Irish Echo News

Australia is a country greatly enriched by its Irish heritage and proud of it, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared last week.

In a warm and witty speech at the Queensland Irish Assocation’s St Patrick’s Dinner on March 16, the Labor leader spoke for the first time about his Irish background and what he called “the great friendship” that exists between Ireland and Australia.

“The Irish imprint on the Australian character is indelible,”he said to loud applause. “Some say Australia is the most Irish country outside of Ireland itself, in its spirit, if not in its numbers. 

“Few states can claim a stronger Irish influence than Queensland. Those strong links are reflected here in the Queensland Irish Association, the only ethnic association of Brisbane to maintain an unbroken line for more than 100 years.”

Mr Rudd said that the roll -call of Australian history is “thick with Irish names, whether in politics, in church, in business”. 

“As Thomas Keneally observed in The Great Shame, as they spread to other lands, the Irish learned to wield the political and social clout that they were denied on their own soil.

“And the roll-call here in Australia includes at least six of my predecessors at The Lodge  –  James Scullin, Joseph Lyons, John Curtin, Francis Forde, Ben Chifley and Paul Keating. All have shaped our past. They steel us for the present. They shape our future. 

“As we in Australia and those of our friends in Ireland now confront the great challenges which the world presents us today, we are all now called on to call forth those great Irish Australian virtues and quality.

“Virtues and qualities of pride, of tenacity, of fortitude in the face of adversity, of struggle, of faith, and of an abiding good humour. Great Australian qualities. Great Irish qualities,” he said.

Mr Rudd told the Irish Echo that while the visiting Irish Minister, Eamon O’Cuiv, had issued an invitation for him to visit Ireland, he was not certain when he would get to visit the home of his ancestors.

When he does, the village of Ballingarry in Co Tipperary will be on his itinerary for it was there that his great-grandparents Owen Cashin and Johannah Maher were born. They migrated to Brisbane in 1887. Their daughter, Hannah Cashin, was Mr Rudd’s maternal grandmother.

“I am pleased to report that the village of Ballingarry looms large in the history of the Irish rebellions of the 19th century,” the PM told the gathering.

“It’s a town where the Irish national tricolour of green, white and orange was first unfurled by the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848.” 

“I stand proud of my mum’s Irish heritage,” he said. “Dad, is a different story. English, lumpen Protestants, the lot of them. Every one of them, who makes my mother’s Irish forebears the actual picture of respectability.

“On my father’s side, [we had] no less than seven distinct convict lines. Crooks, forgers, highway robbers, the lot.

There are separate records of different English ancestors of mine being convicted for stealing clocks, sugar, counterfeiting, robbery on the open road, and a theft of 200 pounds of glue. 

“When I was last in England and was a guest of Her Majesty at Windsor Castle, I didn’t mention to Her Majesty that my very forebears had also been guests of Her Majesty.”

The Member for Griffith, clearly relishing the irreverent tone of the event, even joked that he was a direct descendant of St Kevin, one of Ireland’s many Christian icons.

“There is not an unreasonable school of thought in Irish history which says that indeed St Kevin, and not St Patrick, should be Ireland’s patron saint,” he joked. “Personally I have no such view, none whatsoever.

“Others could commend St Kevin’s virtue, the sheer piety and poetry of his name, a poetry so deep and so broad and so rich that Dame Edna herself has written that it’s impossible for anyone reputable, let alone as Prime Minister to be possibly called Kevin.”

by Billy Cantwell