REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF A NEW BUILDING FOR OSCAIL
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF A NEW BUILDING FOR OSCAIL, THE NATIONAL DISTANCE EDUCATION CENTRE
Is mór an pléisiúir dom bheith anseo libh inniu ag an ócáid taitneamhach seo. Go raibh maith agaibh go léir as an chaoin-chuireadh.
It is a great pleasure to have been asked to formally open this new building on behalf of Oscail, the National Distance Education Centre. I would like to thank Dr Dennis Bancroft for the invitation, and a former colleague from my Trinity days, now President of DCU – Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski - for those words of welcome. Back when we first knew each other, I doubt that either of us foresaw that one day we would each be greeting the other with the title ‘President’.
It is now almost 20 years since a small group of people led by the founding Director, Chris Curran, established the National Distance Education Centre on this campus. In some ways, it seems more than a generation ago, so profoundly different is the landscape of today’s Ireland and the expectations of our young people. The journey of transformation in the fortunes of Ireland and her people has been fuelled by many factors, not least a dynamic and forward-looking third level education sector. We have always known that our greatest resource lay in the potential of our people. We have also known that for many generations a significant part of that potential was wasted, frustrated, ignored or exported. As a result we lost a lot of momentum, of confidence and of opportunity, but even in the worst of times we placed a very high value on education and we placed our faith in its power to transform society by transforming the individual. That faith has been well rewarded as a new, highly educated and creative generation of men and women, working successfully in the land of their birth, taking part in the economic miracle, the cultural powerhouse, that is contemporary Ireland. And yet we know this journey’s true destination has not yet been reached for we still have considerable potential to be tapped, we still have people who are mere spectators at today’s good times, we still have levels of underachievement which challenge us, we still have a job to do. But now we have a much more sophisticated and customised range of tools to tackle that job, among them, Oscail itself, dedicated as it is to breaking down so many of the barriers which kept people on the outside of college looking wistfully in.
Seosamh Mac Grianna in ‘Mo Bhealach Féin’ describes the impact of unequal access to education in grimly graphic terms…..
‘Tá babhun dimheasa idir an té a theid chun coláiste agus an té nach dteid.”
(There is a barricade of contempt between those who go to college and those who do not).
Contempt is an acidic thing to live with. It erodes self- belief, it dilutes the will to try, it distils into stereotypes which keep people in ignorance of each other’s true value and in ignorance of the opportunities for partnership they are missing as a consequence of missing each other by a mile. Those barricades keep us from accessing that great resource locked inside the human person and while we have not yet managed to completely eradicate them we have made very considerable progress in breaking them down. It is a matter of considerable pride to us that so many of our young people and increasing numbers of mature students now access an education that was once the preserve of the elite.
The Institutes of Higher Education, forerunners of Dublin City University and the University of Limerick, the network of Regional Technical Colleges around the country, the Institutes of Technology, the transformation of the established university sector, the establishment of a range of other innovative third level organizations - all have had a crucial role to play in this expansion of opportunity. So, too, has this National Distance Education Centre, with students of all ages from their early 20’s to their 80’s, drawn from every part of the country and every walk of life. For many students, Oscail has opened doors to Higher Education which had previously been firmly closed to them for a variety of reasons - geographical distance, lack of qualifications, life circumstances, disability, discrimination, lack of money, lack of support. Not only has Oscail through its programmes and especially its Access programme, created a well-lit pathway to progress for individuals, that pathway has taken them not just on a journey into education but a profound journey into the self.
Today, Oscail has some 3,500 students taking courses in areas as diverse as Information Technology, Nursing Studies, Management and the Humanities. It comes as no surprise to hear that you are also piloting an MSc in Internet Systems, for there is no doubt that the Internet, which has already become an important learning medium for distance education, still has enormous untapped educational capacity. I would like to particularly commend the innovative way in which you have brought together expertise from all of the Universities in Ireland, North and South, in developing and presenting the programmes, ensuring that the standard of courses and teaching is second to none within the Irish Third Level sector. Indeed, the high regard in which Ireland’s distance education model is held throughout Europe is a measure and a tribute to the standard of excellence you have achieved.
Every individual who has studied through Oscail, has a unique story to tell of personal effort and sacrifice, achievement and self-fulfilment. In a real sense, there are no ‘ordinary’ distance education students, each is extraordinary in their own way. Some have taken courses to improve their career opportunities or to branch out in a new direction; for others, it has been a matter of personal development, of achieving their own potential, their own dreams, however modest or ambitious.
Those individual stories of success have an equally important collective impact. The transformative power of education starts with the individual human person, but it also radiates outward, to family, to community, to country. It brings economic benefits, but also a vital social dividend in the form of healthy, self-reliant, self-confident and dynamic communities – communities which foster social stability, independence, creativity and entrepreneurial activity. And those resources in turn feed back into both a successful, knowledge driven economy and a socially just republic of equals, in which the barricades of contempt that MacGrianna spoke of, are finally and irrevocably torn down.
Oscail has a vital role to play in liberating that potential and helping Ireland get to that humanly decent destination. I warmly congratulate you on all that you have achieved to date and I hope that this new building will help Oscail force open more doors to opportunity to more individuals in the future.
Go gcúití Dia bhur saothar daoibh.