High-level Meeting to Commemorate the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the United Nations
21 September 2020
Ireland
His Excellency Michael D. Higgins
Statement Summary
MICHAEL D. HIGGINS, President of Ireland, said that the United Nations remains the only body through which all nations can work cooperatively to end conflict, eliminate poverty, combat climate change and uphold human rights. Yet the Organization still comes under attack, often from the most powerful. “The United Nations must be our United Nations,” he said, emphasizing that it will only be successful if Member States ensure the emergence of new thinking and new paradigms of critical thought. “Our choice is stark: to seize a new moment for global solidarity or seek to hide in the thickets of a systemic failure that is failing the bulk of the world’s people and that has brought our planet to a point of ecological catastrophe,” he said.
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