REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE JOINT 30TH ANNIVERSARIES OF THE CFNI AND COOPERATION IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE JOINT 30TH ANNIVERSARIES OF THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FOR NI AND COOPERATION IRELAND
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm welcome to this celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland and Cooperation Ireland. I would like to thank Avila Kilmurray and Peter Sheridan for the kind invitation to address this conference and I would also like to thank Baroness Goudie of CFNI who unfortunately couldn’t join us today due to the ongoing air traffic disruption.
Anniversaries always invite a degree of retrospection and it is worth reminding ourselves just what it was that prompted the foundation of these organizations at that moment in history. Both were about the business of inserting a strategic and determined push towards reconciliation in a highly dysfunctional environment rendered toxic by conflicting political ambitions and sectarian divisions. The preceding decade of inter-communal violence had seen Northern Ireland descend into a seemingly hopeless cycle of violence and retribution which merely reinforced polarization. Yet there were people who refused to accept the counsel of hopelessness or the inevitability of embedded communal strife. They believed that problems could be worked out by dialogue rather than death. They believed that deep down no-one and no community saw a real future in conflict. They believed that reconciliation was not only possible it was a moral imperative and they made it their responsibility to become the champions and advocates of the changes that would in time help both communities build a shared and sustainable peace.
Those who were born at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties reached adulthood just as the investment in peace began to show its first dividends with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. You know better than most just how complex, frustrating and difficult was the journey from conflict to consensus, how many hours were invested in building up cross-community relationships, addressing massive levels of mistrust, woundedness and victim-hood, in showing in practical ways how much of real value was to be gained by working together rather than going toe to toe. It was and it remains difficult, draining and back-breaking work but today it is vindicated by a level of success that thirty years ago would have seemed an unlikely pipe dream. Today’s peace may not always look pretty but it is vastly less ugly than the absence of peace that first started your organisations on their mission of change.
There has to be cause for real joy and celebration in the fact that the milestone of your 30th birthdays is marked by a perceptible consolidation of the peace. It may still be too soon to talk of two traditions, one community but the wall of cross-community solidarity which has greeted dissident paramilitary violence has been as reassuring as it has been loud in its denunciation and its determination. There has been manifest improvement in all the key relationships which are pivotal to the peace – those within Northern Ireland, those between North and South and those between Ireland and Great Britain. At no time over my lifetime have those relationships been as healthy and as collegial as they are now and their maintenance and development is an important pathway to permanent peace and stability. The recent completion of devolution by the transfer of policing and justice powers is testament to the triumph of political engagement and the power of the growing culture of political cooperation to transcend division and find mutually agreeable solutions. Anyone writing a forward history of Northern Ireland thirty years ago would have been excoriated had they scripted a power-sharing government which included the DUP and Sinn Fein, never to mention one in which those parties held the roles of First and Deputy First Minister.
Thirty years ago we probably did not know how utterly essential it was that there were people who could dream the impossible dream of peace and work quietly, insistently for its delivery. Those pioneers of a peace built person by person, day by day are to be found in many courageous individuals and organizations among them Cooperation Ireland and the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland. Not everyone was ready to join the journey thirty years ago but over the years more and more people, thanks to your efforts, decided to take a chance, to move beyond the vanities of history and shape a fresh new chapter for Northern Ireland and their children. Even those once completely wedded to violence as a means of achieving their objectives were persuaded that there was a better, more effective and more humanly uplifting way. There was a mountain of historic and fresh hurt, distrust and cynicism to be trudged through. There were disasters along the way that set the journey back, sometimes years. But miraculously the peacemakers did not give up and working separately and together they created a momentum which in time transformed the landscape of connections. Instead of drowning each other out, people started listening to one another and discovered that despite a welter of different views on history, religion and politics, there was the makings of shared future in the things on which they could find agreement or accept compromise. Outsiders looking at what you started with thirty years ago and what you have today might call this change a miracle but you know that such miracles are not overnight phenomena, rather they are wrought the hard way by great and relentless investment in peace-building.
As the shadow of conflict retreats from the streets, Cooperation Ireland and the CFNI are not left without challenges for the spectre of sectarianism still exerts a baleful power, the last remnants of paramilitarism still have to be dispensed with, the hard to reach communities which bear the imprint of social inequality, alienation and underachievement have to be brought into the mainstream of opportunity and the fragile plant of peace has to be nurtured and nourished until it is robust enough to stand emphatically on its own two feet. Your programmes are now an essential driver of the emerging new culture, new ethos of mutually respectful good neighbourliness which will secure Northern Ireland’s future as a place at peace within itself and with its neighbour.
The institutions established under the Good Friday Agreement provide the political architecture for peace. The political institutions are driven by politicians and political parties who are becoming more and more adept at bridging divisions through dialogue. Civic society is becoming more and more engaged with the work of peace building and reconciliation. Your work places you at the heart of that civic responsibility for making the future a place all can be proud of and part of. Throughout this 30th anniversary celebration, CFNI and Cooperation Ireland are asking people to “change the conversation,” so that old attitudes, old ways can be changed and hope in a fresh future can gain a hold of people’s hearts, minds, voices and hands. Just as the pioneers for peace talked a radical new language thirty years ago, you are now inviting the people of 2010 to cast their minds forward another thirty years, to imagine their society as they would like it to be and to begin the delicate but deliberate process of change which will be necessary to deliver that fresh, newly imagined peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian and contented society.
The opening chapters of that society have already been written with the help of Cooperation Ireland and the Community Foundation of Northern Ireland. By far the most difficult chapters have been written. But the most exciting chapters lie ahead for they will reveal what division could not, they will reveal what partnership and joint effort can achieve for all the people of Northern Ireland. For a long time this place was associated with a seemingly implacable hatred that brought devastation. Today it is associated with the miracle of peace. The Pulitzer prize winning writer Willa Cather once said very tellingly, "Where there is great love there are always miracles." Only a stubborn love of this place and its people could have inspired the peacemakers to start the work that is the heartland of Co-operation Ireland, to CFNI. Only great love could have sustained it through some of the darkest days in the modern history of this island and we are a privileged generation to have lived to see the triumph of love over hatred, to have seen the gift of peace emerge miraculously from the debris of conflict.
For all the miracle workers we give thanks. For the organisations who made the work of peace their vocation and their mission and for those who will carry these organisations through the next thirty years we wish energy, enthusiasm and above all success. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.