Remarks by President McAleese to mark Erasmus Day and the 20th anniversary of Erasmus
Remarks by President McAleese to mark Erasmus Day and the 20th anniversary of Erasmus, the EU student/staff mobility programme
Is cúis mhór áthais dom bheith i bhfur láthair inniu. Tá mé buíoch díbh go léir as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíor-chaoin.
Good evening everybody and thank you for the welcome and the invitation to join you for this celebration of two decades of the EU Erasmus Student and Staff Mobility Program, one of the great success stories of European higher education and one of the most exciting opportunities for young people which membership of the Union has created.
Over these past twenty years Erasmus has given 1.5m EU students the chance to spend periods of study in other member states; 24,000 young Irish students have gone the Erasmus journey and today they are enjoying the many broadening and deepening benefits that such an experience offers. Those benefits don’t stop with the individuals; they enrich the knowledge and experiential equity of our country and they strengthen the web of lived mutuality between Europe’s citizens. In this, the golden anniversary year of the Union’s foundation, the Erasmus project has drawn a new generation into ownership of and responsibility for its future.
In naming the project after a great classical scholar and theologian who lived over five hundred years ago, the creators of the Erasmus project were reminding young
Europeans that, historically, many of Europe’s leading intellectuals travelled across their continent’s borders and were fully at home in a range of countries far from their birthplaces. Their insights and wisdom were distilled from many disparate sources and their genius left its mark far and wide on our continent. It’s a story very familiar to the Irish for, when mainland European civilisation faced crises in the eight and ninth centuries, it was Irish scholars and monks who crisscrossed the continent in difficult and dangerous times bringing light to times referred to as the Dark Ages. So we find St Columban buried in Bobbio in Italy and revered there to this day a millennium and a half after his lifetime. We find St Virgilius the patron saint of Austria’s Salzburg but we know him better as Laois man St Feargal. Meanwhile back in Ireland, our unique and unrivalled reputation for enlightened scholarship drew students to our monastic universities from all over Europe and, over the centuries of our complex history, the Irish relationship with mainland Europe has been one of remarkable strong connections.
Some weeks ago I was in Louvain in Belgium for the 400th anniversary of the Irish College, now the Irish Institute and part of the famous University of Leuven. It was there that the first chronicle of Irish history was written by Irish scholars, there that the first texts in the Irish language were published and there that word 'náisiún' first entered the Irish language
Participants in the Erasmus Programme don’t have the backdrop of penal laws or perilous sea travel in frail craft but they are travelling in the same spirit of adventure and intellectual curiosity as the Irish scholars of old. Their hunger for knowledge and appetite, for cultural questioning are important drivers of our ambition to be in the forefront of the knowledge economy and major contributors to a successful and fully evolved European Union. It is a matter of real pride that the participation rate for Irish 18-19 year olds in higher education is one of the highest in Europe. It is a matter of real necessity that they have the chance provided by Erasmus to explore their Union easily and effectively, to be comfortable in every corner of it, to be unfazed by differences of language or perspective for, though they do not remember it, Europe was once a place of virulent ignorance and bullying, imperialist arrogance that sucked the life out of its youth on endless bloody battlefields.
The noble idea of the European Union germinated out of that horrific landscape of waste. It has been a powerful force for healing divisions, deepening democracy, promoting the rule of law and entwining the futures of Europe’s children around a common set of values, a common agenda
Ireland is the success story par excellence of the European Union. Our membership has seen the emergence of the first generation ever on this island to know a combination of peace and prosperity and to enjoy a level of sophistication and confidence unimaginable a few short few years ago. But precisely because it is the first generation, it is important to remind ourselves that we are not in any sense at journey’s end but in reality just starting out on a journey of discovering what we are capable of when all the talents and energies of our people are harvested and harnessed effectively.
Education has been at the centre of and crucial to Ireland’s transformation and it will continue to be a key driver of sustaining our future success. It is the basic building block of that future and the Erasmus Programme, now part of the EU’s Lifelong Learning Programme covering learning from the earliest years to adulthood, is an important resource in positioning Ireland confidently in Europe and confidently in the global market place. The Bologna Process which seeks to build a European Higher Education Area without barriers to mobility is, like Erasmus an encouraging development in our goal to make access to education and to opportunity truly, fully, socially inclusive and fully Europe wide. With 27 member states the scope just keeps getting better all the time. As the English poet Milton wrote “who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”. Today we celebrate twenty years of free and open encounters that have revealed the truth about Europe’s peoples to one another. It’s a recipe for growth, for confluences of ideas, for synergies and networks of common endeavour, for mutual understanding, for simple befriending, all things which build us up humanly and make our Union civically resilient and rightly proud.
We celebrate the courage of the young men and women who have committed to the Erasmus program recognising that, in leaving friends, family, culture and college even for a relatively short period and even supported as they are by the Erasmus system, there is, nonetheless, loneliness and fearfulness and the start of a journey as much into the self as into another nation and people. We salute their willingness to take on all those human challenges and to overcome them knowing that their investment in themselves is also an investment in Ireland and in Europe. Unlike almost every other kind of investment this one carries all benefit and no risk.
I commend the Erasmus programme to all and urge you all to spread those benefits in the years to come.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.