REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE CROSS BORDER OPENINGS’ PROGRAMME
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE CROSS BORDER OPENINGS’ PROGRAMME IN THE BALLYMASCANLON HOUSE HOTEL, DUNDALK
Good afternoon, everyone.
Tá áthas mór orm bheith libh ar an ócáid bhreá atá curtha ar bun anseo agaibh. Gabhaim buíochas ó chroí libh as an gcuireadh a chur chugam.
It is good to be here with you today to launch the Cross Border Openings Programme. My thanks to Andy Pollak for inviting me and to everyone here for that generous Dundalk welcome. For so long now I have been impressed time and again by the dynamism of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, and its fresh approach to the relationship between the two parts of Ireland. This alliance with the Open University - a formidable champion of lifelong learning and open access education - and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions - a great champion of the disadvantaged, is a very welcome innovation. All three organisations have excelled themselves in the development of Cross Border Openings.
We are a generation privileged to be living through a time of remarkable economic progress which has brought extensive opportunities to many doors but which relentlessly challenges us to deliver those opportunities to everyone. We still have too many spectators who are locked out from their own potential by disadvantage and marginalisation. The loss to them of the fullness of their own lives is immense, the loss to their families and to our communities is a tragic and unacceptable waste. A simple glance tells us that the better educated we are, the easier our access to good prospects. The most impressive people I have met in seven years as President have been those who have grabbed a second chance to get an education and through it to change their lives. One of them was a woman with literacy problems so serious that she could never read her children a bedtime story or help with their homework. She started going to basic literacy classes and by the time I met her was a graduate of Trinity College. She told me that until she invested in her education she had no idea of who she truly was or what she was truly capable of. Many of your participants tell similar stories of lives transformed by the decision to commit to second chance education. A lot of things can get in the way of reaching our fullest potential but they do not have to be permanent obstacles - especially nowadays, when lifelong learning is such a normal everyday part of life and such a necessary one if we are to keep up with these fast changing times.
Your initiative is designed to accompany, support and guide those who have the courage and the determination to see what education has to offer them and what they have to offer it. TS Eliot said:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
The Cross Border Openings programme is about making sure the door to education is wide open, easily accessible and welcoming. It is offered to people in both the northern and the southern border counties and, thanks to EU Peace and Reconciliation funding, it is free of charge. That is particularly good news for the unemployed and those on low incomes, just as the flexible shape of the courses takes account of the kinds of pressures people live under. The students of Cross Border Openings are all part of the new design of education which is just beginning to reveal itself as the telephone and the computer join the more familiar desk and classroom. I hope that with the project’s willingness to suit the needs of the students and the students’ own commitment, there will soon emerge many remarkable stories of lives changed for the better because of Cross Border Openings. Here men and women who may have doubted their own abilities, will gain new confidence, fresh energy, new skills, new competences and important qualifications with which to reshape their lives as they would wish. They will make new friends and in particular they will come to see themselves very differently. That investment in one human being will pay huge dividends in family, street, community and country for it is, in the end, an investment in our civic societies and in our quality of life. Even more importantly it honours our shared vision of a land where everyone sits around the best table of life, no spectators, no more margins.
I congratulate everyone who worked to bring this wonderful programme to fruition and thank you on behalf of all those lives, past and future which you touch and enhance and encourage.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh. Go n-éirí go geal libh. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.