REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT A DINNER HOSTED BY PETER BEATTIE MP
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT A DINNER HOSTED BY PETER BEATTIE MP PREMIER AND MINISTER FOR TRADE
Premier and Mrs Beattie, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh inniu. Míle bhuíochas libh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
Premier Beattie and Heather, Martin and I are very grateful to you for hosting this dinner for us and providing us with another splendid night of Brisbane memories to add to those stored from our first visit in 1998. We still tell people about the night Pat Brennan escorted me into one of the most wonderful showcases of our Irish musical heritage I have ever seen anywhere in the world and we saw for ourselves a city where the Irish community sparkles with that double joy in life that happens when love for Australia and love for Ireland inhabit the same heart. So where could be more appropriate to begin this St. Patrick’s season visit to Australia than here in Brisbane and in particular in the headquarters of the Queensland Irish Association in Elizabeth Street which I visited earlier today. I attended the Association’s centenary dinner back in 1998 and today I saw an association as committed and hardworking as ever, drawing Irish men and women together in a community of care and bringing the spirit of Ireland to the heart of Queensland in so many different ways.
The Irish who came here to this vast State played an important role in its growth and development. They worked on the roads and railways, cultivated the land, founded schools and colleges, churches and hospitals and by the sweat of their brows, seed-bedded a future which saw this State enter the 21st century as one of the most dynamic and exciting States in Australia.
I recall Premier Beattie that when we met in September 1998, you had been Premier for only a few short months. In the past five years we in Ireland have followed with great interest your efforts to diversify the economy of Queensland by creating thousands of jobs in high technology and biotechnology. We admire your advocacy of International Trade and promotion of Queensland as a strategic gateway to the Asian markets where more than 50 per cent of the world’s economic activity takes place. And of course we are envious of your glorious climate, which is complemented by an abundance of natural resources and a world-class tourism industry with the awesome Barrier Reef as its crown jewel.
Today’s successful Queensland is beyond the imagining of those early Irish settlers and indeed I could say the same thing about their Irish homeland too. They left a tragic poverty-stricken island whose main export for generations, was her people. Even when we joined the European Union thirty years ago, we were the poorest member state and our young people routinely left to find opportunity elsewhere. The year before we joined the total value of Foreign Investment flowing into the Irish economy was 16 Million Euro or about 27 Million Australian Dollars. In 2000 the figure was 23 Billion Euro or 39 Billion Australian Dollars.
With the creation of 700,00 jobs we have ended mass emigration, experienced net inward migration for the first time in a century and a half and for the first time in our history, we have come very close to full employment. Today the majority of our young people go on to Third Level education and not only is Ireland one of the world’s leading exporters of computer software but we are one of the world’s most open globalised export economies. But of course the more successful we are the more ambitious we become and we know as you do how essential it is that we keep developing new opportunities for our exporters and increasingly our investors abroad.
The Irish Government developed a strategy in 1999 for long-term Development of Foreign Earnings in the Asia-Pacific Region and I know Premier, this is an area in which you have the kind of keen interest and great expertise, which we value. We had been looking forward to welcoming you to Ireland last October when you had to postpone your visit due to the tragic events in Bali, which deeply shocked and saddened the Irish people. In your absence your high-level delegation signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Economic Cooperation between Ireland and the State of Queensland. The Irish Government looks forward to working with you to promote our trading links and to develop together the many opportunities for trade and investment in Asia.
Today our people are more likely to come to Australia as tourists or on the Working Holiday Scheme which has brought fifty thousand young Irish here since I last visited and Ireland is delighted with the 150,000 Australians who now visit Ireland annually. Now that the emigrant route has become a trickle it is very important to us to devise new, imaginative and meaningful ways to build on the gift of kinship and compatibility which history bequeathed us through the hard lives of our forebearers.
That kinship has kept us woven deeply in each other’s lives, taking pride in each other’s successes and supporting each other through dark times. Your support for the Peace Process in Northern Ireland has always meant a lot to us and for all its ups and downs, stops and starts, it is grinding its way inexorably towards a landscape of transformed relationships, transformed hopes. Please keep praying for its success, for the journey is not yet over. We have a distance yet to travel and as the old Irish expression says - two shortens the road.
Tomorrow, I will have the great honour of receiving an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Queensland and remembering there the generosity of Brisbane’s famous son T.C. Beirne, after whom the School of Law is named. His life’s journey brought him from famine-ridden Ireland, with no education but a lot of brainpower and burning ambition. He flourished here as so many Irish did and his story gave two struggling countries thousands of miles apart the seed of self-belief, which we are harvesting in this generation. We are a privileged generation and I am especially privileged to share this season of St. Patrick, the greatest emigrant of them all with the Irish communities of Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. May St. Patrick bless Brisbane, its people and its civic leaders and may he keep the pulse of this city ever beating to the rhythm of an Irish reel.
Go raibh maith agaibh. Thank You.