the individual who has brought
such dynamic guidance to the Ireland Fund of Monaco – none other than
our own Billy Vincent. I would like to see what he caused that night in Kerry
to become a precedent for the work of the Pushkin Trust and the Ireland Fund
of Monaco. I would like to see our work trickle down into the world at large,
become a deluge and inspire people everywhere to create their own Byzantium. |
|
DONATE
NOW
