Senator David Smith

Address at St Patrick’s Day Service

17 March 2019

Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Canberra

I acknowledge that we are meeting on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging.

This is their home and we are fortunate that many of us today, despite our presence being much more recent, our footprints fresh, can call this our home today as well.

I also acknowledge the many dignitaries here today, the leaders of faith communities, the Irish Ambassador Breandan O’Caollai, and other members of the diplomatic community, a particular welcome to Damien English, the Irish Minister of State for Housing and Urban Development and Member for West Meath, and a welcome to other parliamentary representatives.

It’s an honour to be able to speak at this event, the 18th anniversary of the first St Patrick’s ecumenical service in 2001 – an event that my parents have been connected with since its inception. It’s a tribute to the faith communities of Canberra and Friends of Ireland – in particular it’s a tribute to the work of James Haire, Pat Power and active members of Friends of Ireland. This celebration of diversity, tolerance, peace and unity is close to the heart of my parents who are present today.

My parents came to Canberra in the early 1960s. In 1961 the population of the ACT was just under 59,000 but by 2016 this number had reached just under 400,000. A third of our population was born overseas – Canberra, this meeting place is a place that has brought together people from across the globe to the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri.

In speaking today I am fortunate to follow in the footsteps of two great Labor Senators Susan Ryan and Ursula Stephens. Susan Ryan was one of the real

trailblazers in Australian politics and continues to be a critical advocate for older Australians. She is one of many Labor politicians proudly coming from an Irish-Australian tradition. Senator Stephens was one of the first speakers at these ecumenical services in 2003. Hopefully we may be seeing her return to an Australian parliament in coming weeks. If you look at the names that have represented this region – Kelly, McMullan, Gallagher, Sheehan you kind of get the picture of the influence of Irish-Australians across this region.

As a Smith I may stick out as an anomaly but if the Smiths from Meath had not migrated in the 19th century Minister English may have been my local member. I would like to provide a special welcome to Minister English but also to all the dignitaries here today.

My connection to Ireland to Meath and Cork on my father’s side and to Galway on my mother’s side goes back to the late nineteenth century when great grandparents on both sides made their way across the sea.

A connection to Ireland that came through yellowed photos in old frames, a portrait of Robert Emmett by my great grandmother, the Irish Rovers, Chieftains and Dubliners records of my father, place names and counties, an early appreciation of Joyce and Yeats through high school English literature classes but where do the Pogues come in??

In late 1987 at the Rheinbergers’ house in Farrer I heard two cassette tapes of music that were unlike anything I had heard before, a revolution was happening in my ears when I encountered the anarchism of Metallica and the bouzouki/accordion/banjo fuelled energy of “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” by the Pogues for the first time. Shortly after came exposure to the Pogues’ earlier works – Red Roses for Me and Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.

A relationship was formed – with Metallica brief, with the Pogues lasting.

The Pogues – voice for the different, dispossessed, dislocated, departed, downtrodden, dispersed and debauched.

The Pogues were the antithesis to the glamorous consumerism personified by Wham, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran – to the shoulderpads of Dynasty and Dallas. They captured the reality and challenge of urban life on the edges, of poverty and loss – of the migrant experience both real and imagined of “being

Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time” and an understanding that this experience transcends and affects generations. They were migrants. Duran Duran sang about exotic destinations and “girls on film” while the Pogues sang of dark, lonely streets, of working life, of boozers, rent boys and mental illness and most particularly of the conflicting feelings emotions of joy, heart break, hope, humour, and loneliness of the migrant experience and gave that experience a dignity anchored in traditions of departure that are as old as the annals of history – “it’s useless to laugh and it’s silly to bawl about a rusty tin can and an old hurling ball.” A song located in a drunk tank on Xmas eve became the most popular Xmas song of all time.

Immigrants in a sense have two worlds to make sense of. Not only do they have to make some sense of their new experiences but they also have to cope with the experiences which in one sense they have left behind but also brought with them from Ireland, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines or the Sudan as examples. This can lead to an ambivalence about identity but in the music of the Pogues this ambivalence is both recognised and resolved. Tradition and modernity are married and valued.

Napper Tandy is both a character in the traditional “The Wearin’ of the Green” and the debauched “Boat Train.” A wild night in West London invokes Cuchulainn, Frank Ryan, John McCormack and Richard Tauber. The pulling down of the White City Stadium is compared with the loss of Atlantis. “Thousands are Sailing” first addresses the ghosts of Ellis island and their coffin ships before then dealing with the contemporary migrant experience of the 1980s. Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Carolan are never far away

“Where e’er we go we celebrate the land that makes us refugees” – what a simple but powerful line that rebuts the constant call for all migrants to assimilate and give up connections to home! This is a truth shared by all generations of migrants. Despite the pain and anguish that drives 100s of thousands from their “homes” why shouldn’t there be a strong, connection to “home.” Robert Emmett still hung on my grandmother’s wall!

So as a 17 year old, beginning to find my way in the adult world with an uncertain future the Pogues were a rallying cry of unity, “a song of liberty” – a voice for the different, dispossessed, dislocated, departed, downtrodden,

dispersed and debauched and a song of dignity for all human experience – for all of us.

“We’ll sing a song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks”

And it allowed me and my generation a place in the post modern, it contextualised my Australian Irish identity in the 1980s.