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Bertie Ahern speech to UK Houses of Parliament; Bertie Ahern (Taoiseach) speech SOT - I am very grateful for your welcome and I am honoured to be the first Taoiseach to speak here at the heart of British parliamentary democracy / But I speak not for myself today / I speak for the Irish people and for the history and the best hopes of our two island nations, yours and mine / Today, following as it does so many remarkable days, is a new and glad departure in an old and extraordinary relationship / Ours is a close, complex and a difficult history / But now with energy and resolve this generation is leaving the past behind / building friendship and laying the foundation for a lasting partnership of common interests between our two islands / For over two centuries, great Irishmen came to Westminster to be a voice for the voiceless of Ireland and at times a conscience for Britain too / I am thinking above all of Daniel O'Connell [Irish politician who campaigned for Catholic Emancipation] and Charles Stewart Parnell [Irish nationalist politician] but the tradition is long and noble / And their struggle to further the cause of the Irish nation in this Parliament resonated across the Irish Sea through the lives of every Irish person / Those who travelled that sea to take a seat in this place believed in the proposition that democratic politics, however imperfect, is not, first and foremost, a career or a means of acquiring power / Rather it was, and is, the surest way to secure and advance a fair society / This year, Britain commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Act of this Parliament that ended the appalling wrong that was the Atlantic slave trade / This happened despite powerful interests that argued the financial costs of abolition / But in one of the most remarkable examples of a collective political act on moral grounds, those interests were overcome / It was a moment of great moral authority and one of the great stepping-stones to freedom / In the words of Da...