Why Mary Robinson’s words resonate with young emigrants like me

St Kilda is to Melbourne as Bondi is to Sydney. It’s a little bit tacky but charmingly trendy. It’s rough around the edges but not grubby enough to take it past the point of being cool. It’s sand. It’s sun. It’s beers outside. It’s groups lounging around speakers. It is beachside city living at its beautiful best.

The fact that it is chock-a-block, ripping at the seams, full to the brim with Irish people is one of its most defining and enduring features. And the Fifth Province Bar, or “The Fifth” as we locals call it, is bang in the middle of it all.

Three weeks ago my brother arrived over to live in Melbourne. Rather than cooking on his first night I said we would go to The Fifth for our dinner. This place does food that could compete with any Irish mammy’s, and the Guinness isn’t bad either. I reckoned it was the right kind of nourishment for a young fella who had been travelling for a long time.

I have been in Melbourne a while, so it was not my first dinner at The Fifth. But on this particular evening when the bill came it was accompanied by the bar’s business card. It’s a common practice, though I didn’t remember getting one on any of my previous visits.

Female president

I turned it over and on the back found a quote from the first female president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. It read: “The Fifth Province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each one of us – that place that is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in.”

It could be one of the most famous quotes in Ireland, for all I know, but I had never heard it before. And I like it. It is taken from Mrs Robinson’s inaugural speech in 1990.

That evening as I was reading it, the countdown to the US election was drawing to a close and Hillary Clinton still had every chance of becoming the first female president of the United States. If she didn’t get it, the prize was Donald Trump’s. He planned to build walls around his country to keep others out. Either way, the result was going to be monumental.

I had a bit of a moment thinking about it. There I was reading a quote from the speech Mrs Robinson had made the day she became our first female president 26 years ago. And there she was talking about swinging doors, reconciliation and building bridges. For me, that business card highlighted a paradox in the current global political climate. For a nation regarded at times as backward, aren’t we very progressive really?

How special it is to be Irish. How fortunate we are to be from a country that gives its people so many opportunities to travel, to work and to live overseas. How nice it is to feel welcome wherever we go due to the openness with which we meet people.

For many emigrants, Mrs Robinson was president when we were just kids. I believe her attitude influenced us. I believe she has something to do with why we move and explore the way we do. Sitting the other side of the world that evening with my wee brother and thinking about our former president and the precedent she set made me feel pretty complete.

Whenever I feel like there is a piece of the puzzle missing, like maybe four just isn’t enough, I feel grateful we still have that good old Fifth Province.