Remarks by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese at the Conferring of an Honorary Doctorate
Remarks by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese at the Conferring of an Honorary Doctorate in Laws Shenzhen University
Dajia hao. Hello everyone.
I am delighted to be here in Shenzhen University on my first State Visit to China. It is both a great honour and a pleasure for me to become the latest graduate of an institution that I first visited in 1997, during my tenure as Pro Vice Chancellor of the Queen’s University of Belfast. I am here in a different capacity today, as my first State Visit to China as President of Ireland draws to a close. However, the connections established between Shenzhen University and Queen’s University are as relevant to me in my current position as they were to me during my career as an academic.
Ireland and China are both countries which have long recognised the worth of learning and knowledge. While, in many respects, our two countries are hugely different, situated at opposite ends of the ‘Old World’, one a small island, the other the most populous country on our planet, we have come to recognise that it is in both our interests to work together. The motto of this university, “Be geared to modernisation, be geared to the world, be geared to the future”, could equally serve as a motto for the new Ireland that has emerged in recent years.
This year I believe marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of Shenzhen University. I wish you a very happy birthday. I imagine those who were here at the beginning would testify to the huge changes in those two decades. In fact China and Ireland have both changed enormously over those two decades. In the week that I have spent here, I have had many opportunities to see the extent of the economic development of this country. The scale and speed of what is happening here are quite staggering and the world as a whole now recognises China as one of the powerhouses of the global economy. Here in Guangdong Province - and in Shenzhen in particular - you are at the heart of that powerhouse.
Ireland has also changed almost beyond recognition since the early 1980s, when our principal export was our young people, forced to seek opportunities abroad that were not available to them at home. Irish people still travel to live and work in other countries - and increasing numbers of us are living and working in China - but now they do so by choice, as Ireland has moved from being one of the poorest members of the European Union to being one of the richest. Ireland is a small country and our impact on the global economy cannot compare to China’s but our presence is being felt in a way that it was never felt before.
The foundation for this improvement in the well-being of our country was and remains education. It is education that has permitted us to excel in the modern economy, in the IT industries, and in the high-tech sector in general. In Ireland, the proportion of total public expenditure in education is higher than in any other country in Europe with the number of fulltime third level students increasing by almost eighty percent over the past ten years. Half of the Irish workforce has participated in third-level education. The World Competitiveness Report has placed Ireland first in Europe for the quality of education all of its people receive and first in the world in terms of its education system meeting the needs of a competitive economy.
The field of education is one which, by its very nature, calls for as wide a range as possible of exchanges between people, countries and institutions. Ireland recognises this and it is for this reason that I am accompanied on this State Visit by representatives of a number of leading Irish universities and other institutions of higher education who attended a major meeting yesterday with their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai. It is our hope that more agreements between Chinese and Irish institutions of higher education will be reached and that these agreements will result in exchanges of students, teachers and researchers to the benefit of both our countries.
As our two countries develop, we are, in a sense, finding once again our rightful places in the world after periods during which, for sometimes similar historical reasons, our full potentials were not being realised. It is not for me to remind you that the history of the world is a long one. When things were not going as well for Ireland as they are now, we were still conscious of the fact that there was another time, over a thousand years before, when Ireland was known for its scholarly traditions in a Europe that had fallen into a period of decline following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Ireland remained a repository of learning and education and Irish people went on to play a key role in reviving the civilisation of continental Europe.
That period of Irish history, when the rest of Europe was plunged into what we know as the ‘Dark Ages’, corresponds broadly to the time of the Tang Dynasty in China, when this country’s economy was flourishing, Li Bai was writing his poetry and you were printing your first books, centuries before the West.
That was a time when the world was still far too big a place for our countries to have met. Now the distance between Ireland and China is easily bridged by plane, by computer and by the exercise of choice in a world where collaboration and partnerships are the exciting pathway to the future. It is in the exercise of that choice that I am here today because our two countries have consciously decided to deepen their relations and there is no better way of doing that than by visiting each other and befriending each other.
My visit to China has been an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. The range and wonder of what I have seen, from the grandeur of the Great Wall to this state-of-the-art campus, has further strengthened my conviction that Ireland’s relationship with China is of key importance. We, like you, are “geared to modernisation, geared to the world, geared to the future”. May we move forward together and may our young people know times of peace, prosperity and a partnership that spans the globe.
I thank you again for the honour you have bestowed on me today and for your most warm and generous welcome. I am proud to be an honorary graduate of this university and grateful to return to the place in which I first learnt to love China and her people through the kindness and hospitality of the wonderful people I met here. I hope the friendship between Ireland and China will continue to strengthen and flourish and I thank you for all you are doing to be a bridge between your fascinating homeland and mine.
Thank you very much. Feichang Ganxie.