REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF ‘THE IRISH TATLER WOMEN’
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF ‘THE IRISH TATLER WOMEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2002’
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am delighted to be counted among those women who will receive Irish Tatler awards tonight. I am sorry that I won’t be able to stay to witness all the award presentations but I would like to extend heart felt congratulations to all those who are to be honoured for the many ways in which they have enhanced Irish life and for their ambassadorship as women who are making a difference.
Many reasons are advanced for Ireland’s contemporary economic success and cultural confidence and among the best and most compelling of them is the simple fact that in today’s Ireland, the genius of women now floods through the warp and weft of Irish life in ways that would have been somewhere between difficult and unimaginable only a few short years ago. We limped along flying on one wing, much of the natural talent base of our people, particularly of our women, locked into a cycle of limited or downright closed opportunity, lack of confidence, lack of power and frustrating under-achievement.
Even today in a liberal democratic culture with a strong equal opportunities agenda, old habits, old handicaps, die hard and we still have some distance to travel before we are free from history’s shackles and fully flying on both wings. But there is no doubt that the young women of my daughters’ generation compete on a much more level playing-field than any previous generation. My daughters look at me in disbelief when I tell them that Cambridge University was closed to women until half way through the twentieth century, that women were routinely forced to give up work on marriage until the closing quarter of that century, that the first book I was obliged to read on entering law school told me that women were wasting their time contemplating careers at the Bar because their voices did not carry as far as the male voice. The author of that book, the eminent jurist Glanville Williams had obviously limited experience of the vocal range of the mothers of North Belfast. Still Professor Williams’ advice to us young aspiring female lawyers was that the Bar was a good place to find a husband and such marriages provided a satisfactory “way out”. Empowering stuff! And that was only thirty years ago. Today law students in Ireland are predominantly women and a similar new chapter is quietly unfolding in virtually every profession.
I bought a set of some sixty books, a few years ago grandly entitled the Great Ideas which purport to be a history of ideas from Socrates to the present day. You have to get to volume 56 before a woman’s name is mentioned at all. That abject failure to acknowledge women’s contribution is very telling of how women’s voices were largely silenced in the recording of history, depriving us of role models and creating serious doubt about our relevance. Our world was and is skewed as a result but I hope that the next sixty volumes will tell a very different story.
There is a line in Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘From the Canton of Expectation’, which tells us ‘the future lies with what’s affirmed from under’. Women have emerged from under the clouds of history and today they are helping to bring fresh illumination to the world, making us think differently, act differently, see things differently, see ourselves differently. We would, of course, all like to see more women involved in politics, in senior business positions and in all areas of important civic decision-making but at least today we know that it is going to happen, it’s a matter of when rather than if.
Awards like these record the contribution being made by women in our contemporary world. They affirm and encourage us individually and collectively to keep focussed on doing what we can to promote a world in which talent blossoms and goes where it will unimpeded by voices which say; “You can’t because you are a woman.” That “you can’t” voice has already cost us dearly and it is good to hear the Irish Tatler saying loud and clear “you can”.
My thanks again to everyone associated with this award. I wish you a most enjoyable evening and heartiest congratulations to all the winners.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.