Irish President Michael D. Higgins has delivered “Of Heritage, Home and Healing”, his keynote address to the American Conference of Irish Studies (ACIS) 2021 conference. The full 52-minute speech video is posted below this one passage, which I wanted to highlight:

As to scholarly work on Ireland, may I say that there is a debt, never to be forgotten, as to what we owe to the American scholarship on Ireland for at least two centuries, and particularly when at the end of the 19th and through the first half of the 20th centuries, that such scholarship filled a void in relation to the late-19th century for which we in Ireland are indebted. For the work of so many, of those who crossed the Atlantic when our research was underfunded and slow, scholars such as Samuel Clark, J.S. Donnelly, L.F. Curtis, Kerby Miller, Emmet Larkin, Barbara Solow, and so many more. Their work is where so much of the work of Ireland in the 19th century begins as source and method, and I am so glad that through the work of the A.C.I.S. it continues with such range, flair and enthusiasm.