Eugene O’Neill International Public Service Award: Acceptance Speech

President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins’s acceptance speech on receiving the Eugene O’Neill International Public Service Award on September 23, 2024, at the Irish Arts Center, New York. The speech remarks on President Higgins’s involvement with the arts and honors the establishment of the new Irish Arts Center. The speech also explores efforts that he and other heads of states meeting in September 2024 at the United Nations were endeavoring to achieve their Goals of Sustainable Development by 2030. The speech also reflects on Eugene O’Neill’s work: how that work engages with the ever-present migratory experience. “The migrant sensibility is a valuable sensibility. O’Neill understood this, writing about his family’s adopted home, the United States, as he had found it, not as it wished to be found.” The speech also considers and reflects the process of inventing our pasts, as visible in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.