REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE RED CROSS PERPETUAL TROPHY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE RED CROSS PERPETUAL TROPHY SATURDAY 17 NOVEMBER, 2000
Tá gliondar orm bheith anseo libh inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as ucht bhur bhfáilte chaoin.
It gives me great pleasure to be here today and I wish to thank Mr. David Andrews for inviting me to be with you and to present the Perpetual Trophy. It is a source of great pride and indeed honour for me to be President of the Irish Red Cross Society, an organisation with a proud and honourable tradition here in Ireland and as part of the Red Cross Movement, the largest humanitarian aid organisation in the world with over 100 million members. The world is a better place because of what you do. Yours is an honourable name wherever it is heard. Its origins, as a response to the horrors of war in Italy in 1859, will be well known to all of you and we of this 21st century owe our own debt of gratitude to the Swiss business man, Henri Dunant whose compassion for that war’s victims led directly to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Today nature brings its own catastrophes and to those which are unavoidable, human kind has regrettably added those which are utterly avoidable but which ravage life cruelly nonetheless. The International Red Cross with its relief missions in many parts of our world stands ready to offer comfort and hope to those lives blighted by one calamity or another and for those victims the Red Cross is truly a lifeline.
Here in Ireland our own Red Cross has given decades of important service with tens of thousands of volunteer men and women, generously giving their time and energy to the service of others. That caring outreach builds on an important and proud part of our Irish character. It finds expression in your work at home. It finds expression in the work of Irish missionaries and aid workers in the world’s poor but developing countries. Mr. Andrews as a former Foreign Minister has first hand experience of the huge amount of good which Ireland’s best unpaid ambassadors accomplish and it is very heartening to see that even in these times of prosperity at home, the willingness to give unselfish service to strangers is still as strong as ever.
The fact that so many people are prepared to join the Society is in itself a tribute to the organisation. Each generation has shouldered the responsibility for making the Red Cross relevant, updating and developing its services in response to changing times and handing it on intact to a well-prepared and committed new generation.
If the Irish Red Cross Society is effective it is because you volunteers make it so. If it continues to grow and prosper and care and nourish that is because you make it happen. What you do is important and anyone who needs evidence need only ask those who receive your help. They are the voices which can tell of lives changed, of lives enriched, of lives sustained, of lives saved only because you were there and you cared. Whether your contribution has been providing medical expertise at events – and may I say I have been very glad of that expertise in the Áras on occasion, or whether you give first aid courses, or deliver meals-on-wheels or distribute vital food and medical aid in some far off and forgotten part of the globe, if your work was missing there would be a cruel and tragic gap. Your work is not done for thanks though you richly deserve our gratitude as a society. It is not done to be noticed and yet it is a very broadly based community resource. The emergency and first aid services you provide are probably best known but your hospital visits to long stay patients whose family perhaps live abroad, the clubs and parties organised for older people, the therapeutic hand care service and the much valued training and respite breaks for carers, these things are making a real difference to people’s lives, sometimes the difference between having a life and merely existing.
As President of the Irish Red Cross Society, it is always a great pleasure for me to make the annual presentation of the Red Cross Trophy and Awards but this year is the International Year of the Volunteer – and you are the finest of volunteers - so this is a doubly rewarding day for me. I congratulate the winners today and thank them for striving for such a level of excellence in an activity which is unpaid and unforced. I also commend and congratulate each and every one of our Irish Red Cross Volunteers. You do us proud and you make us proud.
I wish you good health, happiness and every continued success in all that you do.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh. Gura fada buan sibh agus go raibh maith agaibh.