REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A DINNER TO CELEBRATE THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GLENCREE CENTRE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A DINNER TO CELEBRATE THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GLENCREE CENTRE FOR PEACE AND RECONCILIATION
Dia dhíbh go léir. Is ocáid an-speisialta é seo d’Ionad Glencree agus tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo anocht agus í a cheiliúradh libh.
I am pleased and honoured to be here to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. My thanks to Chief Executive, Máirín Colleary for the invitation that allows me to share a very precious and hard-earned milestone.
There is an old Irish saying - tus maith is leath na hoibre - a good start is half the work and the cruelly difficult work of peace and reconciliation was surely given a good start here at the Glencree Centre with its unique vocation.
Even though you have had to work through chaos, the Glencree Centre in its atmosphere has always been about creating the feeling of peace, of introducing calm to turbulent hearts and souls, used to the daily drama of sectarian or political violence. Here peace has been as much lived as talked, reminding those who had forgotten or never knew it that there is in a peaceful tolerant society, a rich prize for every single citizen, a prize worth working for and taking risks for. Tom Moore in one of his ballads says “If there’s peace to be found in the world, A heart that was humble might hope for it here.” As good a description as any of Glencree and of its ambition for our island. Today we meet at the end of thirty years, in circumstances much more hope-filled, much less violent than at any time these past three decades. Eaten bread, they say is soon forgotten and what a dreadful mistake it would be to forget the path by which we came here, the graveyards filled on the way, the hearts broken, the defiant determination of the peacemakers through it all. The book I have the pleasure of launching will not allow us the indulgence of forgetting and will I hope provoke the gratitude you deserve as well as the impulse we need for the work of the next thirty years.
The contributors to ‘A Place for Peace: Glencree Reconciliation Centre 30 years on’ have provided their own unique perspectives and record of the many stories that took Glencree from a simple idea many years ago, to a lived, successful reality today. So many hands tried to make light work of lifting history’s dead weight off our shoulders and sometimes it felt like Sisyphus did with that infernal stone that kept rolling back down the mountain. But people of faith just kept on and today that perseverance has paid off in ways that allow us to look at the unfinished tasks ahead and believe we can yet shape a future to be proud of. This publication is a credit to you, and to your belief in the Centre and its work. I congratulate everyone involved.
Conflicts tend to produce triumphant winners, broken losers. Neither lives together happily ever after for always there is the long grass where vengeance festers in loser’s hearts and uncertainty colonises the peace of mind of winners. Here at Glencree a new construct was offered to both. Here was a place to be treated with respect whatever the side. Here was a place to be listened to and to listen. Here was a place to meet each other, greet each other, befriend each other and begin to do that awful job so brilliantly described by John Hewitt when he said - “ we build to fill the centuries arrears.” So they came here in their brokenness, brought their scars, their pride, their hurts, fears, distrusts, their vanities, their hates and hopes. Here the fragments of humanity were gently stitched together. Because one human being whose face is turned to the future and whose heart is turned to peace is one less to worry about and peace can be built one person at a time. If they had not come, the Centre would long since have closed and so we salute the men and women whose personal search for a way through the turmoil of conflict led them through these doors and often only after much soul searching. Through them the skill and confidence of Glencree has grown and it has quietly extended its caring hand across our troubled globe.
Today our Peace Process allows us to believe we have a growing good news story to tell, to ourselves and to the world. To have pitted yourselves against the powerful forces of history and to have transcended them as you have is a remarkable story and if we are very lucky please God we will live long enough to see the best chapters of that story written.
For tonight it is good to gather in the name of Glencree and its spirit and to know that the blank pages of hope were filled here by men and women who believed in the capacity of the human person to change and in our power as individuals and as community to turn hatred to love, hurt to healing, death to life. God Bless everything you have done here and continue to do until the job is done and a happy generation looks at these times through the lens of a new, relaxed history and knows who dug the wells they drink from.
Comhghairdeas libh arís as ucht an obair iontach atá idir lámh agaibh ar feadh tríocha bliain anuas agus comhghairdeas libh freisin as ucht an foilseachán brea nua, A Place for Peace. Go raibh maith agaibh.