REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF NEW PREMISES FOR THE UNION OF STUDENTS
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF NEW PREMISES FOR THE UNION OF STUDENTS IN IRELAND GRATTAN ST
Tá mé thar a bheith sásta bheith anseo libh inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo. Go raibh maith agaibh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin.
I am delighted to be here today to officially open these new premises, Ceann Áras Mac Léinn, on behalf of the Union of Students in Ireland. It seems extraordinary that after over 40 years in existence, this will be your first permanent home, and as has been remarked more than once in recent times, one which is so conveniently located to all major destinations for campaigns and demonstrations!
Those 40 years have seen extraordinary changes in Irish education and Irish life generally and it is to the great credit of the USI that you have always been at the vanguard in promoting a more open, accessible and just society. A measure of the distance we have come is that back in 1959, when the USI was first established, free education at second level was still quite a number of years away and third level education, was by and large the preserve of a privileged elite. For the vast majority of people, their pathway through life was predetermined by background and family circumstances. Seamus Heaney’s evocative poem From the Canton of Expectation describes that fifties mood:
“We lived……….
under high banked clouds of resignation.
And next thing, suddenly this change of mood.
Books open in newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
Against the flanks of milking cows were busy
Paving and pencilling their first causeways
Across the prescribed texts.”
With the benefit of hindsight we know the huge surge of energy and self-confidence which education was eventually to release into our political and civic grid but we also can see with profound sadness how many talents were left untapped and frustrated by lack of opportunity. How much richer Irish life might have been both for the individual and the community, had those gifts been given the opportunity to blossom.
To those early founders of the USI, the free access to third level education that students are entitled to today, must have seemed utopian. But their belief in the transformative power of education, its capacity to energise and release the talents not just of the individual, but of a nation, has been more than vindicated by our economic success in recent years. It is important to celebrate those achievements, to recognise how far we have come in broadening the scope of opportunity. But it is an unfinished story and each new generation has a responsibility to spread the net of inclusion wider and wider to ensure that all our people are participants and not mere spectators. We know there is still work to be done in terms of making equality of access to third level education a lived reality, regardless of disability or family circumstances.
I would like to commend the USI for the role you have played over the years in working towards that objective. You have been an important champion of the struggling student and the person struggling to become a student. But you have also been committed to a wider vision of social justice knowing as you do that it is not a mere optional extra to a prosperous and economically successful society – it is its greatest enabler, the engine which drives individual and collective success. It is the vehicle through which our greatest natural asset, our human genius and ability is accessed, released, shaped, skilled and put at the service of person and country.
One of the most important contributions that the USI has made to Irish life over the decades, is in demonstrating the importance of getting involved. You have always been the ‘doers’ – the ones who didn’t just sit on the sidelines, complaining, but rather worked to bring about change. I know that many of your past alumni have gone on to make their careers in public life, having cut their teeth on university campuses - and occasionally on university administrators! Belief in the value of participation is crucial in today’s Ireland. We need good people to commit to public life, to political life. Those of you who have served with the USI know that the role of the representative is not always a popular one – in fact at times it can be downright thankless - but you also know that it is both important and rewarding work that it layers up in bits and pieces, in hard work and in planning, to the kind of landscape you want to create. This building is just one example of that, one milestone marking the steady and sometimes heady progress made by the Union of Students in Ireland.
These wonderful new premises will, I am sure, make the job of representing the concerns of over 250,000 Irish students a lot easier. I congratulate you on finding a permanent home, and I wish the Union of Students in Ireland, every success in the future.
Guím rath agus séan oraibh. Go raibh maith agaibh.