REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE ULSTER SOCIETY OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS EUROPA HOTEL, BELFAST
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE ULSTER SOCIETY OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS EUROPA HOTEL, BELFAST THURSDAY, 28 NOVEMBER, 2002
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is good to be back home in Belfast and I am grateful to The Ulster Society of Chartered Accountants and its Chairman, Feargal McCormack for the invitation. It was particularly generous and forgiving of you to include my husband Martin in the invitation given that, in an extraordinary act of apostasy, he abandoned the accountancy profession for dentistry. As one of our friends remarked, the big difference between Martin’s second and first choice of careers is that at least dentists administer pain killers before extracting your money. It might soften the blow if I admit that this comment was made by a lawyer and, worse than that, a tax lawyer who is so successful he is reputed to have a loophole named after him.
On this island it seems we are forever destined to meet in interesting times. 1922 would undoubtedly be rated as a profoundly historic one for Ireland even if your Society had not been founded in that year. But for eighty years now this society has tried to help its members and the broader community to adapt intelligently and imaginatively to the forces of history and their economic impact. Now in our generation those forces are offering a mosaic of quite amazing opportunities, an evolving Peace Process, the prospect of long-term comfortable inter-communal relationships, collegial and genial cross-border relationships, mature, consensus-oriented inter-island relationships, exceptionally friendly relationships with the biggest consumer market in the world, the United States, all of which conduce to investment and prosperity. Add in an enlarged European Union which will soon almost double its size and so double its potential consumers of our products, add in a common currency which has already been absorbed seamlessly into life South of the Border and those with vision and an entrepreneurial pulse can see that the landscape of the future is a much more exciting place than the landscape of the past.
There are challenges too, uncertainty about global economic trends, unease about global peace to say nothing of local peace. These challenges are more easily and comprehensively faced and faced down with friends and partners. For the first time in the history of this society and this island’s two jurisdictions, we in this generation have an opportunity to face into those challenges in respectful partnership, with all the sets of relationships in which we exist and function working fluently together.
We have a chance to put our shared island on the map for inward investors and tourists, to create synergies between our respective indigent business sectors, to send fleets of consumer goods both ways across the border, to spread the benign embrace of jobs and prosperity widely as never before. But like all opportunities of a lifetime it has to be taken in the lifetime of the opportunity and that is why we need leaders, inspirers and empowerers at every level of society - people who keep their focus on that landscape of the future, who keep on believing in it and working for it even when the ground underneath them wobbles unsteadily and unpredictably as it inevitably does from time to time.
Your profession knows more than a little about unsteady times. International names in the field of accountancy that once were bywords for trust are now invitations to ridicule. Credible corporate governance, transparency and accountability are on the local and global agendas with a vengeance. Your commitment to high corporate values, your fidelity to scrupulous regulation and compliance, your unwavering leadership through these very cynical and sceptical times are crucial to attracting foreign investment, to encouraging local entrepreneurship, to making this a successful business environment, to have confidence in and to be proud of.
We are very fortunate on this island that, North and South, your profession has a hard-earned and longstanding reputation for integrity and professionalism. Recent lessons from elsewhere teach us how vulnerable reputations are and they remind us what a sacred stewardship you have responsibility for, both individually and collectively. Your members work in many contexts, many different environments but wherever they work they are ambassadors for this society and for the value system of the profession of Chartered Accountant. You play a crucial role in business, in investment, in encouraging entrepreneurialism, in recruitment and training of accountancy professionals, in networking effectively with other bodies, in supporting initiatives designed to get us all to that new landscape of the future, in making your profession and its principles well known throughout the community. All the hallmarks are there of a progressive and outward-looking organisation dynamically engaged with its many constituencies and driven by a vision, not just for itself, but for the community it serves.
I know that you have engaged in a very constructive way with InterTradeIreland and its work of harnessing the genius, skill, wisdom and potential of both jurisdictions and putting them to work in partnership, to increase cross-border trade and business, to bring more jobs, more prosperity, more opportunities to people North and South.
The transition from a culture of conflict with all its wastefulness and woundedness to a culture of peace, prosperity and consensus is unfolding little by little. Precisely because the destination is so worthwhile the journey is long, often difficult and undoubtedly testing. The surge of energy we set out with at the start of the journey is not easy to sustain at Good Friday levels. But one thing we can say with certainty is that we are closer to that destination than ever before in our shared histories. These are days when we rely on societies like yours to lead from in front and we are very grateful that you do. I thank you most sincerely for all you have done, all you are doing and all you plan to do to guide us safely and surely to the place our hearts have hoped for and dreamt of for too long - the place where young men and women, Irish, British, European do not cower in fear or recoil in contempt at each other’s differences but see them as the very seedbed of creativity every successful economy needs. There is a saying in the Irish language - two shortens the road. North and South working together, East and West working together, Catholic and Protestant working together will surely shorten the road to a future to look forward to. Your Society has given great example, a society with its own unique Ulster identity yet also an intrinsic part of an all-island professional body. Not everyone is comfortable yet with the idea of increased collegiality and partnership on the North-South axis. Your experience over eighty years is a quiet but important source of reassurance and long may it continue to be.
Thank you.