REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY Mcaleese at queen’s university association of london
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY Mcaleese at queen’s university association of london annual alumni dinner
As I am responding on behalf of all the guests, allow me to begin by thanking the current President of the Association, Dr Robinson, for her kind invitation to attend this dinner and for your hospitality this evening. I am touched by the warmth of the welcome I have received.
Indeed it gives me great pleasure to come and spend an evening with my brother and sister alumni of Queen’s University Belfast. Queen’s is a very special place. It holds very warm memories of a wonderful time in our lives for each one of us and the number attending this dinner is testimony to the fond attachment we each have to our alma mater!
Many paths lead to Queen’s but even more lead from it and life has taken each of us on very different journeys, some of them very different from the journeys we had planned and some of them very, very different from the ones our lecturers predicted! I still get a mischievous sense of pleasure remembering the day Phil Coulter, millionaire composer returned to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University which dumped him from its Music Department! For most of us, those days in Queen’s seemed heady days of a new found liberation. There were, of course, books to be read and exams to be fretted over but in the recalling to memory of those days it is surprising how little of that features. Instead it is the friendships, the craic, the sporting exploits, the Union, the romances, the seedy Union Bar, the Festival, the marches, the tempestuousness of it all and the brevity. I left after four years with a degree in Law and the makings of a husband. Not a bad investment for life and proof, if proof were needed, that whatever I may have thought at the time, they were life-changing days, course–charting days even if the destination only revealed itself gradually over a lifetime.
I remember the day I got my A-level results and with them the realisation that I was going to Queen’s. That was excitement of an order rarely repeated since. I came home from celebrating that piece of good news to confront the bad news. My parish, Ardoyne, was in flames, the Troubles were to become the future. But even then I believed ardently in the future and its possibilities though the omens were getting less and less happy by the moment. My first piece of correspondence from the Law School should have set the alarm bells ringing. It was imperative, said the letter, for every law student to purchase and read, in advance of coming to Queen’s a book entitled “Learning the Law” by the eminent legal scholar, Professor Glanville Williams. I was on the 57 bus and into town, on to the Malone Road bus and into the bookshop before you could say “equal opportunities”, a phrase I had little acquaintance with at that stage of my life - a life populated by working women, mostly nuns it should be said. The precious first legal text was solemnly read from cover to cover and I was doing fairly well until towards the end I came to a section, ominously and rather tersely entitled ‘Women’. I read the following:
‘It is difficult to write this section without being ungallant. Parliament, it is said, can do everything except make a man a woman or a woman a man. In 1919, in the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, it went as far as it could to perform the second feat. The results so far have not been striking’. He went on
‘Practice at the Bar, ….is difficult enough for a man: it is heartbreaking for a woman. She has a double prejudice to conquer: the prejudice of the solicitor and the prejudice of the solicitor’s lay client. Combined, these two prejudices are almost inexpugnable’. And still the man went on…
‘It is not easy for a young man to get up and face the court; many women find it harder still. A woman’s voice.., does not carry as well as a man’s.’
I told this story some weeks ago when I returned to Queen’s and to my beloved Great Hall which has recently undergone the most magnificent refurbishing. I was there to open the new Centre for the Advancement of Women in Politics. On the brand new wood panelled walls there hung about seventy portraits of the great and good who had made Queen’s what it is - one even included the subject’s dog. Suffice to say not one of the subjects, including the dog, was of the female gender. If ever there was a need for a Centre for the Advancement of Women those walls were its greatest advert. Sir George Bain, the dynamic Vice Chancellor, happily has a sense of humour and was the first to point out that there is still plenty of space on those hallowed walls.
And yet as a student the memories are of freedom and not restriction, of opportunity and not its absence, of friendship that transcended difference, of space to grow without restraint. I was very privileged to return to my alma mater in 1987 as a member of staff and to see it anew through different eyes, to grow to love it over again, to grow a new set of memories around it. Always my memories start with the Lanyon Building and its threshold. Once the draughtiest, yet most nostalgic part of the University, it now houses a welcoming Visitor’s Centre and Art Gallery, both of which speak of a confident Queen’s, anxious to outreach to the public and its alumni and concerned to showcase its heart to the people it serves as never before.
Today Queen’s is one of Northern Ireland's major employers, an energiser and motivator of the local economy, an international centre of gravity for research and development in many fields. With 3,300 staff and almost 23,000 students it is one of the biggest universities in Britain and Ireland and of course, we its graduates are its primary ambassadors. The Queen’s alumni database has, I am told, about 60,000 people registered around the world. That makes for a large diplomatic corps! And it is a corps which 21st century Queens has done much to engage with and embrace. This Association here in London is one of a growing network around the world linked by a common bond of affection with Queens and Queen’s pride in its graduates. Today we know that those bonds while they rest to some extent on nostalgia, can also be harnessed as a form of energy which contributes to the ongoing development of Queen’s, giving each of us the privilege of being implicated directly into Queen’s story of new achievements, new successes. And under the dynamic leadership of Sir George Bain, Queen’s has never looked better. I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to join me in thanking Sir George for everything he has accomplished at Queen’s.
Recent events hold out the prospect of a constructive and positive future for the people of Northern Ireland. The politics of inclusion and partnership are beginning to take hold. There is a job to be done in nurturing this emerging new climate of reconciliation, mutual trust, respect, equality and celebration of diversity. There is a need for nurturers, for leaders in homes, streets, offices, lecture theatres, libraries, wherever two or more are gathered, to do things, say things, effect things which shift the culture from one of sectarian undercurrents, tension and distrust, to one of generosity, shared endeavour and respect. Queen’s in this respect has gone its own painful journey of transition and in doing so has given strong, prophetic leadership, the kind of leadership that can help to reassure a nervous society which is going the same essential journey.
It is also worth recalling to the audience tonight that the framework for a new partnership approach extends also to the totality of relationships between the peoples of these islands. With the advent of devolution and the new devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the traditional political landscape of relations between Ireland and Britain has been widened and enriched. Tomorrow in Dublin the Irish Government will host a Summit Meeting of the British-Irish Council, which will include the Taoiseach and Prime Minister Blair, and Ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, together with representatives from the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey. There is a job to be done here in London in using every opportunity to support the building of the fresh new relationships which will secure a healthier and happier future for all citizens on these islands. We may travel many different paths but we have a common destination in peace, prosperity and partnership.
I know that, as in the past, Queen’s University, its students, staff, and alumni, at home and abroad, will be deeply implicated in the social, political and economic reconstruction of Northern Ireland, in enhancing its profile abroad, and growing healthier relationships between these neighbouring islands. From our university days we are all familiar with that scurrilous publication of Queen’s Ragweek - P.T.Q. But the initials from the motto of the City of Belfast -“Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus”, sum up the spirit of the University -what can we do in return for the benefits we have received.
There is no shortage of work to be done in answer to that question and we are a very privileged generation indeed, because we are the first to have the chance to fill what Hewitt calls “the centuries arrears” with things to uplift and make us proud. I know that Queens and its Alumni, and those here tonight, whom I now warmly toast, will play their part with passion and commitment.
In closing, I would like to thank the members of the Association’s Council who have worked very hard to make this occasion so successful. Special plaudits are due to Dr Robinson for her work as President. On behalf of all the guests, thank you for a very pleasant and sociable evening.