REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT TERRA MADRE IRELAND 2008 WATERFORD INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT TERRA MADRE IRELAND 2008 WATERFORD INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY FRIDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 2008
Dia dhíbh, a cháirde go léir. Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh inniu.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for your warm welcome to Ireland’s first such festival. A huge thank you to our own legendary Darina Allen for her kind invitation. It was certainly worth the cross-country journey from County Clare to Waterford to join so many delegates from home and abroad.
To each one of you I offer the traditional Irish céad míle fáilte, one hundred thousand welcomes, to Ireland - the Food Island - and to this festival where you will see something of the means by which we earn this title. I hope that you have a wonderful time here in Waterford. The Irish palate and the Irish food industry, both for domestic and international consumption, have all been conspicuously revolutionised in recent years. We have, firstly, a wonderful food heritage and, secondly, an ambition to secure a wonderful, healthy and profitable food future. The first is the bedrock of the second for, as Slow Food Ireland rightly reminds us, we have a very rich resource in our traditional food culture.
It is also no harm at all that this year is UN International Year of the Potato, about as traditional an Irish food as you can get, and one which in many ways changed our entire history. A nation that over a short few summers lost a million of its people to starvation as we did, and two starving million more to emigration, has reason to know how important are all those issues that are encompassed by the word ‘food’ - from nutrition value to security of food supply, from affordability to accessibility.
In Ireland, as elsewhere, food has played an important and determining part in the shaping of our past and our present. In some parts of the country food is an integral part of our local identity whether it be Blaa in Waterford, or Ulster champ or Dublin coddle or any of the myriad of specialities that distinguish one parish from another and fly happily in the face of a homogenisation which is not always the same exciting thing as internationalisation. Here you can find that local culinary imprint side by side with the best of cuisines from around the globe. They inform and enhance one another and in these times of greater affluence, education and fluent European and international networking, they have given us access to interesting and varied food that is of high quality.
We make much of hospitality in Ireland and that hospitality is more often than not expressed in a shared meal. We make much of family and community here too and again food plays a big role in family and community gatherings. I should know for I visit communities the length and breadth of this country and I couldn’t begin to count the number of trestle tables I have witnessed groaning under the weight of home-cooked food, prepared with love in order to enhance a special day.
Slow Food Ireland and Terra Madre help us to focus more deeply on those values of care for one another and care for ourselves through caring deeply and intelligently about the food we consume.
Terra Madre Ireland helps us to chart a path to great food “by reconciling our traditional skills with the best of science”. But in order to do that we have to work on building a society that is passionate and knowledgeable about good food and encouraging of those who are so central to its production - the next generation of farmers, of cooks, both amateur and professional, food entrepreneurs, food scientists and consumers and all those whose work impacts on the food chain.
Today, thankfully, Ireland’s thriving food industry is among the best in the world. Our home and export markets have quite remarkable success stories to tell and those stories rest entirely on your pursuit of quality, your setting of standards and adherence to set standards and regulations, your entrepreneurial courage, your pride in product and in Ireland’s reputation. The artisan and specialty food sectors are going from strength to strength, introducing new generations to the sheer goodness and value of great locally grown or made produce. What is more, these goods and products are being tested in a marketplace which is more competitive, more regulated, more educated than ever before. The questioning, demanding, well-educated consumers are their customers, your customers and you have, by your own efforts, given them trust and confidence in your produce.
Irish food is already in the throes of one of its most exciting chapters ever for our once homogeneous society is now home to many thousands of immigrants who carry with them the story of food in their own country. They are already manifestly influencing the products on our shelves and the flavours and foods we experience daily. They will impact on Irish cuisine just as Irish cuisine will impact on them. Some of them, especially from parts of Africa, come to us from countries whose contemporary histories are being twisted and skewed by widespread crop failure, or food supply chains interrupted by violence, or food access made impossible by wildly spiralling costs.
We, by contrast, face challenges of a quite different order despite our own rising costs and the effects of the global economic downturn. The margins for wastefulness and carelessness around food have shrunk for a lot of people. For many others, there never was any such margin. They have always had to watch each penny very carefully. These slightly more frugal times are our opportunity to ensure that we spend wisely and well on our foods and that we and our children eat wisely and well.
Thank you Darina, and all of Slow Food Ireland, not just for hosting this event so ably, but for helping us to make the good food choices and decisions. That will keep us healthy as families and as a society. Enjoy the festival and spread its message.