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Dear Richard,

May I offer my warmest personal congratulations on your being awarded the 2025 Research Ireland St. Patrick’s Day Academic Medal, a most fitting recognition of your immense contribution to scholarship and to public life, and to the fostering of dialogue and understanding across cultures and disciplines.

Throughout your long and distinguished career, you have brought a profound intellectual generosity to your work, consistently demonstrating a deep and generous commitment to the power of narrative, imagination and hospitality in shaping our shared human experience, our understanding of self and society.

May I take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude for your important contributions across so many aspects of society, including the drafting of proposals for the Northern Ireland peace process, a task requiring not only great intellectual rigour but also a deep commitment to the values of dialogue and mutual understanding. That work, like so much of what you have done, continues to resonate today yielding great outcomes.

May I suggest that many of your reflections offer a powerful and humane vision for the future. In post-conflict societies, and indeed in all societies striving toward justice and understanding, the ethics of “narrative hospitality”, as you have put it, have the capacity to replace our past entrenchments, offering an openness to each other, as a call to replace entrenchment with engagement, exclusion with inclusion, amnesia with ethical recall.

Your concept of a “commons of the body” speaks to a deep and necessary truth, that reconciliation must take place not only in political agreements and institutional arrangements, but in the very fabric of human encounter, in shared gestures and spaces where past divisions may be acknowledged, and where the possibility of healing is nurtured.

May I also commend your lifelong commitment to bringing contemporary philosophy into the public domain and consciousness. An admirable dimension of your work has been your generous collaboration with, and advocacy for, fellow philosophers, one that has fostered a dialogue that has enriched both scholarship and public discourse.

Your own writings have been profoundly shaped by, and in turn have shaped, the reception of key thinkers, not least among them Paul Ricoeur, whose reflections on memory, history, and forgetting continue to illuminate our understanding of how we may recall the past in an ethical remembrance. His insight that “to be forgotten is to die twice” speaks to the very themes that have animated your life’s work – how memory, when tended with care and respect, can serve as a foundation for reconciliation, justice, and the imagining of new possibilities in which all can find fulfillment.

May this well-deserved honor serve as a reminder of the esteem in which you are held by your peers, by your fellow citizens, and by everyone who have been inspired by your work, a reminder, too, to acknowledge the continued relevance of your insights at a time when they are greatly needed.

I hope that you will take some time to reflect on all that you have given to academic and civic life, and on the many ways in which your work has enriched our collective discourse.

Sabina joins with me in sending our warmest personal congratulations to you.

Traoslaím leat is guím gach rath ort don todhchaí.

Yours sincerely,

Michael D. Higgins
Uachtarán na hEireann
President of Ireland