Remarks by President McAleese at the 6th International Conference on Social Work in Health
Remarks by President McAleese at the 6th International Conference on Social Work in Health and Mental Health
Dia dhíbh, a cháirde go léir. Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh inniu. I’d like to thank the President of University College Dublin, Dr Hugh Brady, for his kind invitation to speak at this, the 6th International Conference on Social Work in Health and Mental Health. I am delighted that Dublin is playing host to such an important gathering of social work practitioners and researchers and that so many have travelled from far and near to be part of the discussions which will guide your professional footsteps in the years ahead. Let me offer to each of you the traditional Irish welcome – céad míle fáile – one hundred thousand welcomes and especially to those who have come from abroad and those experiencing Ireland for the first time.
You have come here with a serious purpose and the theme of your conference is certainly no easy option. It pitches you straight into the maelstrom of everyday life and into what you can bring to the men, women and children whose complex lives, issues and problems bring them into your orbit through the health and mental health systems within which you work. You are an important part of our collective, civic response systems through which we take shared responsibility for the suffering of our fellow citizens and try to bring the best support and problem-solving skills we can to bear on their lives. We cannot travel another’s life journey for them but we can travel with them and that is what you do, you accompany people for part of the journey that is their life and you do so because of your belief, society’s expectation and your client’s hope that you will be able to make that journey better, safer and surer.
As social workers, your professional skills help reconstruct lives that have been skewed by any one of the many events, accidents or circumstances which can cast the shadow of illness or mental illness over a life. You see cases that start badly and end well. You see cases that start well and end badly. You see cases that are all middle and no end. You confront situations that are at times formidable in their consequences, heartbreaking in their wastefulness of human potential and frustrating in their intractability. You have to navigate through problems that others prefer to run away from or ignore and you have to find ways of letting your skills and talents infuse into the lives of your service users an energy for change, an insight into its possibilities and a determination to recover or establish a better quality of life. Your work often takes you to the margins of society where positivity is not easy to find, where healthy interactions and relationships, even with the best will in the world, are inhibited by all sorts of embedded attitudes, experiences, systems and structures.
We have a saying in Irish ‘giorraíonn beirt bóthar’ – two shorten the road, and you are very important companions and sometimes navigators on the journey towards individual recovery and personal fulfilment and our communal journey towards being sensitive, caring societies which outreach effectively to our vulnerable citizens.
Your context has changed quite dramatically thanks to the global recession. Its impact on individuals, on family life and on communities has been dreadful. Wholesale job losses, high personal debt and a general pervasive disappointment following on from a period of apparent prosperity have showered fresh burdens on many people. In our own case the changing demographics of Ireland, with considerable inward migration during the years of prosperity present new challenges and dilemmas at every level from national politics to local parish. The economic resilience and coping skills of nations have been tested as well as the economic and emotional resilience of individuals, families and communities. Sooner or later these things show up in a series of miserable statistics but long before they do they show up in your offices, or in your files as people in pain, people whose mental anguish has physical and psychological effects which need your expert help. You had full caseloads before the current economic difficulties. Now your workload feels the pressures of the changed context which includes greater and more complex demands at a time when healthcare resources are under pressure, further compounding the challenges that you face.
There are many problems crying out for solutions and it is unlikely that one person, one place has them all. But in this room there are experienced professionals whose distilled wisdom and intuition allows us to hope that new insight can be formed from a generous sharing of information and from debating and deliberating together across geographic and disciplinary boundaries which might otherwise be cul de sacs where the potential of cross-fertilisation gets stopped in its tracks. Your opinions can change outcomes. You can have a powerful influence on public opinion, policy and practice. As we strive to place a stronger focus on promoting and maintaining good health and positive mental health, your evaluation and analysis of what works and what does not are essential to the interrogative processes we need to undergo so that we have faith in what we are doing and sound ideas about where we need to go. Your willingness to innovate and drive transformation in healthcare is an essential element in achieving good outcomes for both patients and public.
So this conference is not time-out, though it has the big advantage of a fresh change of scene and the chance to focus on major issues away from the fray of day-to-day pressures. I hope the friendly exchanges in Dublin will help sustain a sense of solidarity among social work professionals across the world whose vocation and purpose are the very same – the desire to make a truly positive difference in people’s lives. I hope you will leave re-energised by new ideas and with renewed confidence in this noble profession to which you have committed your lives and on which the wellbeing of so many lives depends.
I thank each of you, whether practitioner or researcher, for the great service you provide each and every day and for coming to Dublin to be invest in the future of your profession, our health services and the quality of life of our citizens, especially those most troubled. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.