ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION AT THE ARMAGH CAMPUS OF QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION AT THE ARMAGH CAMPUS OF QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST TUESDAY, 12 JUNE, 2001.
Thank you for your warm welcome and for this opportunity to come back to the Queen’s campus at Armagh and to be a witness to yet another remarkable phase of growth and development here.
The Queen’s Campus at Armagh came into being at the most cathartic and challenging time in the history of Northern Ireland. That it did was not a coincidence. It was the result of a clear vision here in Armagh and in the Queen’s University of Belfast that the future was worth investing money and imagination in and that the success of that future would be measured by the peace, the prosperity, the equality of opportunity it brought to the widest possible audience. At the heart of that vision was a realisation that there was a complex education deficit which needed to be addressed if the potential of each human being was to be released and if the potential of the community was to be revealed through that empowerment of the individual.
The arrival of the campus was timely for the Good Friday Agreement followed within a couple of years and with its overwhelming endorsement a huge surge of fresh energy was released into the political and social landscape. That energy created space. That space created opportunities but like all opportunities their intrinsic value lies in actually being used and not in being watched as they simply drift by. Programmes such as the Women and Peace Building Programme, which I had the pleasure of visiting earlier this afternoon, will play a vital role in helping capture those opportunities, ensuring they are not still-born, or under-utilised but exploited to the full so that a new era of respectful partnership will be lived rather than wistfully regretted for its unfulfilled promise.
Northern Ireland has absorbed a considerable amount of change in recent years and in so doing it has earned the admiration and respect of people all around the world who wondered whether a Christian people, a people whom visitors routinely characterise as warm-hearted, would have the generosity of spirit to make the sacrifices necessary to make a fresh start. Today the answer to that question is evolving and resolving. Today a critical mass of people support the involvement of their political leaders in one of the most unique and radical forms of consensus based government anywhere in the world. They are working to unscramble the historically skewed relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South and between these two neighbouring islands. These are very early days for as the great Ulster poet John Hewitt put it “ We build to fill the centuries arrears.” There is a long journey yet to go before we truly realise all the things we have been missing because too many energies were wasted on sectarianism instead of tolerance, on conflict instead of consensus, on prejudice instead of partnership.
It is very fitting that Armagh, the ancient ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, should become synonymous today with North/South co-operation. Right down through the millennia, Armagh has been a centre of education and innovation, a city consistently in the centre of opposing spheres of influence from the very times when Patrick chose Macha’s Height as a base to spread Christianity, in 444AD precisely because it was close to the Royal Pagan Fort of Emain Macha. This is a city which has a lot of experience of metamorphosing potentially negative tensions and shaping them into positive energies.
The teaching and research conducted here is making a very considerable contribution to that ongoing process of contemporary metamorphosis. The Centre for Cross Border Studies is facilitating a much more sophisticated north south dialogue and its very fine recent publications have helped inform and develop that dialogue.
It was here in Armagh on the 13 December 1999 that the North/South Ministerial Council held its historic inaugural meeting. On that memorable occasion, Ministers from North and South sat down together for the first time to discuss policy issues on behalf of all of us on this island. That meeting I believe, was the outward sign of the growing normalisation of political co-operation in Ireland and the work of building effective bridges is being carried on by the six new Implementation Bodies which have clear accountability lines to the Council, to the Oireachtas in Dublin and to the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast. That work is painstaking and relatively unglamourous but it is seedbedding a future we can all be proud of, one where all the talents and the resources we have are used to their absolute productive best.
Later in the autumn we will have the full wisdom of the results of a groundbreaking study currently being carried out by the North/South Ministerial Council on obstacles to cross-border mobility. Already though the study has ascertained that while many practical obstacles exist, there are many more which are grounded in perceptions and it is often these psychological barriers which cause communities to live back to back.
The really big deficit in Northern Ireland is trust. Its absence eats at people’s hopes, dilutes their confidence, drives them back behind barricades of doubt. That is why they need to be reassured by seeing the benefits of the new networks and partnerships which are being built in the fields of cross-border co-operation. This campus, this city has a key role to play in underpinning that trust. It is already well on the way to becoming a centre of gravity synonymous with a future based on mutually beneficial partnerships. The success of the North/South Ministerial Council Secretariat, based here in this very building is itself a source of attraction to many organisations seeking to operate on an all island basis. Here the future is visibly happening as civil servants from both parts of this island work together with huge energy and creative imagination mobilising the very best of people and plans on both sides of the border, putting them at the service of all the people who share this lovely island.
We dare to believe that we can help each other build peaceful, inclusive and prosperous societies North and South, their hatreds reconciled, their many religious, ethnic, political and cultural differences comfortably co-existing. We are all stakeholders in this process, beneficiaries if we succeed, losers if we fail. We know what failure looks like for those are the centuries arrears Hewitt wrote of. We are writing the script for a new poet of the 21st century who will write that we filled those arrears, that we filled them well, that we freed ourselves of history’s yoke and brought real lasting happiness to Ireland’s generations.
I congratulate you all on the work to date and wish all of you every success as you build for that new century here in Armagh.