REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CENTRE FOR CROSS BORDER STUDIES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CENTRE FOR CROSS BORDER STUDIES NORTH/SOUTH COLLABORATION GRADUATES’ EVENT
My thanks to Andy Pollack for the invitation to this day when the third training course in North South Cooperation for public officials comes to a happy conclusion for its graduates.
The participants in the course are centre stage and its good to see so many of the graduates of the previous two courses here also. The success of the courses rests on their commitment to it and then their application of its principles over the course of their careers. Each participant knows how much the course has meant to them, how it has challenged them, deepened their insight, stretched their experience, developed their skills. Each knows the short-term sacrifice in terms of family and social life and the long-term value in terms of their own professional development and in terms of the future investment in strengthening civic society North and South. You started as strangers and now part as friends whose work on whichever side of the border will long continue to be enriched by the course and the network of friendships it engendered.
It is a great testimony to the success of the course, that the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Co-operation Ireland and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy are coming together again to offer a fourth training course this year for a further thirty participants.
Year on year the landscape faced by each group of participants has altered perceptibly and for the better. Northern Ireland is now hopefully only a matter of weeks away from devolved government and from fulfilling the deep ambition for shared peace, prosperity and partnership, set out in the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement sought to comprehensively address the complex of historically problematic relationships which bedevilled the search for peace and reconciliation. By any stretch of the imagination those relationships have been transformed. The coming weeks will be a measure of how relations within Northern Ireland’s divided communities have improved. The relationship between the Irish and British Governments has never been better at any time in our respective histories than it is today. As partners in Europe, Ireland and Britain’s political leaders and civil servants already work closely and collegially together. As partners in the Peace Process, the mutual focus and respect is palpable and its achievements are historic. On the North South axis too, much has changed for the better and as trust has grown so too the economic and social potential of good neighbourliness is being explored and harnessed by those who are determined to create the best future possible for all who share this island.
The Centre for Cross Border Studies has done much to help open up hearts and minds to how best to harvest these hard won opportunities, and each of you, in undertaking the studies whose excellence we acknowledge today, has helped ensure that the landscape the next group of graduates face will be healthier and better still.
We just have to look at the many benefits that have already been achieved for people throughout the island by co-operating. Some of you may already have been working directly on initiatives like free all island travel for pensioners, the Single Electricity Market, mutual access to health services, abolition of mobile phone roaming charges, joint trade delegations, co-operation in science, technology and innovation, business development, trade, investment, and skills and much more. The invaluable life enhancing impact of these imaginative and sensible collaborations came home to me forcefully a few months ago when I was privileged to launch the All Ireland Mental Health and Deafness Service, a new service for the men women and children living lives of tragic desperation as they cope with both deafness and mental illness. As a group they are not large and they are spread very thinly across this island, so thinly that two separate services were not viable and so, for a long time, that meant there was no dedicated service at all anywhere on the island. What a contrast once the word collaboration hit the table – suddenly that which was impossible alone became possible together.
These things should make us proud and hopeful for they reveal the best in our hearts and use the best of our resources, and out of them comes that thing we all want – the very best for the citizens of both jurisdictions. That is your vocation as public servants, and I hope that in the years ahead, as the seeds of imagination and ambition sown through your studies yield their exciting harvest, that our children will indeed live in the best of times this island has ever known.
I wish you the very best of luck in your future careers.
Thank you.