Remarks by President McAleese at the Fortieth Anniversary Celebration of Letterkenny I.T. Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Thursday, 22nd September, 2011
Dia dhaoibh go léir, a cháirde; is mór an honóir dom a bheith anseo i Leitir Ceanainn um thrathnóna don ócáid mór speisialta seo i saol na hinstitiúide a cheiliúradh.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to be back in Letterkenny Institute of Technology, this time for your fortieth birthday. My thanks to President, Paul Hannigan for his kind invitation and to each one of you for that very warm welcome.
Letterkenny has two big birthdays this year- for the town itself is marking its 400th anniversary and believe me no matter what great things happened here over those four centuries none can have had the benign impact that the opening of this place forty years ago had on the town, the region and our country.
The Institute started with 77 people most of them local. Now, there are some 3,500 students, drawn from all around our island, and much further afield. The range of academic disciplines offered here has also grown enormously so that today’s students have a very broad range of options. From start up, through forty years of hectic development there have been men and women who believed passionately in this place and who worked night and day to shape and guide it.
Their work has been vindicated year in and year out by the students who place their trust in the Institute, who work hard, graduate and are its ambassadors in communities and workplaces both close to home and far away.
Whatever your role I know those gathered here today join with many thousands more in a shared pride at all the Letterkenny Institute has achieved since its birth in 1971.
Regrettably I remember 1971 well. I was then a College student in my second year in Belfast. Northern Ireland was in a dreadful mess that, though we did not then know it, would take the next thirty years to even begin to sort out. Almost four thousand people would die violent deaths in the following years and many attempts to bring peace would end in failure. Yet daunting though the task was the peacemakers set to work and patiently built the pathway to a peaceful and a shared future that today is transforming relationships within the North between North and South and between Ireland and Great Britain. Like those who developed this Institute they chose not to be mere spectators of the world they inhabited but agents of change and importantly of change for the good. If the peace process is a slow burn, gradually shifting history’s trajectory away from conflict towards consensus then the advent of this Institute and indeed of free second level education at the end of the 1960’s was nothing short of seismic.
Almost overnight everyone had access to second level education- something which had been the preserve of an elite was opened up to everyone and the country started to harvest and to harness its richest natural resource- the brain power of its people. The injustices that go along with poverty, the social stratifications that kept talent locked up and frustrated through lack of opportunity began to melt away. The story of Ireland changed rapidly from under-achievement and insularity to a highly educated population and membership of the European Union. The outward haemorrhage of emigration, with us since the time of the famine began to tail off and a population in decline for a century and a half began to grow. The quality of life rose, expectations and ambitions gathered pace as Ireland took its place as a high tech nation, attractive to foreign investors and with a growing cohort of successful indigenous entrepreneurs.
Education was key to that massive spurt of growth that brought such hope and opportunity. As we know failings in the global economy and failings in the our own economy have led to a substantial economic retrenchment which impacts heavily on today’s students and graduates, who are entering a depleted job market, who live in heavily indebted homes in a heavily indebted nation.
So there is a mountain to be climbed to a wiser and more sustainable prosperity and Ireland is already a fair distance up that mountain, painful and testing though the journey is. Once again we can choose to be mere spectators or active citizens, making the changes we want to see happen, happen.
There will be a renaissance ahead, history teaches us that. But the shape, the vigour, the sustainability, the speed of it- these things will depend on people, passionate, determined people who know that good things need to be planned and built- they do not occur by accident or cosmic coincidence.
Because this institute opened its doors- because people dedicated themselves to its existence and its growth, a lot of people had choices in their lives that they would otherwise have missed out on. Investment in education, training, retraining, upskilling are utterly central to our country’s recovery and that recovery needs people like the students here who are taking personal responsibility for making themselves as strong, confident and capable as a good education can make them.
This Institute made its future out of a green field site and at a very difficult juncture. Its founders inserted more than new buildings onto Letterkenny’s landscape, they infused a hope, dynamism, opportunity and encouragement into the lives of individuals that cascaded out into the community and the county. While others wondered what the future might hold this Institute decided what it should hold and set about drawing the roadmap.
Yes the journey has now brought us to a cratered and very bumpy part of the road, but that is all it is- a part of the road beyond which lies the prospect of a fresh narrative of success. This Institute is already preparing for that new chapter and I thank you for your commitment to this great vocation of education, our vital strength in good times and in bad. Go maire sibh an céad.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir.