Speech by An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD Fianna Fáil Wolfe Tone Commemoration Sunday 19th October 2025

 

Theobald Wolfe Tone is one of the most unique and inspiring figures in our history.  227 years after he died his spirit and his ideals remain deeply relevant to all who care about the future of this island.

 

He was a generous and brave young man who dedicated himself to building a new way forward for the Irish people.  A new way forward based on respect, diversity and Ireland taking its place as a modern European democracy.

 

Though born into privilege and benefiting from sectarian laws which reserved places of influence to people of his religion, Tone believed deeply in the shared rights of all.

 

He worked as the secretary of the Catholic Committee, which pioneered an activist and representative approach to seeking equality. He was active in every major movement for reform – and when the state turned to repression, he turned to the republicanism which had been embraced by a new, rising generation of Europeans.

 

Aged only 35 and with a young family to which he was devoted, as Thomas Davis wrote, “he perished in prison alone. His friends unavenged and his country unfreed.”

 

When Davis came here to this very spot in 1843 he found Tone’s grave without any stone to record his presence – and he was overcome with a sense of how soon his hero had seemed to be forgotten.  Yet Davis also wrote of his conviction that Tone’s status would rise again.  That the Irish people would again be inspired by his life and his ideals.

 

In this he was absolutely correct.

 

Different generations have been able to turn to Tone to find not just the origins of our democratic republicanism, but also the guiding principles which we should follow.

 

The republicanism of Tone and his colleagues in the United Irishmen was deeply-thought and had many elements to it.  But ultimately there were two core principles which stood out.

 

The first was that to secure Irish identity it had to be set in a wider European context – one where we embraced the spirit of solidarity with others.  The second was that Irish national identity could only be found by embracing our diversity and rejecting the idea of being defined by one community or tradition.

 

We need to remember this because both core principles of solidarity with Europe and Ireland being defined by diversity are under attack today in a way that few could have imagined only a short time ago.

 

The European context isn’t some marginal element of Irish national identity – it is the very reason why our national identity was capable of surviving and thriving even in the face of political and cultural repression over many centuries.

 

It was Europe that kept Irish scholarship alive, educating our leaders and showing the distinct spirit of Irish people.

 

And it was European ideals and movements which inspired and aided the development of our republican nationalism.  When Tone and his colleagues asserted the will of the Irish people to be free it was in the name of the Tree of Liberty and the Rights of Man.  It was a solidarity between peoples which they promoted.

 

Ba chóir dúinn uilig machnamh a dhéanamh ar an ról lárnach ríthábhachtach a ghlac an Eoraip i gcosaint an chultúir Éireannaigh leis na glúinte.

 

Ba sa Fhrainc, san Ostair, sa Spáinn agus in áiteanna eile ar fud na hEorpa a raibh Éireannaigh in ann staidéar a dhéanamh gan aon bhac orthu agus ceiliúradh a dhéanamh ar ár stair.

 

Deireadh athbheochan ar an mbéaloideas agus ar ár teanga sna hollscoileanna Eorpacha.

 

Agus sa lá atá inniu ann, tá an cultúr Éireannach agus an teanga ag fáil aitheantais agus onóra ar comhchéim leis na náisiúin dhaonlathacha eile san Aontas Eorpach.

 

The decision of the Irish people to join the now European Union in the referendum proposed by Fianna Fáil was a transformative moment for our country.

 

It was a decision which has delivered dramatic and sustained progress for the Irish people.

 

A decision which truly secured our place amongst the nations of Europe and the world because it gave us a say in shaping the rules which impact on all countries.

 

Over the last half century Ireland’s place in a strong Europe has been our single most important and most positive national policy.

 

But we can take nothing for granted.  We need to understand the very deep threats that are working to undermine the European Union and its commitment to democracy, the rule of law and free trade.

 

Read or watch the news any day and you see the reality of these threats both from outside and within the Union.

 

Russia has been waging an open war on the borders of the Union for over a decade.  Ukraine, a country which only wants to be allowed to be a free democracy, is under daily attack from an imperialist aggressor determined to destroy this freedom.

 

But it goes further than this.  All of the countries of the Union, as well as the Union itself, have been subject to ongoing hybrid attacks from within Russia.

 

We can see this ourselves.  Russian vessels have detoured to spend time threatening our vital cable connections to international markets.  And of course we all saw a devastating cyber-attack against our health service in the middle of the pandemic.

 

We have to cast off any illusions that Ireland is safely-tucked away and has no need to take any action.

 

We have no alternative – we must be able to better protect ourselves and that is why we need to invest in our critical defences and we need to coordinate with other countries who are dealing with the same challenges.

 

That’s why I welcome the moves by member states to step-up shared-work to enable each country to deal with new and very real threats.

 

When Europe is being undermined we have to stand with Europe.  The neutrality which Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil introduced as a cornerstone of our international policies is as important as ever.  But our commitment to being neutral is not a commitment to being defenceless in the face of aggression and it is not a commitment to try and block other countries from investing in their critical defences.

 

Yet that is exactly the demand which we hear from those who have spent the last fifty years constantly attacking the European Union and calling it a military superstate obsessed with war.

 

This is a reminder that we also have to stand up against the corrosive and cynical euroscepticism of those who pretend to be pro-EU but in practice invest all of their energy in attacking the Union.

 

This matters because for decades a creeping euroscepticism was allowed to take hold in Britain and ultimately led to the incredible damage of Brexit.  Pro-European voices in Britain waiting too long to challenge those who pretended to just want reform or to be just concerned about the latest proposal.

 

We need to start calling-out people who say “Oh, but I’m pro-EU” as they constantly announce and reannounce the supposed end of Irish sovereignty.

 

You’re not pro-EU if you stand against every Treaty which has built the Union over the last quarter of a century.

 

You’re not pro-EU if you claim it’s controlled by a wealthy elite and can never find a positive word to say about it.

 

You’re not pro-EU if you constantly say that it’s destroying our neutrality and is in the hands of a military-industrial complex.

 

Next year Ireland will hold the Presidency of the Council for the first time in 12 years.  Ireland will be central to setting the agenda and working to push forward towards decisions on critical issues like the budget, the rule of law and international trade.

 

I am absolutely clear that the position of my government will be that Ireland is a pro-European country.  We believe in a strong and effective European Union.  We will support a budget which will fully fund essential programmes like the CAP and allow extra funding in new priority areas like innovation and public health.

 

And we will also be consistent in supporting the unbreakable commitment of the European Union to democracy and the rule of law.

 

At the very moment when the Union is under direct attack from the far right and far left and has external forces trying to undermine it, we will stand with Europe.

 

At home we will also stand for the core republican ideal of a nationalism which is inclusive.  An Irishness which is defined by diversity not exclusion.

 

The generation of idealists who came to this place and called for us to remember Tone also gave us our national flag.

 

It was similar to the French tricolour, but its origins came later.  It reflected a wider liberal nationalism internationally which sought to create new symbols which reflected the ideals of the people rather than the identity of their masters.

 

A national flag which explicitly called for a nationalism that embraced different cultures and political traditions is a wonderful legacy which they left for us.

 

Whatever your ideology, you dishonour our national flag if you claim that you alone represent Irishness or our political aspirations.

 

If you use our flag to try and claim that there is a fixed national identity, it shows that you do not understand our history and you do not understand that our identity has survived because we have been willing to evolve and be more inclusive.

 

We also must do far more to understand that each of us carries a responsibility to build reconciliation and understanding between different communities on our island.

 

Fianna Fáil is determined to use government to move reconciliation on this island from being empty words to being a defining element of what government does.

 

Today, as we have at every moment in our history, we stand as a proud republican and nationalist party.  The vision of different traditions coming together, under a shared flag and in a shared state, is one which will always be core for us.

 

Over a century after partition, division on this island has served nobody well.  It gave us two states which were less diverse and less successful than if had they been together.  It caused us to grow apart and increasingly become strangers.

 

In the Good Friday Agreement, we secured the first ever agreed blueprint for handling the constitutional future of our island.

 

But the Good Friday Agreement also set everyone the challenge of breaking the patterns of division which had escalated over many decades.

 

It set us the challenge of building real contacts between communities and between North and South.

 

Yet far too little was done.  Too little attention was paid to the lack of deep and ongoing connections which would benefit us all.

 

That’s why we established the Shared Island Initiative – and it’s why I am determined to ensure that the Initiative will rapidly expand its work.

 

This is the first time in our history that there is a major programme in place not just to study every element of what we share and what we don’t – but also to invest in building permanent, deep engagement between all communities.

 

The new Dublin-Derry airlink, investment in a new teaching building in Derry and support for dramatically improving road connection are very practical and vital examples of projects which would have been impossible before. These are projects which will benefit the entire North-West.

 

But work is also moving forward in a much wider range of areas.  Supporting small businesses to trade. Joint research on Parkinson’s disease.  Investment in recycling and biodiversity.  Shared tourism projects and new work on inclusion in education.

 

These are just a few of the projects underway that are opening up a new era of contact and shared objectives North and South.

 

As we work to accelerate the pace of projects and to open up new areas of activity, we have to be very clear in pointing out that we need far greater engagement, particularly from people South of the border, to build connections with people from other traditions and with the day-to-day life on the other part of the island.

 

From independence onwards a huge amount of effort was spent on the assumption that what was needed was a few more public meetings.  Decades were lost on the idea that the force of our advocacy would decide what would eventually happen.

 

But maybe it was time to try something else – to not just talk about people being together but to actually do something to bring them together.

 

The Shared Island Initiative is exactly the sort of initiative which de Valera, Aiken and Lemass talked about over many years but could not implement because of the inflexibility of others.  A truly radical report which they submitted to the Parliamentary Party in 1953 called for the move towards a policy which today reads as being remarkably similar to the peace settlement of 45 years later.

 

All three were men who have fought in 1916 and had seen close friends and family fall during the War of Independence and civil war which followed.  Each understood the demand for inclusion and understanding made in the Proclamation. They understood that the spirit of Tone was founded on the ideal of an Irish republicanism which was diverse and capable of change.

 

If we are to truly honour the life and ideals of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen we must start by remembering how they were modern and European.  They sought to chart new ways forward for the Irish people.  They were focused on building a better future, not on restoring or protecting the past.