REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT A DINNER IN SUPPORT OF THE SYMPOSIUM “A DIALOGUE ON PHILANTHROPY”
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT A DINNER IN SUPPORT OF THE SYMPOSIUM ENTITLED "A DIALOGUE ON PHILANTHROPY"
Good evening, and on behalf of Martin and myself, a very warm welcome, céad míle fáilte, to Áras an Uachtaráin. We are delighted to be able to host this timely gathering of stakeholders from both sides of the Atlantic and I am very grateful to my good neighbour the American Ambassador Tom Foley for helping Ireland to focus on the potential here for a much more structured culture of philanthropy. I hope the discussions over dinner will provide a convivial follow-on to your discussions of earlier today.
There is quite an air of interest around the link between Ireland’s contemporary wealth and the possibilities offered by philanthropy. Charitable giving is part of our DNA. It has been from time immemorial and it has been the hallmark of the Irish at home and abroad even in times of great poverty. We also have considerable experience of the collective power of the pennies of even the poorest, for it was those pennies which seed-bedded history-changing organisations like the Land League, the GAA and the Credit Union movement. It was those pennies that built churches, schools, community centres in every corner of Ireland and many a corner of Africa and today the euro generation is still digging deep into its pockets for causes close to home and around the world. It is a culture of spontaneous generosity to be proud of.
We also have very recent experience of the impact that focussed and intensive generosity can have in the resolution of problems once considered intractable. We only have to think of Northern Ireland where the centuries-old sectarian and tribal divides were bridged by the judicious application of considerable funding from the Ireland Funds, the International Funds for Ireland and EU funding. The incremental but real changes wrought by that funding delivered deep into the heart of communities, and were of immeasurable value to the development and ultimate success of the Peace Process. We think of the changes wrought in our education sector by Atlantic Philanthropies and many other donors whose investment in our knowledge equity has utterly changed our prospects.
Ireland is set to write an utterly new chapter in her history. For the first time we have a peaceful island, with a rapidly growing cross border culture of good neighbourliness, to match the Dublin-Westminster friendship which is the warmest it has ever been in possibly a millennium. For the first time we have behind us a generation of economic success and from it the growth of a wealthy, high-achieving indigenous entrepreneurial sector.
Many of those who have earned considerable wealth in recent years are already deeply implicated in charitable outreach both in Ireland and among the poorest of the world’s poor. Not all might agree with Andrew Carnegie, that “he who dies rich, dies disgraced.” But we can understand him to be raising the question about how best to utilise, in the interests of humanity, the resource that is wealth.
In our population of some four million, by one reckoning there are some 30,000 Euro-millionaires, and at least 300 persons worth more than €30m. This remarkable cohort has an opportunity to do extraordinary good, with a reach, and on a scale that is, quite simply, unprecedented. If that scale can he harnessed to a strategy which facilitates a culture of planned giving and which targets that giving towards outcomes that are manifestly life-enhancing, we could not only advance much more quickly our ambition to be an egalitarian republic which is only truly complete when no-one is on the margins, but can also advance our ambition to live in a world where everyone has access to decent education, healthcare, employment opportunity and environmental stability.
The United States is, of course, a leader in philanthropy and indeed it was the US which led the way in applying philanthropy to the deep-rooted problems that led to conflict in Northern Ireland.
This is a debate other countries would love to be having. It comes precisely at the confluence of peace, prosperity and partnership. Importantly it comes just as we are at the very start of a journey through which we will reveal for the first time in our country’s long troubled history, what kind of Ireland can be built by people first of all who stay, people who come as emigrants, people who once ignored each others’ true potential, people who wasted so much time mired in the vanities of history that their future was eaten away one miserable day at a time.
Now a confident, well-educated generation has the surging energy that comes from many sources in today’s Ireland. They have already shown a talent for global entrepreneurialism and enviable achievement. They still have the Irish heart for helping others.
My neighbour now asks the question whether it is time to learn new, more exciting, more ambitious ways of giving and to contemplate altogether grander scales of outcomes. Among the privileged elite of past generations there were similar debates. They built workhouses, soup kitchens and funded famine ships. Our entrepreneurs are the children’s children of an overlooked poor people deemed worthless in the eyes of the rich. They are the people who transcended that grim past, proved their worth, revealed their genius in a kaleidoscope of ways.
They are sharp, clever and they are problem solvers par excellence. They are perfectionists, dreamers and they possess today not simply wealth but financial
power which when it is allied to moral responsibility, when it is harnessed to philanthropy can literally move mountains. I hope that we will see that power used and used well in writing the next and most exciting chapter in Irish history.
Enjoy your time here at the Áras and thank you for caring about the next chapter and the people in it.