OPENING ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE OECD INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM
OPENING ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE OECD INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON BUSINESS-EDUCATION PARTNERSHIPS
Dia dhíbh go léir tráthnóna. Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin, OECD Deputy Secretary General Berglind Ásgeirsdöttir, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Ireland and to join you here in University College Dublin as it celebrates its sesquicentenary year. One hundred and fifty years ago this University set about putting a new heart and new hope into a wretched and miserable Ireland devastated by famine, poverty and emigration. Today’s Ireland, the third wealthiest nation in the world we are now told, has a remarkable story of success to tell, a story that cannot be told without acknowledging the crucial, the central role played by education as a powerful engine of social, political and economic change. Its is also a story that we are only at the start of and your colloquium is part of the restless curiosity we need to keep provoking and encouraging to ensure we maintain our country’s momentum and reveal its fullest potential. More than that this is a debate that transcends national boundaries for it also profoundly affects the ambitions and hopes of nations and peoples around the world as this gathering from the four corners of the globe bears witness to. The OECD draws us into that global debate as part of a global human family whose future security and prosperity lies in the triumph of consensus over conflict.
I thank those who organised this event, in particular the retiring Secretary General of the Department of Education and Science, John Dennehy, whose strong advocacy of a framework for business-education partnerships lies behind this gathering. I don’t know what he plans for his retirement but it is very clear he intends to keep his successors very busy indeed.
In a knowledge-based economy, wisdom, experience and insight that are trapped inside sectoral boundaries are often knowledge that is not being fully harnessed or fully harvested. We have a strong vested interest in creating fluent, efficient conduits between business, industry and education and this forum will, I hope, help advance those partnerships and a culture in which those partnerships flourish spontaneously.
This colloquium provides a unique opportunity to examine the existing and potential relationships between education, business and industry, to scrutinise their likely effectiveness in tomorrow’s world and, in a collaborative spirit, to begin to shape and hone those relationships so that they can help deliver equitable, stable, knowledge-based, just and prosperous societies.
Ireland is a particularly good example of a knowledge-based economy for our greatest natural resource is our people, sometimes referred to as human capital and in that we are rich. We have a highly educated young population whose motivation, innovation and flexibility have helped push Ireland into a new gear economically but even as we talk here, today’s knowledge is rapidly approaching its sell-by date and if our human capital is to flourish it has to have an impatience with complacency and a thirst for what could be rather than what is.
Education and business both have essential roles to play in providing opportunities to learn, to relearn, to re-skill and up-skill throughout life for investment in the human person’s intellectual and ethical development is the basic widget, the basic building block of the knowledge based economy. To the extent that individuals or groups or nations are locked out of knowledge their talent is utterly wasted, their potential thrown away and the lives of families, communities, and whole countries are skewed, even overwhelmed by their inability to rise above endemic poverty, disease and violence.
We have plenty of experience of that waste on this very island where, for generations, education was the prerogative only of the wealthy and where women in particular were seriously restricted in their ambitions. Today we look back with shame on those times when we squandered our potential because we squandered our resources. If you only use half your resources why be surprised when you only realise half your potential. Ireland’s contemporary cultural confidence and economic vibrancy has a very instructive direct relationship with the huge increase in participation by women in our nation’s civic and commercial life.
If skills and knowledge are to be the primary sustainable long-term resources available to our economies and societies in the years ahead, then we had better be doing what it takes to join up the dots between the spheres and sectors which are the primary stakeholders in education and training.
The age of the computer has driven a massive gulf between those who are computer-literate and those who are not; the age of frenzied competition has driven a coach and four through certainty of tenure of any industry or business in any geographic location, the age of mass communications has opened the world to the entrepreneurial risk-taker, the rising tide of expectations is driving all of us into a cross-disciplinary dialogue which is held back by unnecessary boundaries and vanities but accelerated by openness and a willingness to both share with each other and learn from each other. In the Irish language, we have a saying: “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine” (or in English, “People live by helping each other”).
It is clear from the fact that you are here that you believe in the force of that argument. I hope that here you will generously share your own unique part of the jigsaw puzzle and humbly acknowledge the validity of the other bits of that puzzle carried here by each delegate. Maybe here the whole puzzle will begin to make more sense and the pathway to the future will become clearer. I hope so and wish you well in your deliberations.
Go raibh maith agaibh. Thank you.