REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE INAUGURAL MELLA CARROLL ADDRESS ‘WOMEN AND JUSTICE…’
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE INAUGURAL MELLA CARROLL ADDRESS ‘WOMEN AND JUSTICE: A BALANCING ACT’
I am delighted and honoured to have been asked to inaugurate this lecture series, in this wonderful lecture theatre dedicated to the memory of Mella Carroll, one of Ireland’s pre-eminent jurists, trailblazers and indeed a former Chancellor of this trail-blazing University.
I am lucky to be going first, for I have the opportunity to echo so many other of Mella’s firsts: from gaining first place in her class in the King’s Inns, Mella went on to become the first female chairman of the Bar Council, the first female bencher of the King’s Inns, and most famously, our first female High Court Judge. In a slight break from the normal pattern, Mella was actually not the first, but the second woman to be appointed senior counsel, but that is a scrap of history probably best left to the speaker at the second Mella Carroll lecture, next year!
Mella’s huge contribution to the law has been well documented elsewhere and will continue to fascinate and absorb many generations of legal academics and practitioners. But it is her role as trailblazer for women I want to underline and remember for hers was a journey against the tide and a journey that turned the tide.
Today we have two women on the supreme court, three at the cabinet table, four female Secretaries General of Government departments, two female Presidents in a row, 60 percent of women active in the force and an Irish woman winning the Booker Prize, so it would be very easy to forget how recent, how revolutionary and how unfinished is the equality agenda she helped set for women.
The situation in our law schools today, which have more women than men, is the polar opposite of Mella Carroll’s time. Attitudes of the period are well captured in a short extract from a book, “Learning the Law” published while Mella was working as a junior counsel. The author was the pre-eminent jurist of his generation Glanville Williams, who died ten years ago. In a chapter tersely entitled, ‘Women’ - which of course has no counterpart chapter entitled ‘Men’ - the author begins, ‘It is difficult to write this section without being ungallant’. But apparently not too difficult, for he continued,
‘Practice at the Bar ... is heartbreaking for a woman. She has a double prejudice to conquer: the prejudice of the solicitor and the prejudice of the solicitor’s lay client. Combined, these two prejudices are almost inexpugnable .... It is not easy for a young man to get up and face the court; many women find it harder still. A woman’s voice... does not carry as well as a man’s.”
Looking back over the life of a remarkable woman and an eminent jurist, we can see that Mella’s voice carried just fine. The courts heard her, the Government heard her and the women of Ireland heard her.
Having studied French and German at UCD, a life in law and subsequently the judiciary was not an obvious or an easy choice for Mella. But it was a natural one. Her life was not about settling or about choosing easy routes. It was about a relentless quest for truth and justice, about service to the community and about faith in the law as a stabiliser of community life and a key contributor to the common good.
Mella’s knowledge of, and respect for, the law was profound and deep-seated. Her father, a founder member of the Garda Síochána, qualified as a barrister, updated the legal guidebook of the old Royal Irish Constabulary and later became Commissioner of the force. At home, the Ten Commandments and respect for the law were taught. At school, the Sacred Heart nuns instilled the gospel values, a deep-rooted sensibility to social justice and the confidence to assume personal responsibility, as the ‘whole person’ was formed. There were not then so many distracting or loud siren voices vying for the hearts, minds, souls and buying power of the nation’s young.
Mella’s upbringing, and others like it, represent an extraordinary investment of time and effort by an individual, a family and a community in the fundamental, life-enhancing building block of the personal formation of a human being as a socially responsible citizen. It raises in my mind some very profound questions about the extent to which the ‘civic, social and legal formation’ - in the broadest possible terms - of our young today is as adequate to the lives they face as Mella’s was to hers.
In our avidly entrepreneurial age where the entrepreneurial success of legitimate business is mirrored by the growing success of criminal entrepreneurs who have no code of values, no respect for life, no sense of social responsibility or patriotism and no contribution to make to our society beyond the devastation they wreak as selfish predators, we have to wonder about the life formation that made of their lives such ‘an evil cradling’ to borrow a telling phrase from Brian Keenan.
Eamon De Valera held that “the essential thing in any state is not the governmental framework, but the standard of citizenship on which it rests.” His sentiment is echoed by philosopher and theologian Louis Bouyer, in “L'Eglise de Dieu”, who observed that
“a community without law, far from being a community of charity, will never be anything else but a community of the capricious.”
Now, we in Ireland are clearly not a community without law, but there is a realm of wilful capriciousness that raises some tricky questions for modern Irish society about the extent to which respect for law, respect for the self and respect for others are still part of the early building blocks that form the core of our lifelong civic, social and personal consciousness. There is an old saying: “what’s learnt in childhood is engraved on stone”. Those who engraved on Mella’s early life had the skill of expert diamond engravers.
Mella cared about human dignity. It was what drew her to the law, though she was well aware of its limitations as an agent of social change.
Under Mella’s Chairmanship the approach of the Second Commission on the Status of Women was characterised by her view that a body of law is not the only instrument to achieve true gender equality. Under her direction the Second Commission took a holistic approach, with a major focus on social issues. Its findings permeate the National Women’s Strategy 2007-2016, which was launched by the Taoiseach this April. For the first time in Ireland, the Government has set out a ten-year plan, recognising the vital role played by women in the development of our country, and describing the measures it intends to take across three broad themes: equality, wellbeing and engagement. This strategy covers extraordinarily broad ground, covering areas as diverse as entrepreneurship, poverty, childcare, health, trafficking, representation and development aid. Mella herself did not have children but many of those yet unborn will in the years to come have much to thank her for. Tomorrow they will have choices and chances that will exist thanks to her care.
Just last month, a survey was published showing that most Irish women rank financial independence as their most important priority, ahead of leisure, family, political and religious matters. They are telling us emphatically that despite their mortgages, child-care problems and commuter lives, despite the everyday balancing act, living with an infrastructure that is galloping to catch up with the speed of social change, this generation of women believes that their human dignity is intrinsically linked to the choices now afforded to them by their education, their careers and their financial independence, choices and chances, opened up by pioneers like Mella.
The subtext of much of Mella’s life was the surprise and the shock that a woman was doing a job traditionally believed to be a male preserve. For many women of her generation and indeed my own, the words, “You can’t because you are a woman”, were a powerful and decisive brake on natural ambition and opportunity and the culprits to blame for the immense waste of many talents. The words are of course still heard in many cultures and quarters but their sting has been drawn by women like Mella and by the glorious fresh creative energy released into virtually every sphere of human endeavour in Ireland as women’s talents are showcased more widely than in any previous generation.
That Ireland has this new narrative, and indeed a story that is only truly beginning, is a tribute to the work of Mella Carroll, and to the many women who followed in her pioneering footsteps. In Mella’s own field and mine - the law - the full effect of the inroads being made by women are becoming very visible but yet to be fully revealed: two women on the Supreme Court, one of whom has served at the European Court of Justice, five on the High Court and hundreds of others in practice throughout the state, often, though not yet often enough, in very senior positions in law firms and at the inner bar. With the present gender composition of law school intakes in Ireland, that change can only go in one direction. The gender balance, the radically widened gender input will, in a generation’s time have altered not just the world of law, but of medicine, science, technology, the arts, humanities, social sciences and even politics. A coming generation will know the surging power that comes when a bird flies on two wings and not one.
But first Mella had to show that a bird would never fly freely with one wing pinned down by the other. Quietly, methodically, brilliantly she prised apart that closed world of gender scepticism and pious paternalism, by simply proving day in and day out that she was as good as any of her peers and better than many. There were much easier paths she could have chosen. Instead she chose the path less travelled and left it carefully illuminated for those who followed. Weren’t we lucky that she did. Ar dheis de go raib