ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE CÉIFIN CONFERENCE 2005 “FILLING THE VACUUM”
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE CÉIFIN CONFERENCE 2005 “FILLING THE VACUUM” WEST COUNTY HOTEL, ENNIS
Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Tá an–áthas orm bheith i bhur measc anseo ar an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
Good afternoon and thank you for the welcome to the 2005 Céifin Conference. Thanks also to Fr. Harry Bohan for the invitation and for setting a provocative and timely agenda. “What”, he asks in the introductory brochure, “is filling the vacuum left by our over-emphasis on commercial values?” He acknowledges that much of the economic and social change Ireland has experienced in recent decades “has been for the good”. Our people have education, opportunities, jobs, choices and self-confidence which were lacking in the past but there are, he says “some aspects of this change which are less positive and with dire consequences for some individuals, families and communities.” These words are strongly reminiscent of Goldsmith’s famous couplet,
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
That couplet was, of course, written in a different era, an era when wealth accumulated in the bank vaults of the very few on the backs of the slavery, poverty and political exclusion of the many. It was the righteous anger of the poor which distilled into a strong egalitarian and democratic impulse, the founding spirit of our nation, the very bedrock of our shared value system as a people. The Preamble to our Constitution sets out our collective ambition in simple language – “to promote the common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured (and) true social order attained ………”
Long after independence was won for this part of Ireland the indignity of poverty remained intractable and the only freedom it seemed was the freedom to emigrate. Until recently, Ireland was a place where you could have had a conference every day of the week on filling the vacuum because there were so many vacuums to be filled.
Seamus Heaney describes that bleak landscape brilliantly in his poem From the Canton of Expectation,
“We lived deep in a land of optative moods,
under high, banked clouds of resignation.
A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime”
And then remarkably the tide turned. The vacuum created by emigration was filled. The vacuum made by endemic, high unemployment vanished. The vacuum of a dwindling population disappeared. The airtight vacuum of mono-culturalism – that went too. The vacuum that narrowly corralled the talents of women has gone. The vacuum of poor diet and early mortality was consigned to history. The vacuum in which no traveller child transferred from first to second level schooling disappeared. The vacuum of widespread poverty has manifestly been filled in. Twenty years ago, one in five of us lived in poverty. Today that number has reduced to one in twenty. The vacuum in which corruption festered has been tribunalled into the airy light of day. The vacuum of silence in which children were the tragic victims of physical and sexual abuse and of the suppression of the criminal consequences of that abuse, that is being filled.
In so many aspects of life the dreadful pervasive void of the “ceann faoi” has given way to a surging assertive “can do”. The landscape has filled up with new industries, new houses, new truths, newcomers, new hope. We have been filling historic, longstanding vacuums at a breathtaking pace and at a level of success no other generation could have imagined and yet we hear talk of a creeping malaise, as if we have arrived at a long yearned for destination only to find it disappointing after all. Is it possible that, in the heady excitement of these past short years of phenomenal change, we have somehow drifted out of sight of the fact that ours is a journey only started, not a journey completed, that our wealth is a means to a long-desired end, and not an end in itself?
A conference like this offers us a necessary breathing space to stop and look closely at the choices we are making individually and collectively which will shape Ireland’s future for good or for ill. We have the choice of roads that can either continue the noble adventure of bringing about true social order, which I understand to mean full social inclusion and an end to poverty, or we can become so wrapped up in attachment to the indulgent self that we become indifferent to the completion of that journey and deaf to the voices of the excluded.
It is simply unthinkable that our final destination could be the cul-de-sac of complacent consumerism when we are the first generation to have within our reach the great destination of an egalitarian republic where the strong are driven by a restless and unselfish duty of care for the weak and where every life is given the chance to fully blossom.
For those who seem to have missed the boat named the Celtic Tiger, modern Ireland can be a very scary place, where all you can see in front of you are the far-off backs of those who are making rapid headway in this new time of opportunity. The long-term unemployed, the chronically ill, disabled, elderly, lone parents, carers, children born into dysfunctional or cyclically underachieving families, those overwhelmed by addiction, the travellers, the illiterate, the vulnerable foreign worker in insecure and poorly paid employment – they can each tell what it feels like to be in a race where all the other runners have disappeared from view and you cannot get past the starting line because of the obstacles that stand in your way. Those who are running the race reasonably well, they can tell too of the pressures the race puts even on those who got off to a good start - housing costs, childcare, long commutes, two job households, high debt, shortage of quality time. . . . . And we have the fallout that comes when a society vaults so rapidly from an era of frugality to an era of plenty. We have senior citizens to whom the cheque book is still an innovation, struggling to make sense of the credit card kids with their mobile phones, designer clothes, computers, i-Pods and whatever the latest must–have is. We have young people, the best educated in our history, with more money in their pockets and more freedom than any generation before them and sadly some of them, though thankfully not all, fail to see the ugly wastefulness, the obvious dangers and sheer irresponsibility of binge-drinking and of experimenting with drugs. Nor are they fully alive to the dangers of settling for becoming simply active consumers rather than active citizens. Their civic formation, which is our responsibility, is crucial if they are to have the courage to set their sights on higher things, to take personal responsibility for the trajectory of their own lives and the future trajectory of their communities and their country. They will, after all, be the makers as much as the inheritors of 21st century Ireland.
And yet for all the cynicism and complaint that is around, I find it hard to believe on the basis of the evidence that I am privileged to see day in and day out, that the Irish people would ever settle happily, or be let settle happily, for Destination Complacency, for a greedy, selfish, soulless society, a place of strangers rather than neighbours, of individualised cocoons rather than community. Even in these busy times when we hear anecdotally that it is getting harder to find volunteers for all sorts of community work, my daily life uniquely takes me right into the heartland of the people who are the doers, to the people who are looking out for and looking after one another. There is an army of them out there of all ages and backgrounds. The odd time they might make a local newspaper, more rarely still the national media but their lived lives go largely un-remarked and yet their side of the story, when told, puts quite a different complexion on modern Ireland and the state of its heart and soul. They are the people who gave us the World Summer Special Olympic Games, who invented a million ways to part people from their money last December when between them they raised almost 75 million euro for victims of the tsunami at the other end of the earth. If you need a bone marrow transplant tomorrow and no member of your family is a match, over 19,000 Irish citizens have volunteered as stranger donors for an operation that is dangerous to them and that will cost them two weeks of not insignificant discomfort. If you suffer from depression, Aware volunteers will find you. If you are a lonely older citizen, someone in your community will have set up a Day Care Centre or a Helpline to bring you into the company of friends. If you are the parents of an intellectually-disabled child, you are probably already involved in self-help groups, in carers lobby groups and the Special Olympics, to an extent that would put the cynics to shame. If you are a sick child in Chernobyl, a bunch of Irish people have made you their concern.
Anti-social behaviour among teenagers is often in the news but I also see thousands of fantastic young people active in their communities through things like the President’s Awards, Foróige and innumerable other initiatives.
In a cramped portacabin this week I met a group of mothers of addicts whose exasperation led them to set up a support service for each other and for addicts. Like many of the groups I have come across, these wealthier, more confident and open times have made them ambitious, determined and armed with an agenda they intend to see through. They are plugged in to the state services, to local businesses, the local community, the churches, the profession, the media and they are painstakingly creating, developing and sustaining the partnership-driven web of mutual care and support that it takes to get through a tough life with dignity. They leverage extraordinary amounts of money from their own pockets and the pockets of the wider community and Government, and they put that money along with their freely given time, skill and commitment to knitting all of us together as a caring community and not just a bunch of indifferent strangers. They teach our kids sports, they give their blood to our sick, house the homeless, comfort the bereaved; counsel the troubled, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, care for the environment, get involved in politics. This very day they will do a million good things that will bring joy and comfort, hope and opportunity, courtesy and kindness into the lives of others and they will listen with sinking hearts as their massive contribution, their sacrifice and their considerable faith in humanity is overlooked yet again in discussions about the future direction of our country. They are our hope and our reassurance. Their value system, their work and their leadership keep us faithful to the agenda we set ourselves as a nation and which we are challenged to complete. They also know something that those who have never volunteered don’t yet know - that it really is in giving that we receive - that amidst the many frustrations there is fun, friendship and fulfilment that no shop can sell, no gadget can generate.
We are fortunate to live in a high-achieving, wealthy Ireland where so many such men, women and children are not content to be solely mere consumers but where they are impatient for these good times to be shared and experienced more widely still by all our citizens. That impatience and the restlessness it generates is the antidote to selfishness. It is the outward sign of an inward spirit of generosity and deep-rooted egalitarianism. It builds strong communities and makes us resilient in the face of predators who would rob these successful times of their best meaning and fullest potential. That ambition to complete the journey to “a true social order” where no life is wasted if we can help it, that is and should be our most important gift to our children. It needs even more recruits – it needs a steady supply of champions. Maybe with Céifin’s help and the debate it will provoke, we will learn how to carry our shopping bags in one hand and our consciences in the other, how to fill the vacuum with vision and virtue.