Higgins hopes Mandela’s vision ‘will come to be achieved’

President Michael D Higgins has said he hopes the vision of Nelson Mandela “will come to be achieved in our fragile planet”.

Speaking at NUI Galway today, where he signed a book of condolences dedicated to the former South African president, Mr Higgins also said his legacy would continue “inter-generationally”.

By his actions, Mr Mandela had shown that “even though a struggle seems impossible, and even though the forces against transformation and change are immense, it can all change and it can change fundamentally in every way - in terms not only of democratic participation ,but in terms of equality - so it is not simply utopian.”

Mr Higgins said he had learned of the former leader’s death with great sadness, even though he had been very seriously ill for some time.

“He was an inspirational figure in every sense,” Mr Higgins said, referring to Ireland’s connections with him through the late Prof Kader Asmal; his visits to Ireland,including Galway in 2003; and his meeting with the the Dunnes Stores workers who refused to handle South African goods over the apartheid issue .

“You could see as well his capacity for emotional gratitude and compassion when he was speaking to these young women who had put the most valuable thing they had, their job, on the line,” Mr Higgins said, referring to that latter meeting with the former Dunnes Stores staff.

“I think it is very important that we are authentic about it as well,” he added. “It wasn’t easy to win a majority in favour of the struggle against apartheid, it wasn’t easy to win support sometimes for the sanctions, for the different forms of boycott which we had been asked to do by the congress of trade unions in South Africa.

“As well as that there was the continual argument between economics and human rights.”

The “notion of an unfinished struggle” was something which “rings out in several of Mr Mandela’s later speeches,” Mr Higgins said.

“What strikes one is grace, the grace of the mind, the preparation in prison if you like for both mental and physical strength to take up a struggle and take it from a version of direct confrontation and violence to one in which one sat opposite the previous foe,”he said.

He hoped that “the vision of Mandela will come to be achieved in our fragile planet” and spoke of his humour, his inclusiveness, his interest in sport, and his realisation that “ justice is not something that is to be written on paper”.

Recalling how he shared the Nobel prize with former South African leader FW de Klerk, Mr Higgins said that he was “able to say that although matters are not resolved between us, we have to privilege the future of the peace, and in that there is a lesson for so many places that are conflictual at the present time”.

The book of condolences at NUI Galway’s James Hardiman Library atrium is open from 9am to 5pm tomorrow, 10am to 5pm Sunday and until 8pm on Monday.