Barbados prime minister Mia Amor Mottley highlighted historic Irish links with the Caribbean island and the strength of current trade relations between the countries as she opened her country’s new embassy in Dublin on Monday.
In a wide-ranging speech to a large gathering of political and diplomatic figures, Mottley also cited recent remarks by President Catherine Connolly on international relations. She also called on Ireland and Barbados to find common cause to confront the climate crisis.
Finding a “common purpose” with Ireland by opening the embassy was part of an effort by Barbados to reclaim its Atlantic destiny, she said.
“There are schoolbooks which tell the story of the British but no one tells the story of the Irish and no one tells the story of the fact that, for your people, the flight to Barbados was a choice put by [Oliver] Cromwell of ‘to hell or Barbados’,” she said.
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“We smile now,” she went on. “But that early, early linkage when your people came in as indentured servants and our people came in as slaves meant that we understood together what it was to be pawns in the hands of those who had ambitions that simply did not see us, did not hear us and did not feel us as human beings who could be valued and who could be allowed build something [of] worth.”
Barbados is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain this year and its fifth anniversary as a republic.
The opening of the embassy chancery office on Baggot Street coincides with the introduction of trial Aer Lingus flights between Dublin and Barbados.
The prime minister said both countries should work to develop the tourism market, adding that “we owe it to our ancestors and we owe it to our children” because the four-century relationship must stand for something.
“It is a fact that we have more Irish investment in Barbados than British investment. When I told the British foreign secretary that two years ago he was utterly taken by surprise.”
Quoting the President’s recent speech in Barcelona, she noted how Connolly had cited remarks by former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, “that the United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell”.
Mottley said: “As the country that was the alternative to hell four centuries ago, it is opportune for me . . . to remind us that truly, truly, truly, we who for so long were shunned and treated in ways that could never be accepted have come to show the world now that that behaviour and that treatment should not be replicated at all in our future.”
It was only through a strong moral voice – provided with moral strategic leadership – that inequities of the past could be avoided in the future.
