REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE CONFERENCE OF THE ASSOCIATED COUNTRYWOMEN OF THE WORLD
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE EUROPEAN AREA CONFERENCE OF THE ASSOCIATED COUNTRYWOMEN OF THE WORLD
Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo i bhur measc inniu. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as ucht bhur bhfáilte chaoin agus cneasta.
Thank you to the Irish Countrywomen’s Association for inviting me to open this prestigous event which brings together delegates from fifteen European countries. It is a particular pleasure to congratulate the ICA on being honoured with hosting this major event in the Associated Countrywomen of the World calendar. I offer each delegate Ireland’s traditional welcome ‘cead míle fáilte’ - a hundred thousand welcomes and I hope that these days in Dublin will forge friendships and memories to last a lifetime.
I know that all the associations represented here today provide invaluable social support to women especially rural women all across Europe. Our Irish Countrywomen’s Association is an exemplary showcase of the work that is undertaken through each one of your associations. The ICA is the largest women’s association of any kind in Ireland with 11,000 members and 650 guilds that stretch across the country. Since its foundation just over a century ago in Bree, Co. Wexford, generations of members have invested in Irish life in ways that are simply immeasureable, for who could ever hope to quantify the friendships; the personal supports members have given one another; the individual and family lives enriched by the new skills acquired; the traditional crafts and skills passed on from one generation to the next; the troubles shared; the communities united and helped in good times and in bad; the stranger from foreign shores or the isolated young mother welcomed into a social network; the humdrum days made brighter in the knowledge that the evening offers a gathering of friends and the exchange of news and stories. Women of all backgrounds, both urban and rural have shared their lives and banded together as a powerful persuasive national force designed to develop and improve the quality of Irish life.
Through the ACWW you have generated an international solidarity that advocates for the kind of change that improves the lives of women and families and humanity in general through the spotlight you bring to issues of fundamental concern to so many of the world’s citizens - from climate change to access to clean water, to education, to health care, to HIV/Aids treatment and prevention. You undertake this work as volunteers and in this, the European Year of Volunteering, I want to use this opportunity to thank you for the massive investment in community life that your volunteering contributes through the networks of individual care and human solidarity that are your stock in trade.
One hundred million Europeans are engaged in volunteering activities and we need them all and more to fill life up with their genius and their goodness all the more in these tough economic times when we need to pull together as never before to get through the difficulties we face. In rural Ireland of old when there was a huge amount of work to be done - too much for one farmer on his or her own - the neighbours formed a working party to tackle it together. That phenomenon we call the ‘meitheal’ and there is no better example of the power of the meitheal than the ICA and the Associated Countrywomen of the World. It took quite a meitheal to prepare for this European Area Conference - a mix of skills, talents, efforts, imagination, ideas and responsibilities and we are grateful to the team which undertook it so graciously and energetically. They are the kind of loyal, dependable, generous, people whose resolve and determination will help to get our country back on the path to sustainable and sensible economic recovery. I hope those of you who have come to us as strangers will be impressed by the welcome prepared for you and by this country’s capacity for sheer hard work in the face of a challenge. Although you would not know it from what you read about us or hear about us these days, in every street, in every community there are good, decent and humble people doing good things for the good of our country. You are among them today.
Just over a hundred years ago when the ICA was formed a man named Horace Plunkett, legendary founder if the Irish Co-operative movement remarked that it would be the “women of Ireland “ who would deliver a better quality of life. The imprint of the ICA is to be found in many of the major life-changing initiatives that lifted Ireland out of endemic poverty and underachievement - from rural electrification to adult education. But underpinning all their work has been an unchanging devotion to revealing the potential of all women and the strengthening of family life. These are, always have been and always will be, noble, life-enhancing pursuits in a world that still insists on flying awkwardly on one wing when it was given two. The equitable, peaceful and prosperous world we want is still a work in progress and it needs voices like yours which insist that the world can change one person, one family, one community at a time given the investment of time and effort in the nurturing, nourishing and cherishing things that you stand for and stand up for.
Please enjoy each other’s company and enjoy our capital city and our beautiful country. May this conference renew and refresh each one of you giving you the energy and the fresh ideas to continue the quiet, gentle, ethical work of care that makes our world a better, happier and fairer place to live.
Bhail ó Dhia ar an obair!
Thank you