REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMIN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION STATE APARTMENTS
A Uachtaráin, a Chathaoirligh, a Ard Stiúrtheoir agus a chairde,
Cúis mór bhróid agus áthais é ceiliúradh caoga bhliain. Gabhaim buíochas don bhForas as an seans a thabhairt dom bheith páirteach san ceiliúradh seo. Le caoga bhliain anuas tá áit lárnach ag An Foras Riarachain i socraí na tíre seo. Tá buíochas muintir na hÉireann agus na rialtais éagsúla a bhí i réim ar fud na blianta sin tuillte ag an bhForas. Tugann sé an-shásamh dom bheith anseo inniu leis an bhuíochas seo a ghabailt don bhForas agus a chairde.
We are here this evening to celebrate not just the anniversary of an institution, but the establishment and delivery of an ideal - that the Irish public service should operate to the highest standards in the world. And so we gather to celebrate the many ways in which the IPA has provided Ireland with the best possible support throughout the momentous journey it has taken over the course of the last fifty years.
The celebrations today have included well deserved honorary doctorates, and the launch of Ireland in 2022: One Hundred Years of Self-Government. I warmly congratulate John Fitzgerald, Dermot McCarthy and Frank Murray on the well-deserved recognition of their formidable contributions to the well-being of our country and I congratulate editor Mark Callanan and all the contributors to the Institute’s latest fine publication.
These events certainly convey a strong sense of a job well done but the real monument to the Institute’s success is the phenomenal development that has occurred in Ireland over the course of the last fifty years, culminating in today’s remarkable confluence of peace, prosperity and partnership. No jumble of coincidences brought us to this point, to the best Ireland in our history, with even better to come, but rather the wisdom and commitment of many expert guiding hands none greater among them than the legendary TK Whitaker whose presence here this evening is so welcome. We are also joined by the Institute’s first President, Charlie Murray, and the family of the Institute’s first Director-General, Tom Barrington. They along with the other pioneers of this Institute are entitled to take considerable pride in both this Institute and this Ireland of today for back in 1957 in lean and grim times they set the scene for the growth of a professional public service second to none in the world, with education, training, research and scholarship at the core of its development. The educational excellence which would act as a leaven within the public service was also to become the leaven which would raise Ireland’s game and make it the success story of the European Union.
With an effective mix of solid core traditional values and radical innovation the Institute has watched the standards of our public administration rise steadily but the Institute’s seminal contribution to the modernisation of the public sector has only been possible because of the many civil servants who took advantage of the opportunities the Institute offered. They entered its doors, internalised its vision and translated it into their everyday work. They became the leaven and they are owed the thanks of the Irish people for their dedication to perfecting their own skills and helping to perfect the service they provided to the public.
The Institute’s work covers every section of the public service and in both its openness and its intimacy the opportunities for cross-disciplinary work and cross-fertilisation are richly beneficial at home but it also has a strong international profile evident from its immediate accession to the International Institute of Administrative Sciences, its crucial contribution to the newly independent African administrations of the 1960’s and its more recent assistance to the newly-independent States of central and eastern Europe many of whom are our partners now in the European Union. Our futures and theirs are now formally entwined and no generation in Ireland or in any of our partner member states has ever had a brighter future to look forward to.
Our public service and especially this Institute has had a big role to play in bringing us thus far and we know from the deliberations in the book Ireland in 2022 that your minds have already cast forward to help identify the planning we need to do now to be sure that the best is yet to come.
There is about these times something of a beginning, just a beginning. You have invested fifty years in getting us to this starting point, to a time when so many of the huge mountains you faced in 1957 have crumbled, a weak, low grade agricultural economy, poor infrastructure, mass emigration, high unemployment, widespread educational underachievement, poor North South communications, fraught Dublin Westminster relationships - all these things you have helped consign to history. You have been the writers of a new narrative for Ireland. You were believers in that narrative long before it seemed achievable. You had faith in Ireland and its people when such faith was fair game for cynics.
Fifty years ago you began the work that prepared us well for the landscape of today’s Ireland. Now you are preparing us well for the exciting landscape of tomorrow, that place which might very well see the completion of the ambition we set ourselves as a people and set out in our Constitution—to be a country where the dignity and freedom of the individual is assured and true social order attained. The Proclamation puts it more poetically when it speaks of a time when all the children of the nation are cherished. We have come much closer than any other generation and not by accident but by a design, planned and effected here five decades ago. Every Irish citizen has cause to be deeply grateful to you for you have given us a public service to be proud of and helped create a country to be proud of.
I hope the next fifty years brings even greater momentum and success to the Institute, the public service and to Ireland.
Go neirí libh amach anseo.