REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE SUMMER GRADUATION DINNER, QUEENS UNIVERSITY BELFAST
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE SUMMER GRADUATION DINNER, QUEENS UNIVERSITY BELFAST TUESDAY, 7TH JULY 2009
Vice Chancellor, Ambassador, Senator Mitchell, Honorary Graduates, Honorary Graduands, ladies and gentlemen.
Coming home and coming back to my beloved alma mater Queen’s is the easy part. Making speeches is a bit like doing exams though and I am conscious that listening to speeches has parallels with marking exam scripts. But we are in the company of a group of Honorary Graduates and Honorary Graduands who didn’t sit a written exam to justify their appearance on the podium but whose lived lives have been rigorously assessed by their peers, by public opinion, in the marketplace, in business, research, international journalism and international diplomacy, sport, the stage, literature, science, technology, medicine and law. They are, all fifteen of this year’s distinguished awardees, utterly remarkable people and I know we each congratulate them warmly and wish them well as Honorary Graduates of this University.
Talking to a group of youngsters the other day I asked them had they any idea yet of what they would like to make of their lives. Two immediately volunteered that they wanted to be famous and the third said she wanted to be a celebrity. I didn’t get the impression that they had much of a roadmap planned for themselves apart from a fifteen second appearance on Ireland or Britain’s Got Talent. For our special guests here tonight in whose honour we gather there was no shortcut to this day or any of the other days on which they received deserved honours or recognition. Each exemplifies passion, drive, commitment and focus. Each has a skill honed over years of practice and an inspirational story of success achieved the hard way, the only way that truly endures, the only way that is truly worthy of note.
Speaking of enduring success I cannot come back to Queens without Martin reminding me to mention the Sigerson Cup medal he won for this University in Gaelic Football almost forty years ago. Now there really is a one-day wonder that he has squeezed endless mileage out of over four decades. On the other hand sport was a great diversion in those days, not just from our studies but from the appalling conflict which raged all around us in our native city and county. It was a conflict so old and relentless, so embedded and enduring that there were many who would have described it as intractable.
Not so the Chancellor of this University, Senator George Mitchell, whose presence this evening, along with his dear wife, Heather, gives me a chance to say thank you for your faith in the capacity of the human person to change, for your patience and your persistence, for your unfailing serenity and good nature, for your investment in building peace the hard way, by persuasion, one person at a time. By the time you arrived here in the mid-1990s many had died, more had emigrated and hope was in short supply. You became the honest broker with an alchemy that married the ability and the patience to master all sides of a complex history and story with a steely determination to make hard calls when they were needed. You got the most demanding job spec ever drafted on this island and today, as peace visibly consolidates, no-one is more deserving of thanks, praise and respect. No-one is also more deserving of a restful, quiet retirement, which is presumably why President Obama appointed you as his Special Envoy for the Middle East. Our best wishes and prayers go with you and to Heather for the sacrifices that you both keep on making in order to bring the gift of peace to those overwhelmed by conflict.
George has invested ten years as Chancellor of Queen’s and, just as peace has transformed Northern Ireland, so too Queen’s has had the most exciting decade in its history. Under Peter Gregson’s outstanding leadership, Queen’s became a member of the Russell Group with an investment spend that now tops £200 million and a research reach across a range of disciplines that is sparking huge innovation with practical downstream benefits for so many people.
Yet we know that the chill winds of recession blow all around this island, making life difficult, uncertain and uncomfortable. Graduates who once had great jobs in thriving professions now face redundancy. Students who started their degrees during years of economic buoyancy and who felt they had a reasonable expectation of a rapid start to their careers, face the prospect of a thinning job market with huge competition for fewer posts. So our celebrations are tinged with a new and sobering reality. The problems we all face to greater or lesser degrees will, we know, be overcome in time but only if we do what the peacemakers did here, think innovatively, make sacrifices, build fresh capacity, work tirelessly, forge new partnerships, release pent-up talent, and refuse to give up, no matter how tough the going gets. We learned a lot of that from a great Chancellor of a great University. We see those things deeply and profoundly at work in the lives of those receiving honorary degrees. We have a lot to be grateful for, especially for people who don’t set out to become famous for its own sake but who set out to invest the best of themselves in the betterment of humanity and to whom recognition and reward come the hard-earned way.
Queen’s is now well into the latter half of its second century. It has led through times that varied between tough, very tough and awful. In truth there have never been easy times here, just Queen’s men and women who did their best no matter what the times, people who believed in the future and our capacity, individually and collectively to change it for the better.
And now I would like to propose a toast:
"To the Queen's University of Belfast".