REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE POLITICAL DISCUSSION SOCIETY, NUI GALWAY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE POLITICAL DISCUSSION SOCIETY, NUI GALWAY ON TUESDAY, 12TH FEBRUARY, 2002.
It’s good to be back in Galway and especially to be back again in NUI Galway. I owe thanks to Mary Rose McNally for the kind invitation and to each of you for the lovely warm welcome.
We are soon to have the first Irish general election of the twenty-first century and it is an apt time to reflect on the challenges which face this generation and which will be a transparent test of our collective character.
Materially there is little doubt that this generation is wealthier than any which preceded it. Intellectually, no other generation has had such educational opportunities. Today’s Ireland is seen at home and abroad as a successful, achieving country steeled by a new found confidence and energized by the mobilization of the talent of its people as never before. True as those assertions are, and grateful as we should be that they are true, we also know that there are many spectator seats at this unfolding drama that is contemporary Ireland and in each of those seats is a human being whose life is only half-lived, whose talents are wasted and whose absence from centre stage weakens the whole production.
It is true that we were once an island almost entirely made up of such spectators and what transformed us was fidelity to the dream that there could be and would be an Ireland where every citizen flourished in a culture of freedom and equal opportunity. A large part of that dream has revealed itself to us these past few years but not all - the rest is now up to us. And that really is the true leitmotif of this generation - you and I have been given the gift of many half-finished noble, ambitious and extraordinary projects. Now it falls to us to see them through, to bring them to their fullest realization.
The last generation brought us into the European Union, the greatest adventure in consensus based transnational politics ever devised by human kind. That Union is set to double its size embracing Europe’s eastern flank and drawing in countries who were mysteries to us and we to them, until the fall of Communism only a decade ago. Just as that giant step is contemplated, instead of a surge of energy running through Europe’s civic society, we find instead a strong undertow of apathy and disaffection. Have we forgotten so soon the circumstances in which the European Union dream was founded, the many millions of dead, of young lives thrown away in world wars, whose memory chastened the survivors into creating history-defying structures of robust and respectful partnership between old enemies. Those structures are still in their infancy. They need champions in this generation to consolidate the catalogue of successes they have achieved, to drive the vision to its ultimate frontiers and to root ownership of the Union in the heart of each citizen.
It is hard to believe that the centenary of Irish independence will probably occur in your lifetime and possibly in mine. Hard to believe that a century could be so short! Hard to believe so much could be crammed into a handful of generations. My grandfather's generation with its memory of the 1913 Lock Out, the Rising, the Civil War, Independence, Partition, the advent of electricity, piped water, poverty, emigration, prejudice and racism against the Irish abroad, frustrated hopes, dreams that died on London’s building sites - that generation lies uncomfortably close behind us. Now Ireland tells a different story entirely as one of the world’s leading exporting nations, at the forefront of the second industrial revolution, the curse of emigration has been expunged and people come to our shores now in search of opportunity.
It is of course a relatively new phenomenon for Ireland to be a land of fresh and hope-filled starts, but our experience as an emigrating nation has much to teach us about what it is like to be a stranger whose talents and very humanity are overlooked by prejudice and bigotry. Time and again our people were humiliated and hated, labelled as worthless and time and again they transcended those labels by the sweat of their brow. They helped build their new homelands, they grew good families, they became fine citizens, they even helped their native land to survive its hard times and in latter years they and their descendants gave invaluable support to the search for peace in Northern Ireland. We know better than any race on earth the rich harvest that comes from giving the stranger space and opportunity to blossom. Now we have the chance to put all those lessons to work here in Ireland, to create a tolerant, pluralist society where differences in background, colour and creed are seen as things to be joyfully curious about rather than things to be frightened of. That emerging Ireland is also an embryonic gift to this generation - one which your efforts, your values, will see through. It is already a battleground for conflicting values and as we contemplate the racist attitudes expressed verbally and in physical attacks on those of different skin colour it is worth remembering the words of Douglas Hyde, first President of this Republic - words spoken in Carnegie Hall ninety seven years ago.
“Hatred is a negative passion. It is a powerful, a very powerful destroyer, but it is useless for building up. Love, on the other hand, can remove mountains”.
There are manifestly mountains of doubt and prejudice to be removed. That work too calls for champions, to speak out in places where the bitter word is spoken, to set standards high, to close off the arteries which feed hatred.
This generation has stewardship too of the Peace Process, another embryonic gift, half grown, in need of the most assiduous nurturing, but holding the promise of a glorious Ireland and a blessed generation yet to come - one which will know for the very first time what it is like to live in a place where peace reigns and where neighbours who previously ignored each other or set their faces against each other, now work hand in hand for the good of all. If we nurture the seed of peace well we will for the first time have our true strength, our true potential, revealed to us.
That inspirational goal also demands champions for there are as many obstacles on the way ahead as have already been removed from the path behind. Most of those obstacles lie in human hearts, in fears and misunderstandings rooted in history’s shambolic dance. Now we have the job of identifying those fears and laying them to rest. Peace building is infinitely more difficult than demolishing hope with hatred, and the challenge to our generation is to internalise deeply the work of peace and to make ourselves its champions.
There are those who believe this generation has it made with almost full employment (notwithstanding some recent setbacks), buoyant cultural confidence and pride and global respect for Ireland at an all time high. These things which we have achieved by hard work are important drivers of our faith in ourselves and important measures of our ability to succeed but if they lead us into a cul-de-sac of smugness or complacency we may delay or impede the completion of the vision that underpins this Republic - a vision where all share the good times and each human being knows his or her true worth, true talent, because they live it day in and day out. We are accelerating rapidly towards that vision as more and more people benefit from widened access to education and to the opportunities our vibrant economy has created.
This is a fast moving society but not everyone is moving fast and not everyone is equipped to survive its relentless pressures. If you are stuck and going nowhere, those who are moving on the rising tide disappear from view very rapidly. A society where those stuck on the beach and those moving with the tide, lose sight of each other is not a healthy place. There is plenty of evidence of wasted and wasting lives among those who are overwhelmed by the pressures of our time, some because they have had too much, others because they have too little. We have our marginalised still waiting to take their place at the centre of things and wondering will it ever happen, we have the lostness that drives so many young men in particular to suicide, we have the devastation wreaked on daily life by drug and alcohol abuse, we have a brutishness in the growing violence on our streets, an absence of care for others that creates carnage on our roads every single day. We have many children born into weak family structures where the traps of poverty and illiteracy lock them into cycles of underachievement from birth. We have the spectre of Aids already devastating Africa and threatening to push its baleful reach right across the globe. We are linked to a global economic structure with highs and lows not of our making but which affect us nonetheless and we are linked to a world community with a restless penchant for conflict which can cast shadows over this tiny island even from as far away as Afghanistan. So no we haven’t it made - not yet but we do have the making of it, if we have the will and if enough hearts and hands commit to the work.
A famous female leader of our neighbouring island once pronounced that “there is no such thing as society.” She was wrong. Here in Ireland we believe emphatically in society, in the metamorphosis of a random collection of individuals into a system of mutual support with a shared vision and driven by shared endeavour. We believe in its centrality to human development and because we have had the bitter experience of unjustly organised and oppressive societies we have a wisdom, distilled over centuries which impels us towards a democratic, egalitarian and strong civic society underpinned by values of tolerance and generosity. We know that in such a society the individual has his or her best chance to live humanly, to live decently.
A strong, resilient and caring civic society does not simply happen by chance. It is made, sustained and developed by human beings who dare to care far beyond the boundaries of self and more than caring, they act. Out of the many diverse and necessary things they do in the name of civic altruism, community flourishes, a climate of mutuality develops and an embrace is felt by each human being no matter what their circumstances, background or ability. We have a reputation as builders of civic society both at home and abroad.
Those civically minded individuals are not clones - some promote the arts, sports, culture, the environment, religion; others care for the poor, the lonely, the vulnerable - not just here in Ireland, but in the Third world, some simply raise families to the best of their abilities, giving them good example, instilling values that stretch the human spirit rather than crudely indulging it, making homes crucibles of loves rather than breeding grounds for hatred and prejudice.
And leadership is crucial, not the kind of leadership that creates unquestioning followers but the kind of leadership that creates leaders, that motivates the doers and puts heart and hope in a society and reinforces its capacity to care well for its citizens. That is why politics plays such a critical role in the processes which turn a random collection of individuals into a functioning, caring society. As members of the Galway Political Discussion Society, you don’t need to be persuaded of the benefits that politics bring to civic society. You know the extent to which each of us as individuals relies on effective politics for our quality of life and so you keep faith with the necessity of politics, notwithstanding the abuse of political processes by a small number of persons who bring shame on themselves and unfortunately breed disinterest and disillusion among voters. That disinterest and disillusion are like acids eating away at the fabric of this important phenomenon we call society and they are an important challenge to our generation to reassert the value and the significance of politics and at the same time to insist that the best guarantee of good politics is an interested, searching, curious and engaged public.
Looking back it is easy to forget that another generation not yet born will sit in similar judgement on us and when they make comparisons between the generations, they will carefully note the grim hand which was dealt to generation after generation of Irish men and women, until now, until this one. For make no mistake about it the stakes have been raised and exponentially. This generation has been dealt Aces. Now it has to play them. It has the winning of the game but it has the losing of it too.
The pathway to contemporary Ireland was littered with many obstacles that had to be removed - the obstacles of fatalistic resignation from within and resistance to change, inequality and exclusion from without. We owe so much to those individuals who never saw their dreams realised in their own lifetimes, but who sowed the seeds, through private effort and many varieties of public service.
Education was arguably the most important equity they bequeathed to the next generation. It created the knowledge and skills base on which today’s economic successes have been built. But it also created a personal success for thousands of young men and women, opening up new ideas, drawing them in to the world of knowledge not as passive recipients but as active contributors, creators, discoverers in their own right. It gave us the tools to re-imagine our world and to believe we could shape it to that new image. The next cohort of potential leaders, of society makers and re-makers is already among us and thankfully with the growing liberation of women we now have the opportunity for more people than ever to make a significant contribution to reinforcing the social fabric. Now the question is will they make the choice to be the leader or the led, spectator or actor, cynic or doer.
There is a fundamental difference between a realism which induces cynicism and one which provokes change. Cynics cast around for someone to blame. They contribute nothing. They drain energy. They see a problem and sit back making smart alec comments about who is going to fix it. Left to them problems fester and get worse. Change comes from the doers, those who see the problem, who know if they do nothing, then nothing will be done and who are driven to find answers, no matter how difficult, no matter how intractable. The doers believe in society and they intuit deeply that its central dynamic is hope-filled action.
It takes courage and independence of mind to commit to crafting the new social dispensation which lies now within our reach, the fulfillment of the ideal of an egalitarian republic, the fulfillment of the idea of a European Union, the fulfillment of the promise of peace on this island, the fulfillment of the dream of a world without hunger. I hope that some of you find the courage not just because we need you to but because I know that if you do, you will find the most wonderful personal fulfillment. I have been privileged in this role as President of Ireland to meet almost exclusively, the doers. No matter what life throws at them they find a way to cope and it is always a way that stretches the human person to levels of charity, benevolence, generosity, kindness which make the rest of us glad to be alive and give us hope in and for humanity. When you meet them, you are energized by them, renewed by their faith in service, in giving and in sharing. They fill the oxygen tanks that society needs to breathe.
George Bernard Shaw summed it up well:-
“People are always blaming circumstances for being what they are. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.”
This is a very good time to believe in ourselves, in our own power, to let our light shine, liberating a new generation to be people who stand for something more than mere consumerism, to be people who stand by and for community, by and for society. It is a time to get out and vote, to take part, to use this freedom which others worked so hard for and to use it well.
Cardinal Newman in his Meditation on being Special tells us:
“I have my mission…..
I am a link in a chain
A bond of connection between persons…”
In too short a time our children and grandchildren will sit in this hall, in these seats. They will be wiser than us for they will have lived through this future we are only now designing. We will not be able to bluff them. They will know what we did, they will know what our mission was and they will speak of what we achieved and what we wasted. Will they be proud of us? Will bigotry and poverty of all sorts be history? Will the peoples of Europe have learnt to live comfortably with twin identities one for country and one for continental homeland? Will the people of Ireland be firm friends with one another North and South? Will it be a safer world. Will it be a happier place? Will our children and grandchildren be proud of us? With your help and only with you help, yes, I believe they will.
Thank You.