REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE ANNUAL MEETING OF UNICEF’S NATIONAL COMMITTEES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE ANNUAL MEETING OF UNICEF’S NATIONAL COMMITTEES 2004, BERKELEY COURT HOTEL
Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Good morning everybody.
My thanks to Maura Quinn, Executive Director of UNICEF Ireland, for her kind invitation which gives me this opportunity to welcome to Ireland, representatives of all thirty-seven of UNICEF’s National Committees from around the world. Ireland has been honoured to host this meeting for the first time and we are grateful for your confidence in us and the compliment you pay us by being here. I hope that here in Dublin you will find the energy, the enthusiasm, the ideas and the focus to inspire you to keep on committing to the vocation of caring for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children. I hope too that when the work is done there will be time to relax and get to know our capital city and our country and to take back home with you many happy memories.
The United Nations is privileged to have within its UNICEF system the support of a network of over one hundred thousand wonderful volunteers who raise awareness of the dreadful problems facing poor children and raise considerable funds to tackle those problems. So many children suffer in silence but you have made yourselves their champion, their voice, their advocate and ultimately their hope. You remind the world time and time again of the boys and girls who are commercially exploited by the sex industry, the youngsters who are forced to become soldiers in cruel, wasteful wars, the little children who put in a hard days labour for a pittance. These are the children for whom school, fun, sport, freedom, love, home, have meanings so vile and sickening that we can only wonder at their courage and their resilience even as we are overwhelmed by the damage being done to them. Your work breathes life into the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, making it a living promise to the world’s children and a present threat to those who would destroy those rights.
According to tradition, this is the anniversary of the day the waters of the flood abated and Noah's Ark came to rest. Today another flood threatens in the form of HIV/AIDS, but this flood will not subside of its own accord.
Shortly after I became President over six years ago I visited an organisation called AIDS HELP, joining my voice to the many voices trying to remind people that this was a growing problem, a preventable problem and a ticking time bomb with potential for damage to humankind on an unimaginable scale. Back then in 1997, an estimated 29 million people throughout the world had contracted the virus. Now that figure has escalated to 44 million. This isn’t just a disaster waiting to happen. This is a disaster that we are right in the middle of with no reassuring end in sight. Scientists do their best to find solutions, commercial interests do their best to make substantial profits from those solutions. Some countries can afford treatment, others cannot. Some countries take a responsible approach to public health education, prevention and treatment, others pay the problem scant regard in the mistaken hope that it will go away.
What goes away are the mothers and fathers, their lives ended tragically early by Aids. What goes away are the children, born with Aids, destined to die before their fifth birthdays. What ebbs away is a nation’s very life source - its people, its future. What ebbs away is protection or safety anywhere on earth from this modern scourge. This toxic tide of HIV/AIDS will not ebb unless and until it becomes the high-priority focus of a concerted fully global effort, backed by resources to deal with it multilaterally, strategically, intelligently and effectively. The tide will not turn until individuals consciously and responsibly change their behaviour and are helped and encouraged to do so.
At every level of society there is a part to play. AIDS is a disease, not a disgrace. Reacting with shame, covering the victims with humiliation, treating every revelation as a scandal, makes the problem harder to combat. In every community and in every family, candid conversation about AIDS, its causes and its consequences is a help in creating the bulwark of personal behaviour which can help stop the disease in its track. I was able to see at first hand how such an open approach contributed to the decline in infection levels in Uganda but not before literally millions of children were orphaned by AIDS.
As we know, Africa has been worst hit but HIV is again increasing in wealthy countries and is beginning to course through countries where its arrival is quite recent. At a conference here in Dublin a short time ago, it was revealed that in Eastern Europe and in Central Asia the number of sufferers has risen by a factor of five thousand per cent, since 1998. Heaven alone knows how many children are already facing skewed lives as a result for the impact on children is not only in contracting the disease itself.
There is the devastation of losing one or both parents, brothers and sisters, friends, carers, teachers, community builders. It is hard to forget the poverty-stricken grandparents I met in East Africa, left, in their hundreds of thousands, to raise their grandchildren alone.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the start of testing of the Salk anti-polio vaccine. One scourge was almost at an end - an answer was looked for and found. No such vaccine yet exists for AIDS. We hope it soon will and when it does that access to it will be easy for the poorest and most marginalized who carry the biggest burden of this disease. Until then we are challenged to address openly a whole range of behaviours which go towards spreading the disease and which constitute a menacing danger to the world’s children.
We rely on organisations like UNICEF to keep telling and retelling this solemn message and we are deeply grateful to all who commit to the work of care for our children including the work of organising occasions such as this.
I would like to give particular thanks to Dr Chris Horn, the Chair of UNICEF Ireland, and Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF and to all those have contributed to the success of this important event. May your efforts be blessed with success.
Is iontach an obair ata ar siul agaibh. Go maire sibh. Go raibh maith agaibh.