ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE DURING HER VISIT TO THE MAPS PROJECT AT MAYNOOTH COLLEGE
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE DURING HER VISIT TO THE MAPS PROJECT AT MAYNOOTH COLLEGE ON FRIDAY 20 MARCH 1998
Today we mark the successful completion of the MAPS Employment Horizon Project run by the Centre for Adult and Community Education of the National University of Ireland. This project is about providing equal opportunities for people with disabilities – providing the support to enable them to pursue a third level course. Through this imaginative project, a mainstream diploma course has been made available to deaf students – without changing the academic standard – but with adaptations to its delivery, through the use of sign language.
While it has been of tremendous benefit to the students themselves, it has also been a learning experience for the educators. They have seen how more people can be brought in to the system – can be included in mainstream education – with some lateral thinking and imagination. Following on from the project, I understand that Maynooth is actively looking at how it can become a more ‘disbility friendly’ university in its courses, in access to its premises and in its culture. Maynooth is now the trend-setter in providing access for the disabled – in providing an inclusive educational environment for those who, through no fault of their own, were unable to participate in the past.
With our recent advances in economic standards and social development, the tragedy of exclusion becomes all the more obvious. Recently I spoke with a Dublin woman who had ‘missed’ an essential part of her early education and had to confront a literacy problem in recent years – a problem that she had to face when one of the five children she had protected and educated, wrote to her from his new place of work in Germany, and when she found herself ashamed that she was unable to pen a reply. Her sense of anger at being deprived of a basic right was palpable and was matched by an equal sense of confidence and self-esteem at being finally allowed access to the world – or the universe – of education.
Meeting that woman, who had lived with the shame of a predicament which was not of her making, brought home to me how much we need to look at our own place too – to release those who are confined by limited access to education and culture – to empower them to take their rightful place in our own society. That lady’s story is reflected in so many other people, who through economic and domestic circumstance, or disability, are faced with the double burden of lack of access to education and the consequences of its absence from their lives.
Recent years have seen a lot of debate about participation and exclusion. Clearly, participation by all social groups needs to be maximised. It is an essential safeguard – a basic right - for individuals, communities and society. Having a job enables people to have access to the means and mechanisms to participate fully in the normal functioning of society. Exclusion from education limits access to employment – it closes doors and shuts off opportunities. It means exclusion from a sense of belonging - exclusion from social participation.
There are fundamental changes taking place in Irish society. A new vision of the future is being shaped and moulded – a vision of a society that embraces all classes and creeds – a vision that takes account of the marginalised and the disadvantaged – a vision that sees empowerment as the way forward. The issue of participation is central to these changes. Effective participation does not depend on institutional arrangements alone - it depends on the knowledge, understanding and open-mindedness of those engaged in it.
In the emerging changes which we face, there is a readiness and eagerness on the part of the educational establishment to move with the times – to provide for the needs of a changing society – to lay the groundwork in education for meeting the challenges that lie ahead. I recall the words of Newman on the advantages of education, “When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual”. He went on to say that “ . . it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession”.
The achievements in the last twenty to thirty years have been facilitated to a large degree through greater access to education – with free second level and grant-aided third level education opening up new opportunities to the children of a generation that had come through the economic hardships which were part of the convulsion of an emerging young nation. We have done well and we have a lot to show for it. But by depriving people of their rights to education we put limitations on our potential for progress. We have seen what an educated workforce can deliver in terms of affluence and improved standards of living. None of us owns education – it is not up to us to apportion it as we see fit. It is a right of everyone to get an education – to get the opportunity to play their part in a society that nurtures all. We can open up even more horizons and reveal new opportunities. To deny that right is to do us all an injustice.
The great success of this project is that it has given eighteen deaf students rightful access to a conventional education that would otherwise have been denied to them by virtue not of their disability, but of the false barriers their disability was deemed to impose. A barrier has been removed – a hurdle dismantled – it is a landmark day for deaf people and for people with other disabilities. Significantly, the ‘Maynooth eighteen’ are now themselves equipped as teachers with the tools to open more doors – to allow others to break into the world of mainstream education.
What has been achieved is a lesson for all of us – a lesson in what can be done through imagination, commitment and support form Government, the NUI and the EU - to ‘include’ those who have had to suffer the indignity and frustration of marginalisation – to acknowledge their full entitlement to the rights that most of us take for granted. The introduction of Deaf Studies and Disability Awareness into mainstream academic subjects is another welcome move forward, as is the establishment of a network of adult educators, both of which have come out of this project.
I would like to congratulate the NUI Maynooth, the Centre for Adult and Community Education, the Sign Language Association of Ireland on this initiative. I would also like to commend Liz Leonard who coordinated the Project, and all her team – the tutors, sign language interpreters and the many others who contributed to the project’s success.
I would particularly like to congratulate the 18 students who completed the Adult and Continuing Education Diploma course. They are history makers – pioneers in a new form of education. What they have achieved is a lesson to all of us – and an encouragement to the disabled to take the opportunities now becoming available and to move forward as full participants in Irish society.