REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE IRISH-AUSTRALIAN BAR CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE IRISH-AUSTRALIAN BAR CONFERENCE ST. PATRICK’S HALL, DUBLIN CASTLE
Dia dhaoibh a cháirde agus céad míle fáilte.
A particularly warm welcome to our visitors from Australia. Good evening everybody and welcome.
I am grateful to Hugh Mohan for his very kind invitation to me to open this Joint Conference of the Australian and Irish Bars. To our visitors from Australia I offer the traditional céad míle fáilte, or one hundred thousand welcomes, and since many of your ancestors probably originated here in any event, can I add, welcome home. Given the fraught legal circumstances in which many of them arrived in Australia they would no doubt be more than bemused to see their successors return as lawyers.
Australia is the most Irish country in the world outside of Ireland. The forces of history have made us kin to one another as wave after wave of emigrant Irish made the long sea voyage to that ancient land and forged there new lives, new futures. They brought with them a feisty individualism, a determined egalitarianism, a faith in democratic structures rooted in civil liberty and human rights. They had long bitter experience of hardship, oppression and exclusion and they wove those experiences into a changing Australia. So deeply did they embed their value system into that world that was new to them, that the story of Ireland cannot be told without telling the story of Australia nor can the story of Australia, be told without telling the story of Ireland. Men who left here in chains became Chief Justices there. The overlooked and neglected people who left here with empty pockets became many things, among them mayors, governors, public representatives, business people and professionals of all sorts. They left the English common law behind in Ireland and of course discovered it again in Australia. That same common law has given us a shared legal heritage albeit one that was conferred on us without our consent. Whatever about the circumstances of its implementation, today we see, in our respective legal structures and systems, a familiar landscape with considerable similarities; and of course precisely because of that historic commonality, we have long had strong collegial relationships and mutual recognition of qualifications. These things create a context for comfortable and fluent discourse across the range of issues you are preparing to discuss. Nationally and internationally, our two nations confront questions with huge implications for the law and for the citizens whose peace of mind and whose very freedoms depend on it. For all our similarities we do not always approach things in the same way and in these very divergences lies the source of the curiosity about one another that brings each of you here. In those differences of experience and perspective, of trial and error lie the insight, skill and information you will share with each other. You will trade ideas, validate expertise, listen and learn, talk and teach. Out of that, we hope, will come a fresh new distilled wisdom to serve both the legal systems and the peoples of Ireland and Australia well for the future.
In this the 60th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Charter it is more essential than ever that lawyers communicate transnationally, that nation talks to nation - for the dignity and worth of the human person and the equal rights of men and women are in no less need of protection today than when the Charter was signed. We need fearless champions, insistent advocates, and it was gratifying to see Ireland and Australia working so closely together on the United Nations Human Rights Commission to protect the independence and impartiality of the law, and to protect human rights defenders. So many of those who made those first lonely journeys to Australia from Ireland were precisely that, human rights defenders in a world which was run by people who simply did not accept the principle of equality. They lived in a world of bigoted supremacy of smug triumphalism in which so-called law and order served to diminish and oppress humankind. It took brave souls to stand against the might of a corrupt establishment. Branded as criminals, they paid a heavy price in exclusion from their very country, but even the harshest punishment was unable to overwhelm the simple truth and integrity of their faith in the human dignity of all God’s creation. That unswerving faith was their gift to Australia.
Today, Ireland and Australia meet as two of the world’s leading human rights based democracies. Australia has been blessedly free from civil turmoil for a long time while Ireland continues its centuries old struggle for a true and lasting, just, peace. A confident, educated and successful generation now insists on the chance to achieve its political ambitions exclusively through democratic dialogue. Australia has been a good friend to us not least during the recent years of the developing peace process. Though it is currently going through an uneasy phase I remain confident that, in the long run the vision embodied in the Good Friday Agreement will come to pass. It offers the best prospect for a future to be proud of and we appreciate the ongoing support of our Irish family in Australia, and of the Australian Government, in our efforts to build healthy and happy relationships between those who share this island. One of the strongest memories I have of my visits to Australia as President is of the formidable bond of friendship that exists there between Irish men and women of all faiths and perspectives, all politics and all pasts. The vanities of history disappeared quickly when loneliness drove them to a recognition of each other as neighbour and as friend. That is one of Australia’s gifts and challenges to us.
The public doesn’t always have the most flattering view of lawyers. Sometimes they accuse us of being inspired by pecuniary matters rather than principles. On the ceiling above us, in the central panel above your heads, among other figures, are, by coincidence, depictions of Justice and Liberty. These are the things which inspire good lawyers and promote good law, good democracies. I hope they inspire you, and I hope too that this conference will refresh and reenergize your vocation as lawyers and that you will take from it many friendships and memories to last a lifetime. I hope too the imprint of your deliberations will be found in future answers to common problems on both sides of the world.
My sincere good wishes for the success of this Conference which is now officially open.
Thank you. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.