REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH PRIMARY PRINCIPALS’ NETWORK 2008 LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE IRISH PRIMARY PRINCIPALS’ NETWORK 2008 LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE IRISH NATIONAL EVENTS CENTRE
There was a time when the merest movement of one primary school principal’s eyebrow was sufficient to silence me and several hundred others simultaneously. Some might think this is pay back time but you know better than any other audience that all you have to do is fidget, or talk among yourselves, or yawn or fall asleep to drain the speaker of all confidence and all hope. So maybe a truce is in order, particularly since I am so genuinely delighted to be here among those whose work is without a doubt the ‘Tus maith’ that makes for ‘leath na hoibre’. I am very grateful to Seán Cottrell, the Director of the Irish Primary Principals' Network and the National Executive for your kind invitation to this important conference.
Few groups in our society play such a critical role as you do as shapers of individual and collective destinies and as frontline absorbers of major change. The theme of your conference last year, ‘Changing Ireland’ explored the many ways in which you have responded and have had to respond to the rapid shift from a relatively homogeneous bilingual society in long-term population decline to today’s rapidly growing multilingual, multi-ethnic phenomenon. Some countries took generations to absorb waves of migrants. Ireland did it in just a few years and all those inevitable issues to do with adjusting to language, culture, loneliness, to do with integrating into a new community, settling down, making friends, all those things landed on your doorsteps and, as I know from my many visits to many schools, they were responded to with great care and commitment. There have been considerable adjustments to school life, preparing children used to homogeneity for heterogeneity, preparing everyone for much more focussed and practical sensitivity around differences of all sorts, preparing Ireland through its children for a new Ireland. It has been something of a rollercoaster yet you have been a flagship for our ‘fáilte’. I want to thank each of you for the flexibility and responsiveness which your leadership has brought to bear on these quite remarkable times.
Now this conference focuses on that very issue of leadership. It calls us to cast our minds beyond the absorbing preoccupations of macro and micro management that form such a large part of your daily routines. This conference is about breathing space to contemplate in a wider and deeper way the journey our nation’s children are taking, where they are being led and by whom. We know that your role in our children’s successful navigation of life is of huge importance and that confers on your discussions and deliberations here a very particular status, urgency and gravity. Where you lead, how you lead, are of seminal importance precisely because of whom you lead. Their context is also crucial for few generations in Ireland have lived within such a complex broader context and that context has very real consequences which impact in a very emphatic way on our children’s school lives and on your professional lives.
There are aspects of that broader context which are encouraging and reassuring and aspects which are challenging and worrying. Growing up in a prosperous, successful and confident Ireland is quite a recent experience. The role played by education in creating these new circumstances was and remains pivotal. The simple truth is that until there was widespread access to and take-up of second and third-level education, Ireland remained stuck in generations-old underachievement. The story changed with the introduction of free second-level education at the end of the 1960s but it was the 1990s before the intellectual traction built up by the surge into second and then third-level created enough momentum to herald a dramatically new era characterised for the first time in a century and a half by enough opportunity to keep people at home. So we no longer educate to emigrate.
Most of us did not grow up in an entrepreneurial Ireland for that too is a very recent arrival among us. But education and opportunity have revealed an indigenous talent for entrepreneurialism and our future prosperity depends on sustaining and developing it. Our young people have today a much wider platform on which to showcase their talents and imagination.
Today’s Ireland is among the world leaders in modern technology and high-tech industries which feed our ambition to be in the van of the global knowledge economy. We have historically low levels of unemployment, greater social mobility than ever before and much wider career choices and chances. For children born into continuing cycles of family deprivation, the self-belief and ambition awakened and nurtured in school now has much more fertile ground in which to plant itself. There is light at the end of what were once very long tunnels.
Our children are growing up in an Ireland which is much wiser about the sheer, gratuitous wastefulness of old and disappearing forms of exclusion which trapped in half-lives so many groups like women, the disabled, the poor, the travelling community, the mentally ill, the illiterate. Today, those newly liberated and emerging constituencies are injecting the dynamic of fresh energy into our civic, political and economic life.
Our children are also growing up in an Ireland which has considerable power on the European and world stage and not just as an economic powerhouse which trades across the globe but also as a friend to the poor, a peacemaker and one of the top benefactors of the developing world, a job we cannot do without the commitment of our children and our children’s children. This is the first generation with a good news story to tell about peace-making at home. This is the first generation which will grow up with a cross-border, good neighbourliness and structured partnership and a new language for the eradication of sectarianism. It is the first generation to feel the benefit of a historic recalibration of the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain, the first to be able to comfortably call to memory the heroes of 1916 and the heroes of the Somme.
Your pupils face long commutes, mammy and daddy both work, granny and granda are miles away for many. They have televisions and computers which can entertain, amuse and educate but can also betray their innocence and their vulnerability. They have their role models from sporting legends to rock stars, some of them hugely inspirational for all the right reasons, with values that a parent or teacher can wholeheartedly endorse. But they are also exposed to others whose human frailty is masked by a fame which children often lack the subtlety to see through. There are things that make kids of them and things that make mere consumers of them. There are things that shield them and things that exploit them. There are predators of all sorts ready to shut down their little lives whether with abuse or drugs or bullying or neglect. Those predators can be in their families, their schools, their streets, their magazines, their computers, their televisions. They can be familiar or strangers. This generation has a freedom like no other but that very freedom places them right in the thick of many forces over which they have little or no control. And they are only children.
We all have sacred stewardship of their lives and you exercise that stewardship in the closest of ways. It is your vocation, your mission. In between the school plans, the curriculum implementation, the keeping-up with technology and new ideas on pedagogy, the motivation of staff, the interaction with Civil Service, boards of management, parents and community, fixing the leaking taps, organising the raffle for Concern, in the middle of all those things which must be done and done well, your core role is to help lead our children to their very best selves. You introduce them to music, to art, to poetry, to literature, to spirituality, to history, to maths, to science, to responsibility for themselves and for the earth, to relationships, to respect for themselves and for others, to languages, to sport, to achievement, to effort, to team spirit, to individuality, to courtesy, to generosity, to saying sorry, to feeling proud. You introduce them to their very uniqueness. Their parents trust them to you and we as a society trust them to you. You have led us safe thus far and now, with the help of this conference and the distilled wisdom it will reveal, you will help lead Ireland through its children to beyond this, the most hope-filled Ireland in our history which you have helped create, to the very best Ireland ever - that place where in the words of the Proclamation, the children of the nation are cherished equally.
Molaim rath Dé ar bhur gcuid oibre anseo agus le linn na bliana.