REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE NATIONAL PILOT OF THE CAPTAIN OF ENTERPRISE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE NATIONAL PILOT OF THE CAPTAIN OF ENTERPRISE PROGRAMME CITY HALL, LIMERICK
Is mór an chúis áthais dom bheith anseo libh inniu agus tá mé buíoch díbh as an chuireadh a thug sibh dom.
I am delighted to be here today to launch the National Pilot of the Captains of Enterprise Programme. I would particularly like to thank Margaret Ryan of Limerick City Enterprise Board for inviting me to this special day in Limerick- a day when with words like pilot and captain, it charts a new course to the future- a future where the talent of women is harnessed to its fullest potential.
In the course of a visit to Derry a couple of years ago I had the pleasure of hosting a questions and answers session at St. Mary’s College. The questions covered a wide spectrum of topical issues but one in particular which comes to mind addressed the question of the role of women. The students felt that “in many respects the role of President only achieved a high profile when a woman was elected”. I was asked why I thought that this was the case. Partly of course there is still a very telling novelty value in elected female Presidents. As a phenomenon they are rare right around the world but the reasons go deeper in Ireland for both female Presidents have been privileged to hold office in our country during a period of huge economic success, part of which has been driven by the dynamism and genius of a generation of women who have experienced and taken advantage of much greater freedom and opportunity than any previous generation has known. Ireland’s greatest natural resource is her people. Our greatest tragedy as a nation is the extent to which history, poverty and attitudes conspired to waste so much of that resource in the past, holding us back from realising just how much we were capable of achieving.
The history of wasted talent is even worse in the case of women for women’s contribution to society down through the centuries has so often remained unacknowledged, unappreciated and under-developed. Women found their life’s chances restricted by a much narrower range of choices than those open to men. My daughters look at me in disbelief when I tell them that only in the middle of the last century did Cambridge University finally admit women and that many of those who feature in the history books as great statesmen and churchmen of the early twentieth century were appalled at the idea of permitting women to vote. The culture we have come from was a culture where women were seen as beings who needed permission from those in authority, where the idea of a woman being empowered by her own human right to choice and equality of opportunity was radical beyond imagining. The latter quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a much better articulated, much more sustained set of arguments about the rights of women and importantly it saw the creation of formal laws and both formal and informal organisations to vindicate those rights.
Today’s Ireland with its economic success, its cultural self-assurance can be under no illusion that a large part of that success is due to the widening of the spheres of influence which women have access to and are now contributing to.
This generation will be freer again. You have even more choices, more confidence, less looking over their shoulder, less explaining, less justifying to do. You know your own power and you have the power to transform Ireland into a country which is no longer flying on one wing but on two wings, a country where no one’s talent is wasted or ignored but where the talent of all is valued, respected, harvested and celebrated. The journey for women is just beginning and for all the progress, for all the laws, there are still many obstacles to overcome, not least of which is the self belief, the self assuredness which inspires women to take the risks needed to become entrepreneurs. The growth of a new culture of entrepreneurship in Ireland has also been central to our remarkable economic success story. Sustaining that culture is essential for our future prosperity, for the widening of that prosperity to all corners of our country. Encouraging that culture is vital and that is precisely what you are doing. The under representation of women in enterprise and self-employment is a problem not just for women but also for society as a whole. In essence we as a society are denied the benefits of the skills and expertise which women bring to enterprise creation and the specific contribution women can make to the culture of enterprise and to shaping the workplace of the future. Today as new opportunities open up for women we need women to take those opportunities.
I am deeply heartened to learn of the participation levels of all of the schools involved with this Programme. The energy, the appetite for innovation, the determination and the capacity for hard-work evident among our young women here today should make us proud and give us reassurance that Ireland is on the road towards the full political, social and economic inclusion of women. The statistics tell us that there is a long way to go, but they also tell us that we have covered quite a distance in a couple of generations. Now the pace needs to accelerate and with the help of this programme I am sure it will.
Go n-éirí go geal libh.
Go raibh maith agaibh.