REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE CONFERENCE OF RELIGIOUS OF IRL
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE CONFERENCE OF RELIGIOUS OF IRELAND, GREAT SOUTHERN HOTEL
Dia is Mhuire dhíbh.
Is breá liom bheith anseo i bhúr measc ag an ócaid specialta seo, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhúiochas a chur in iúl díbh as an chuireadh agus an fáilte fíorchaoin.
There is a wonderful passage in G.K. Chesterton where he contradicts the mathematicians and says that ‘two is not twice one, two is two thousand times one’, for he was putting his finger on a great truth that ‘there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally’. And what is true of one ally, is even more true of being part of a living community. As we say in Irish ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid’. Isolation is the opposite of the connectedness which is the web holding communities together. Connectedness is the balm which keeps us mentally engaged. It even keeps us physically healthy. We desperately need to be able to depend upon our communities to be our allies in our troubles. Even more valuable to us is the knowledge that our friends and neighbours know they can depend upon us for support in time of their need.
As human beings we have a basic need for contact with other human beings. Our connections with others, our relations with them give context, purpose, focus and meaning to our lives. Without that connectedness chances are we will not flourish as we could and should and that the fullness of our lives will be tangibly diminished. This is exactly what John Donne meant when he said that ‘no man is an island’. Community support and strength is potent, its presence matters, its absence is a chilling thought. When recently I visited the distraught families of the five lovely young schoolgirls who were the tragic victims of the Navan bus crash, each in turn spoke with conviction of the wave of support they received from their immediate community and from all around the country. It mattered to them and, while each of the bereaved faces a dreadful personal journey of loss and anguish that none of us can go for them, still it matters that we are prepared to go with them.
Such a longing is deep in the human heart, and it shows itself in surprising ways. Last year I met a former inmate of Mountjoy who was part of a prison outreach team doing bricklaying work on a new community centre outside the prison. Long after his sentence was up he returned to that work each day until it was finished, so taken was he by the chance to contribute to the welfare of others and to be respected for that contribution. In that simple experience he had learnt the truth of the saying from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi - that it is in giving we receive. That two-way traffic of decency and goodness is an essential element of the strength and resilience of any civic society but it is subtle in its structure for its underlying dynamic is simple choice and it depends each day on people making that choice anew.
As a nation we are good at connectedness, that ‘teangmháil’, that human spark which spreads from one of us to the whole community. It is a vital part of Irish life at home and abroad. In some ways it is more obvious when you travel, for then you see the reality behind the statistics, the seventy-five million people with Irish identity, so many of whom over generations and bitter times created organisations and societies to help each other through, to make each other feel cared about, to give them access to the familiar tone and texture of Irish culture, to make life more tolerable. That compassionate outreach to one another is strong in the Irish psyche as we saw so clearly in the magnificent response to the Special Olympics and to the tsunami disaster. They opened a big window on a part of Irish life that goes on day in and day out in a million individual acts of graciousness and generosity that give us youth clubs, sports clubs, charities, respite care, Christmas parties for senior citizens, shelters for the homeless, advocacy for refugees, fundraisers for good causes at home and around the world, and a litany of connections that make of us a human family and not simply a bunch of strangers. Many of those initiatives revolve around church and radiate out from the churches as parish or diocesan community. History and demographics have put church four square at the centre of this thing, this impulse and this phenomenon we call community. So if church is undergoing change we can be sure so, too, is community and vice versa. It was Will Rogers who once said – “Even if you are on the right track, if you don’t move along you will get run over.”
The partnership between church and community has been phenomenally successful in Ireland - but there are forces coming along the track which have the capacity to run over it.
The American sociologist, Robert Putnam spoke in Dublin recently of the trend away from community in the United States. He points to the decline in what he calls ‘public capital’ when there is a loss of volunteerism, informal sociability and social trust. People have become much busier, more time at work, more time commuting, more time living in new green site neighbourhoods, more heterogeneous environments, more privatisation of previously voluntary care, less church activity, more watching of t.v. or computer screens and more distractions generally. Does any of that resonate in today’s Ireland? We are certainly busier, and more employed. Voluntary societies say that volunteers are harder to recruit. There are echoes of it in the amalgamations or closures of parishes, as vocations in the Catholic Church, though not the other smaller religious denominations, plummet to negligible levels. The phenomenal growth in new housing has created swathes of strangers, many from outside Ireland, who need community and are just discovering that it doesn’t come with the fitted kitchen – it has to be made by neighbour greeting neighbour, organising the coffee mornings, the car pools, the sports for kids, the mutuality that knits strangers over time into a caring, functioning community.
It is ironic that in this age of instant global communication, when there are more mobile phones than people, chat rooms across the Internet and new tools for communicating seem to appear every few months, it is our connections with our next-door neighbours that are in most danger of weakening. Community is precious and its recreation of itself over generations has created an illusory impression that it will keep on re-inventing itself even if we do nothing. Truth is that if we do nothing, it will diminish and we will have a much reduced quality of life as a result.
Finding ways to support, encourage and strengthen community is every citizen’s responsibility, but the church has a special onus and mission in this regard, precisely because it is such a hub of community connectivity. Confidence has been in short supply these times as scandals drift and cynicism take their toll. No two parishes have the same story to tell. In some, dynamic lay involvement is helping to do a lot more than merely holding the pass, while in others there is a demoralising listlessness.
I don’t have easy answers to the riddle of how to fully energise and empower community or how to avoid the loss of civic or public capital which is one of the primary resources of a humanly decent society. I am constantly amazed by our young people’s capacity to keep formidably connected to each other through use of mobile phones, chartrooms and e-mail. Maybe they have a message that those very technologies, properly harnessed, could help enhance the bonds of community and keep us talking, keep us relating in new ways. Some time ago I saw a research project on elderly housebound deaf people in England who were given videophones so that they could keep in touch with each other. Each recounted a story of lives virtually reborn by that simple initiative. We Irish are as famous today for computers as we are for community, and the success of websites like www.sacredspace.com is very telling, but a list of hits is still not a community, though maybe with an expanding technological reach and imagination, it could be an effective part of tomorrow’s connected community. Yet for all that realm of new possibility, we know that it is in each other’s company that we truly flourish as each uses his or her unique gifts and talents in the service of the other. The magnificence of humanity at its very best is revealed in a tear, a handshake, a comforting hand on a shoulder, a cheer at a match, applause at a concert and in all the shared memories that stitch strangers into each other’s lives.
Not long ago I visited South Korea. A former Prime Minister approached me. He is now a very elderly man who was born in North Korea and he had witnessed dreadful suffering in his lifetime. He said “I have an important message for Ireland. Thank you for sending the Columban Fathers.” I don’t think the Virtual Reality of Columban Fathers would have produced the same response or result! Every where I go in the world where our Irish missionaries have established a presence the story is the same - we are welcomed as dear friends, not recently arrived foreigners - because of the investment in care and community made by our native sons and daughters. They did it the hard way. They took themselves away from the comfort of home, they sought no thanks or payment, no recognition or reward. They didn’t breeze in for a week or two and disappear, they stayed the course. They earned respect and affection not just for themselves but for their country, for its values and its vision of humanity. They told their stories at home and pockets opened as Ireland lived her commitment to the world’s poor in her often understated and unremarked way. In their home parishes and adopted parishes, one community initiative after another started around the parish priest’s kitchen table. There is a lot of skill, wisdom and experience about community-building and indeed shared community living in this gathering. You have a huge contribution to make to the debate that will take us to a society so rich in civic capital that we can create and sustain the partnerships of endeavour which allow us to deal effectively with the things which plague us - from binge drinking, to street crime, from suicide to road deaths, from elder abuse to drug abuse, from unwanted pregnancies to domestic violence, from poverty to the waste of human potential - especially still the potential of women.
In my inauguration address last November, I outlined my concerns about the human infrastructure we offer each other through friendship and community solidarity.
We are such a lucky generation in many ways, so high-achieving and successful that it would be sad if in winning our prosperity we lost our time for one another as has happened elsewhere. Now would be a very bad time to get careless about community. Your legacy of investment in community is second to none. We who are the beneficiaries and the stakeholders thank you for all you have done and keep on doing to hold us in the palm of that loving hand. Lets between us make sure that tomorrow’s Ireland is an exemplar before the world of a country that does the work to make community and makes community work.