REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE RECRUIT CAMP MILITARY CAMP, LOURDES FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2008
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE RECRUIT CAMP MILITARY CAMP, LOURDES FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2008
Dia Dhaoibh a chairde. It’s quite a spectacle to see Lourdes taken over by armies from all over the world and an even better spectacle to see Ireland’s Defence Forces not only well represented among them but so well represented by our recruits. You have come here in a very special year for Lourdes and for Ireland as we celebrate fifty years of continuous participation by our Defence Forces in UN peacekeeping service. Those fifty years have been an extraordinary showcase of a tenacious commitment to peace by a militarily neutral country, a country which has shouldered time and again more than its fair share of the burden of care for the world’s most distressed and oppressed peoples.
Now as we look ahead to the next fifty years, you are the men and women who will be the hands and hearts of our peace-keeping work wherever it takes us in the decades ahead. Your home context is very different from many of those who soldiered in the past, particularly in the earlier part of those fifty years.
Today’s Ireland is confident and prosperous. She has a hard-won peace and an exciting new culture of collaboration growing across the once vexed North-South axis. Her Defence Forces have earned respect and admiration around the globe and their context too has changed with engagement in increasingly complex operations and in very difficult conditions. We are proud to see the very challenging EUFOR mission to Chad headed by an Irish soldier, Lieutenant General Pat Nash. The faith placed in Pat is a faith placed in Ireland, a faith earned the hard way in the Congo, in Lebanon, in Liberia, Kosovo and many other places where we were tested and found to be professional in the highest degree and with a winning humanity.
Now your training draws you deeply into that world of skill, developed by first-class training and enhanced over a lifetime by experience. You are the future of our Defence Forces at a time when they are better equipped, have wider capabilities, and a far broader horizon than at any previous time in their history. It is not easy to predict where you might find yourself serving, for ours is still an unstable world where Mother Nature and human nature sometimes inflict their worst without much advance warning but one thing is for certain, in the midst of chaos and uncertainty we know that our Defence Forces will bring hope and help and whatever they do, wherever they are called to serve. They - that is you – each one of you will honour the legacy of those who have gone before and you will continue to earn rightful pride and respect at home and internationally.
In this place of prayer, sometimes quite desperate prayers, it is worth remembering that for the many people you will meet on service overseas your arrival, your presence, your work will be the answer to their prayers. The French and German troops who began to meet here after the appalling bloodbath that was the Second World War came in the hope that never again would there be such an outrageous waste of human life provoked by hatred, enmity and greed. The European Union was born of their heartfelt prayers for peace. It has brought to Europe a time of prosperity and peace such as no generation has ever before known down through the millennia. It brought nothing short of a miracle. Here in this place we pray that through your work, your vocation, the gift of peace, the miracle of peace may spread far and wide throughout the world.