SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY McALEESE AT THE 21ST ANNUAL DINNER OF CO‑OPERATION IRELAND
SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY McALEESE AT THE 21ST ANNUAL DINNER OF CO‑OPERATION IRELAND (USA) NEW YORK, 18 MARCH 2002
Mr Chairman, Distinguished Guests
Dia dhíobh a cháirde. Is ócáid speisialta í seo domsa agus tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh tráthnóna inniu. Go raibh maith agaibh as ucht bhur bhfáilte chaoin.
I am particularly happy to have the opportunity to address you this evening at the 21st Anniversary Dinner of Co‑operation Ireland (USA).
As joint patron of Co‑operation Ireland, it gives me great pleasure to salute your achievements over the past decades in mobilising, understanding, commitment and practical support from the people of the United States for peace with justice in Northern Ireland and for partnership between North and South. Great credit is due to Nicholas Moore, Chairman of the Board of Directors, his fellow board members and the organisation’s many friends and supporters for their strenuous efforts through the years to nurture the will for peace which lay deep in many hearts but which needed a new kind of leadership to give it voice and to make it happen.
On behalf of the people of Ireland, I am delighted to have this opportunity to express our heartfelt thanks and appreciation.
The Good Friday Agreement has brought a fresh sense of optimism that the people of Northern Ireland can finally leave behind the deep-rooted culture of internal division and the wasteful culture of disregard of its Southern neighbour and move ahead to create a new and better society for this and future generations. The vision of a future based on co‑operation, mutual respect and inclusion which is embodied in the Agreement, has received the overwhelming endorsement of the people on both sides of the border. The voice of the people is clear – the old days of wasted opportunities are a shameful history, which have no place in the landscape of the future.
The task facing us now is to provide the practical support and encouragement to help people, at local and community level, to keep nudging the peace process in the right direction, changing the language of contempt to a new language of respect, shifting the sectarian mindset to a newfound respect for difference, opening closed eyes to the opportunities offered by partnership and cooperation along axes long ignored, making peace work.
There is hardly a family in Northern Ireland which has not in some way been affected adversely by the conflict, a conflict that goes back considerably longer than the recent thirty year period known as ‘The Troubles’. Belfast, my home city, has long been a byword for sectarian and political bitterness. Its wounds go very deep and the legacy of mutual recrimination and distrust will take great sensitivity and forbearance to transcend. Let no one be in doubt that the healing and reconciliation process will be difficult. This plant of peace with its new culture of fairness, equality and justice is only just beginning to germinate and it needs the most tender care, the gentlest treatment, if it is to take strong root and grow robust. It will take time. There will be setbacks and disappointments but there is no acceptable alternative. As with any agreement crafted out of centuries old conflict, it has its champions and its critics. But it was also crafted out of the cruelly wasted lives of almost four thousand men, women and children, out of the many more who were woefully injured and out of the traumatized generations of children whose childhood was colonized by violence. Remembering them it is easy to be sure that 95% of something humanly decent is better than 100% of nothing.
Last year I participated in a commemoration ceremony to mark the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, a turning point in Ireland’s history and the last battle fought by the Irish Chieftains. With defeat came the decimation of the Gaelic way of life and it skewed the relationship between Ireland and its nearest neighbour. 400 years and many battles big and small later, we have learned that the culture of dispirited losers and triumphalistic winners is the sure seed-bed of more battles, more violence. The all consuming, all important challenge that we on the island of Ireland face today, some four centuries after Kinsale is how to drag ourselves out of history’s traps to create, to mould our future. The Good Friday Agreement is the future, the way forward, if our children and our children’s children are not to meet to commemorate battles of the 21st century.
Many agencies and communities are already active in helping to move the process forward. In the forefront of these efforts, both Co‑operation Ireland and its partner organisation, Co‑operation Ireland USA, have played an enormously valuable role. Over two decades ago, you recognised very clearly that even in the midst of conflict and destruction, there was always the possibility of developing the kind of mutual respect and understanding such damaged communities so badly needed. With courage, skill and generosity you began to develop effective cross‑border links and projects involving communities both north and south, and the result has been 377 projects, 580 jobs and grants totalling a remarkable 19 million dollars. Not a single one of those dollars was given because of any law of compulsion. Nothing mandated the giving of those millions except the amazing miracle of strangers caring for the well-being of others and showing that care in the most infinitely practical of ways.
We can count the number of dollars, measure the jobs and the projects but the intangible benefits we will never be able to fully describe, though we know them to be real - the solidarity your generosity created, the hope your kindness kindled, the new relationships your witness helped to grow in the most unlikely places - these are the glue that binds the newly created and slowly emerging culture of consensus. These are the things which have created the circumstances in which Northern Ireland, once a byword for discrimination and unfairness, has been able to leapfrog into the most exciting adventure in consensus based democratic politics anywhere in the world.
You developed a particular skill at focusing attention on grass roots initiatives and projects linking schools and youth groups as well as community‑based activities, which otherwise would have had difficulty in attracting support from outside sources. Through your economic co‑operation programme, you have nurtured progress by supporting tangible co‑operation in the small and medium business sector which has led to a more stable, peaceful, and co‑operative climate between communities. You let people see for themselves that partnership really did work. You helped them reveal to themselves the enormous new energies and synergies that cooperation would generate. You created opportunities for simple friendships, the basic building block of all peace and you gave quiet, forceful leadership that created for the first time in Northern Ireland a cohort not of followers but empowered leaders.
Together with this continuing support for youth, education and economic programmes, Co‑operation Ireland USA has played a very valuable and leading role in the very successful Civic Link Initiative, bringing together schools from the north and south of Ireland. I would like to commend the US Government for its generous support of 1.5 million dollars to this very important initiative. I am also very proud that the Irish Government, through its Reconciliation Fund, has given financial support to Co‑operation Ireland, amounting to over 1 million dollars in the past three years.
Co‑operation Ireland has played a key role in delivering the cross‑border business and cultural links component of the European Commission’s Special Peace and Support Programme for Reconciliation which has delivered a number of highly successful initiatives up to now. We look forward to their playing an equally important role in the delivery of the next phase of the programme due to begin this year.
Above all, as a non‑political and non‑denominational group, you have managed to help provide a forum for all communities, no matter how divided, to find a space in which to grow mutual understanding and respect, the cornerstones of a peaceful future. Your work has earned you gratitude, admiration and support in Ireland and abroad, from governments, corporations and agencies, and perhaps most importantly from the most vulnerable parts of society, the parents, families and communities who have come to see life differently with your help.
Tonight I am honoured to join you in celebrating the substantial achievement of over two decades of excellent work in the cause of peace and reconciliation among the people of Ireland. Across the globe other peoples mired in conflict, waken each day to a new death roll, a fresh new experience of misery and despair. They need to believe that peacemaking can work. They need to believe that human beings can change. They need to believe in hope. Your work allows them to see, even if only dimly, some glimmer of light at the end of their own dark tunnels.
Speaking tonight in New York, I am deeply conscious that this is still a suffering and a sad city. Six months on from that awful September Day and we know that we are still reeling from its brutality, its breathtaking wastefulness of human life. There are broken hearts and lives that will never be mended. There are fears that will take a long time to subside. There are lonely spaces that nothing will ever fill. But there is also resilience and spirit and strength and courage; there are friends and neighbours; there is human goodness and kindness; there is determination, and there are people who just refuse to give up. New York has come to mean courage and determination.
Now this city inspires a different quality of admiration, a deeper, wiser and more enduring respect because this is a city that has been sorely, grievously tested and it has come through proudly. Your spirit gives heart to all those who face brokenness and who need encouragement to believe that it is possible to build a good world, a happy world, not just for a privileged few but for all of God’s creation.
You know that world will not happen by coincidence, by accident or by doing nothing. The forces ranged against it are awesome. Hatred is the most potent weapon on the face of the earth and it is out there doing its evil worst in a million different ways day in and day out. But there is a stronger power – the power of friendship, of care - the power of belief in human dignity, and above all faith in the transcendent power of love. That is what you put at the service of Ireland. With it you have started us on the journey to peace. There is a saying in the Irish language that “two shortens the road”. I hope you will stay with us on the road to peace and keep helping us to shorten that miraculous journey.
Mo bhuíochas libh arís as bhúr gcuidiú agus bhur dtacaíocht. Cabhraíonn sé go mór agus muid i mbun oibre ar son na síochána agus na cothromaíochta in Éirinn. Is mór linn an tacaíocht seo agus an buan-chairdeas atá ann idir tír na hÉireann agus na Stáit Aontaithe, agus is mór linn go speisialta an gaol ar leith atá againn libhse. Go raibh maith agaibh agus lúireach Phádraig go raibh ina sciath cosanta oraibh go brách.
Thank you.