REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COLLEGE OF ANAESTHETISTS OF IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION AND OPENING OF THE EDUCATION AND TRAINING CENTRE OF CAI
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Is mór an ónóir agus pléisúir dom bheith anseo inniu.
I would like to thank President Moriarty for the very kind invitation that allows me to perform the official opening of the new education and training centre and at the same time celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the foundation of the Faculty of Anaesthetists. I have shared some very special personal moments in the College of Anaesthetists becoming the College’s first Honorary Fellow in 1998 shortly after its foundation and receiving the Gilmartin Medal of the Faculty of Anaesthetists back in 1996. However this day is the College’s tribute to itself - a statement of intent about the future and the culmination of a considerable investment in terms of time, planning and finance. Yet the links with the past are strong too for here we have the most sophisticated, modern high tech training facilities housed within the elegant walls of a fine Georgian building. So as one generation gives way to another, nothing is lost, the past is respected, the present is enhanced and the future secured. A fiftieth anniversary celebration which can rightly reflect proudly on fifty action-packed, fast-changing years is also setting the scene for the next fifty years. It is doing so in much more than mere words of intent but in the planning around teaching and training in anaesthesia which these new facilities testify to.
The poppy on the College’s Coat of Arms harks back to a time when analgesia was a crude and basic art aided by extracts from the opium poppy. Even Cuchulain is said to have taken a sleeping draught which would have made an ordinary mortal sleep for 24 hours but in the case of Cuchulain he was awake after just a hour. And as Juliet of the House of Capulet found to her tragic cost, inducing a sedative state does not always guarantee a pleasant awakening. The scientific knowledge and the skilled competence to precisely control anaesthesia really begins here in Ireland only a hundred and fifty years ago with the ground breaking work of Professor John MacDonnell, whose influence is also woven into the College’s Coat of Arms. The scientific curiosity which led John MacDonnell to pioneer a radical game changing innovation has been rewarded by the rapid and still on-going development of anaesthesia as a lead branch of the medical arts which has facilitated enormous progress in what medicine and surgery can accomplish.
Today your work spans a vast realm of specialisms which are life-changing,
life-enhancing and even death enhancing in terms of what you are now able to bring to palliative care and the management of both acute and chronic pain. On a daily basis, you deal with human beings at all stages from before birth to end-of-life and your professional skill and care allow a realm of hope to enter their lives which was simply absent in other generations though yearned for by many. Today is my opportunity to say thank you for this vital work and to record how much we as a nation owe to those eleven founding Board members who fifty years ago founded the Faculty of Anaesthetists of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Two are still going strong Dr Harold Love and Dr Ray Davys [and I’m delighted Dr Davys has joined us for today’s ceremony]. Since the Faculty became an independent College in 1998 it has been a powerful engine driving high professional standards and first-rate education, training and research in anaesthesia, intensive care and pain medicine and not just in Ireland. Your students come from all over the globe, so your reach and influence is extensive. It has made many friends for Ireland and created a very effective and quiet ambassadorship wherever your graduates live and work. The training programme in Malawi, in partnership with Irish Aid, tells us a lot about the culture of care that exists here for those in the world who are still struggling against poverty and disease, just as these new premises tell us a lot about your care for Ireland’s future as a first class, global leader in anaesthetics.
It now gives me great pleasure to wish the former Faculty now College, a very happy 50th birthday and declare the new education and training centre of the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland formally open.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.