SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, U.S.A. FRIDAY, 11 OCTOBER, 2002
It is a joy to be here, to be the first President of Ireland to visit and to be so deeply drawn into the life of this distinguished University by joining the ranks of its alumni as an honorary Doctor of Law. I thank David Roselle and Howard Cosgrave, for the very kind invitation, which led to what is a very special and memorable day for me.
I loved University life so much that I stayed in it from the age of eighteen to forty-five and was only amputated from it by election to the Presidency. In behind all the papers and exams, the pressure and the midnight oil, which believe it or not are common to both staff and students, there is a way of life so unique, so full of adventure that I feel a mixture of both nostalgia and envy as I reflect on what life must be like as part of the community that is the University of Delaware. The nostalgia is for those days when my husband and I were students together at Queen’s University of Belfast, a city that began to crumble into thirty years of violence just as we, enthralled and excited crossed the university threshold for the first time, not fully aware of the awesome power of hatred or of our power as individuals to stop its toxic course through human history. The envy is for a generation of young men and women, thirty years nearer the universal truth that is the central quest of a university, for though Martin studied Physics and I studied Law nonetheless we were then part of that complex and endless shared endeavour of trying to understand our life, our times, our nature, our destiny, our world.
I began studying law in 1969, not exactly the dawn of the Ice Age, but a time when females constituted around 10% of the students in Law Schools. Today they considerably outnumber male law students, just one visible, outward sign of a remarkable revolution in attitudes and expectations. More than that, as young women do well academically across every discipline often out-performing their male peers, we begin to get a glimpse of a world that has until now been flying rather unsteadily on one wing, using only half its potential, wasting or corralling the other half and more importantly we begin to get a glimpse of what the world could be like if we flew on both wings, harnessing all the talent, empowering all the available creative genius no matter what its gender, colour, class, creed, disability or ethnicity, accumulating it into a pool of human resource of a magnitude never before encountered on earth and putting it at the benign service of humankind with a commitment never before experienced on this globe. Your generation are nearer that world than mine. Your choices can bring it nearer or retard it just as the choices of my generation did the same. Looking back, I am amazed at the stubbornness, determination and sheer naivety that carried us through, despite the lack of role models, despite the pervasive less-than-encouraging attitudes of the time. Just how discouraging is probably best exemplified by this story from my own direct experience.
When, as a teenager I first voiced my ambition to become a lawyer it was at home in the presence of my parents and our parish priest. His response was immediate and emphatic. “You can’t - you have two terminal impediments, one you are a woman and two you have no relatives in law”. My mother, whose reverence for the clergy was without match anywhere, threw him out and equally emphatically gave me the only and best career advice my parents ever offered me which was to “Ignore the oul eejit”. I took my mother’s advice but in fairness to that kindly, if conservative old man who was very generous and supportive when I entered Law School, his views were largely typical of the times and based on a fairly accurate analysis of the prevailing culture.
Shortly before commencing my undergraduate legal studies at Queen’s University of Belfast I, like all my fellow and sister undergraduates, received a letter from the Faculty with strict instructions that we were to prepare ourselves for our studies by buying and reading the eminent jurist Glanville Williams book “Learning the Law”. We descended like locusts on the bookshop and devoured his words, for, given the importance attached to them by the Faculty, we knew that this was Holy Writ, the key to our future, the gospel according to Glanville.
What message did his book send to that generation of young female students, hoping to embark on a career within the legal profession? For most of this legal bible, there is precious little mention either way of women, and practically no acknowledgement from the author that some of his readership might be anything other than white, middle class and male. And then, on page 192, women finally get a look in. This is how he begins the passage:
‘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’.
‘Practice at the Bar, as has already been said, 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’. Lots of encouragement there, then, for the young, enthusiastic woman just starting off in law. But there’s more and on he goes:
‘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, also, does not carry as well as a man’s.’ Clearly, he’d never met the women of North Belfast or my mother who could be heard in stereo without benefit of electricity.
Yes, I’d like to be sitting in your seats with so much of that old paralyzing stereotyping behind us, a future as yet unscripted in front, and all those days ahead when you can be changers of things that are wrong, bringers of hope, mobilisers of a future to be proud of. On the other hand I am very proud to be the President of a small country which within living memory was a poor third world country whose greatest export was its people and which is today one of the wealthiest nations on earth, the biggest exporter of computer software and a country to which people now come to seek opportunity, reversing a century and a half of outward migration.
The story of Ireland’s transformation cannot be told without also telling the story of the Irish who came here to the United States. Many came in rags and they came to hard labour but their saved cents became dollars that were sent home to feed and educate the next generation, their children and grandchildren’s success became our role models, our inspiration. They lived and died in hope that there would come a day when an independent Ireland would take her place among the nations of the world, her children self-confident and well educated, successful and culturally dynamic. I am privileged to be President of that Ireland and to have this opportunity to acknowledge here how much we owe to the United States, with whom we have the strongest, most enduring of familial bonds.
Today those bonds manifest themselves in a mosaic of links crafted by the unique genius and effort of so many different individuals, groups and organizations to say nothing of Government. They stretch through every field of human endeavour, from business investment to St. Patrick’s Day Parades, through to the peace process you helped us build in Northern Ireland. Wobbly though it is at times it is infinitely better and more precious than anything we have ever had before and once again we would not have it but for the help we received from our American friends. All these things start with an idea seeding itself in someone’s mind and they happen because people commit to that idea and refuse to give up until it is realized. One such idea that links Ireland and the United States is of course your excellent Irish Studies Programme and of course another is the superb range of Irish works that your library holds including a very fine collection of Irish manuscripts featuring names as great as W.B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey. I hope these have whetted your appetite not just for our rich literary tradition but for Ireland itself and that those of you who have not yet visited us will plant the seed of that idea and see it through. In every generation the children of America and Ireland have profoundly influenced each other, driving a shared global debate on freedom, democracy and equality through the worst of times and the best. As President John F Kennedy said on his visit to Ireland shortly before his assassination
“And so it is that our two nations, divided by distance, have been united by history”.
I am grateful for the way in which this University has played its part in making that shared history and for allowing me to be a part of it here today.
On that visit to Ireland John F Kennedy quoted from another celebrated Irish writer George Bernard Shaw and I think the quote could be a perfect motto for any student of this University as he or she contemplates the future and asks what will I contribute? Shaw speaking as an Irishman on the approach to life of the Irish said
“Other people see things and say: “Why”…….But I dream things that never were and I say : “Why not?
My thanks to each of you for your attention and to those who prepared this lovely venue and may God Bless this community of scholarly endeavour that I am now very proud to be part of. In Irish we say “go raibh mile maith agaibh go léir”.
Thank you.