Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the Intl Council of Barristers & Advocate Conference
Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the International Council of Barristers and Advocates’ 4th World Bar Conference
Dia dhíbh, a cháirde go léir. Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh inniu.
Good morning everybody and thank you for your warm welcome to this conference which I am proud to open. Let me, in turn, welcome all of you—and in particular those whom I know have travelled enormous distances to be here. You pay Ireland, North and South a huge compliment by being here and I offer you the traditional Irish welcome in our Gaelic language, céad míle fáilte, one hundred thousand welcomes.
I am very grateful to Turlough [O’Donnell SC, Chairman of the Bar of Ireland], for his introduction and the invitation to be part of this international legal gathering with its focus on human rights and the role lawyers play world wide in their development and vindication. You have a galaxy of exceptional speakers lined up both here in Dublin and in Belfast and you have the urgent context of a world where lives are wilfully wasted on a vast scale either because a culture of human rights is absent or poorly developed or more talked about and talked up than faithfully honoured.
This very building could tell many tales of human rights abuses that were planned and perpetrated here over its long history and often by the highest officials in the land. What is both frightening and fascinating about the violence of those long centuries is how very far ahead they cast their shadows and how very long indeed has been the shelf-life of the toxic seeds they sowed.
We are the first generation ever to have emerged from those shadows and to have gathered in the poisonous harvest to the point where the landscape is now ripe for planting, for reseeding, this time we hope with better, much better seed. Seeds of hope, seeds of mutual respect, seeds of good neighbourliness, seeds that grow legal systems which robustly articulate and defend the rights and dignity of every human being, seeds which grow thinking and learning systems which inculcate a sensitivity to human rights and which no longer prioritise the handing on from parent to child of contempt for the otherness of others and the bitter hatred which is the enemy of all human rights.
You chose a good time to come to both Belfast and Dublin for we are in that moment between harvest and planting, a moment when those who fully intuit the profundity of this historic opportunity are doing everything they can to use it well: doing the fresh, new, radical things that promote and consolidate reconciliation, things like the joint hosting of this Conference itself.
For many of us who grew up through the most recent phase of Ireland’s conflict it would be true to say that the Belfast-Dublin axis was for many people characterised by mutual mistrust. We were at the political level neighbours but not friends. We paid a dreadful price for our failure to develop a culture of good neighbourliness but thankfully today that story is at an end and a new hard-earned spirit of partnership and peace has been crafted by the best educated and most gifted problem-solving generation we have ever produced.
It is no accident that this is also the generation best educated around issues of equality. It is also no accident that both peace and prosperity began to consolidate when more men and women than ever in our history were liberated by equality of access to education and opportunity, and the long days of privileged elites vanished into the footnotes of history.
Lawyers featured strongly among the many courageous people who, in difficult and often dangerous circumstances championed the human rights of those excluded, overlooked, neglected, oppressed or discriminated against. Some even paid for their courage with their lives, for there is nothing so hateful to those who would deny the rights of others as someone who fearlessly articulates the truth and uses the call to justice as their only weapon.
Last month we celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the basic building block of our new future on this island. You will be meeting one of its main architects, that immensely talented lawyer Senator George Mitchell. It was he who reminded us at the time when the agreement was overwhelmingly endorsed by twin referenda held North and South that difficult as the Agreement had been to negotiate, implementing it would prove more difficult still. He was right.
It has been difficult, but that is all it is—just difficult; not impossible, as subsequent events have shown. Old enemies are now jointly governing Northern Ireland and a spirit of cooperative good neighbourliness is growing along the North-South axis. The Dublin-London axis has never been more collegial, more friendly than it is today and so we look to the future with considerable optimism.
But in back of our optimism is a formidable array of checks and balances, of structures and strategies designed to promote, defend and vindicate the human and civil rights of all who share this island, among them a raft of legislation and monitoring bodies. They are not a recipe for perfection but rather a recipe for protection and none of these sophisticated mechanisms can do their job adequately without the existence of a fully independent Bar to undertake the gruelling work of challenging abuses and securing rights.
The main street of this city is named after Daniel O’Connell, arguably the most brilliant lawyer and politician ever produced on these islands. He lived in an era of elites, a time of oppressed minorities and even majorities. His successful advocacy at Westminster of Catholic Emancipation broadened and deepened the understanding of human rights and civil liberties worldwide for he argued not according to the accepted framework of the time, in terms of favours and concessions, but in the radical new language of rights.
His view, that each was equal before the law, regardless of politics, creed or colour pitted him against powerful vested interests: in his support for civil rights for Presbyterians and non-conformists in Britain; for Protestants in Spain and Portugal, native Americans and African Slaves in the United States, and Jews in Russia; in his advocacy for the separation of Church and State and for universal suffrage; in his belief that constitutional persuasion and advocacy were more formidable than armed conflict, he charted a fresh new path through the obstacle course of arrogant elites and empires. He endured ostracism and even imprisonment for his beliefs. He died believing himself to be a failure and yet we live in a freedom he designed.
The landscape of despair he faced is also all around us in those countries where lawyers are persecuted, imprisoned and worse for their support for the principles espoused by Daniel O’Connell two centuries ago. Twice in recent years I have been asked to present the Front Line Human Rights Defenders awards and on both occasions they were awarded to lawyers, one from Sudan the other from Syria, who could not attend the presentation because they were imprisoned on account of their human rights advocacy.
In a perverse way could there be any higher endorsement of the value of their work than to be that one person, one voice that makes an oppressive administration tremble. Many of you will not be called to that level of commitment, though some will. Many will simply be called to be vigilant and courageous in countries where human rights cultures are well embedded but are always vulnerable to the kind of fear and tensions, the kind of corruption and cover-up that cause systems to fail and the innocent to suffer.
This is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the years since its ratification, the Universal Declaration has been supplemented by an expansive human rights infrastructure, guaranteeing a wide range of rights, and supplemented by a growing body of networks and national and international jurisprudence. This has now grown so vast and so complex that the role of the independent lawyer in navigating it, as client adviser or as judge, is more important than ever
Some of us have thankfully come a long and painful way since O’Connell’s day, but for too many of our brothers and sisters all over the world there is still such a very long way to travel before we arrive in that place where to paraphrase the words of our 1916 Proclamation, “the children of the world are cherished equally”. We won’t get there by doing nothing and we won’t get there without an independent and a determined Bar working as you are, in solidarity with one another on a common mission to end the misery and criminal waste that rains down on humanity wherever human rights are abused. It is what makes the law a noble vocation.
I am delighted to have been asked to join you this morning, and I wish you every success with the weekend’s deliberations.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh. Go n-éirí go geal libh. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.