ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE LITERARY AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE LITERARY AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN FRIDAY, 11TH FEBRUARY 2000
It is a great pleasure to be back once again at the L&H, this time with a bit more protocol attached than on my last visit when I made the promise to return. It’s taken me a little while to get here, but thank you to Patrick Smyth and his predecessor as Auditor, Barry Ward, for their invitation and their patience.
Outside these four walls this Society has a long and distinguished history as a venue for public speaking and debate. Inside these four walls it has an equally long and terrifying history as a venue where speakers are eaten live and swallowed whole by cannibalistic audiences. The two images are not incompatible. Generations of students have honed their skills of argument, logic and persuasion here, and used them to great effect in their subsequent careers. Others, with less impressive powers of persuasion and entertainment, faced audiences - to quote a public speaker of many years ago – who not only looked at their watches during the speech, but started shaking them for good measure to make certain they were still going! There are even rumours of audiences running up white flags and surrendering. I’ll do my best to stay out of that category.
One great advantage of coming here in the month of February is that we are now a fairly safe distance from the turn of this Millennium and all of the retrospections, introspections and pyrotechnics which that event brought with it. We are off all the cusps, over all the thresholds, no longer teetering on all those brinks. This is the third millennium, these are the unscripted days replete with all those much awaited opportunities. We are living it, already shaping it and entitled to wonder aloud how the script we are writing will read, what will it tell.
It is hard to believe that the centenary of independence will probably occur in your lifetime and possibly in mine. Hard to believe that a century could be so short! Hard to believe so much could be crammed into a handful of generations. My grandfather's generation with its memory of the 1913 Lock Out, the Rising, the Civil War, Independence, Partition, poverty, emigration, frustrated hopes - that generation lies uncomfortably close behind us, its story told in history books or in folklore.
We understand that story only imperfectly as yet for there is not for the moment sufficient distance or detachment to give us the sharpness of perspective, the generosity of spirit to fully comprehend the mark that generation left on this country, on us. Those of you who are budding historians or political scientists or social scientists, will know the rigorous scrutiny those past lives have been and will be subjected to, their mistakes identified, analysed, endlessly debated, even endlessly derided.
Looking back it is easy to forget that another generation not yet born will sit in similar judgement on us and when they make comparisons between the generations, they will carefully note the grim hand which was dealt to generation after generation of Irish men and women, until now, until this one. For make no mistake about it the stakes have been raised and exponentially. This generation has been dealt Aces. Now it has to play them. It has the winning of the game but it has the losing of it too. Never before has so much been realistically expected. We have had romantic dreamers of course, maybe more than our fair share, who kept visions of a dynamic, successful Ireland alive on very thin gruel indeed. Mostly when they woke up they woke up to an absence of that dream. When we waken up many of us, though not yet all of us, waken up to the living of it.
Today's Ireland is built on a dense complex of things some fragile and transient, others robust and enduring. The most potent of the latter has been education. Education was the means by which parents, often themselves trapped in underachievement because of lack of opportunity, could see an escape for their children to a better life, to those elusive opportunities denied to themselves. It was the most important equity they bequeathed to the next generation.
The provision of free second level education in the 1960’s transformed the thinking and experiential landscape of this country altering it and us, profoundly. It provided the confidence and the insight which allowed a struggling young nation to wean itself from an unhealthy over-dependence on Britain, economically, intellectually and culturally; to test itself against new markets, to follow other and better exemplars, to dig deep into our own cultural reserve here in Ireland and within the global Irish family to find new sources of energy to refreshen and reinvigorate a tired psyche. At a macro level, it created the knowledge and skills base, the huge equity on which today’s economic miracle has been built. But it also created a personal miracle for thousands of young men and women, opening up new ideas, drawing them in to the world of knowledge not as passive recipients but as active contributors, creators, discoverers in their own right. It gave us the tools to reimagine our world and to believe we could shape it to that new image.
In Seamus Heaney’s poem, From the Canton of Expectation, he describes the avalanche of transformation dislodged by widening educational opportunity, how it engulfed stifled destinies and projected them, plunged them forward into a new unconquered space.
But first he describes the world before education:
"we lived in a land of optative moods,
under high banked clouds of resignation.
A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime
The broken nerve when we prayed Vouchsafe or deign,
Were creditable sufficient to the day".
The deadhand of history had crippled hope, made intellectual eunuchs of successive generations or so it seemed. Heaney describes the change brilliantly:
"And next thing, suddenly this change of mood.
Books open in the newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
against the flanks of milking cows were busy
paving and pencilling their first causeways
across the prescribed texts.
... intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars".
The metaphor of crowbar is particularly apt, for their pathway was littered with many obstacles that had to be removed - the obstacles of fatalistic resignation from within and resistance to change, inequality and exclusion from without. But those generations were infused with a hunger and determination to break through the barriers, to escape the confines of traditional expectation and destiny. There was an excitement, an exhilaration about challenging the old ideologies and hierarchies, about discovering a new consciousness and a new language of equality and human rights. And all that hunger and newfound confidence energised both a search for personal achievement and a desire to make life more equal, more humanly decent for others.
The great gift that education confers is personal empowerment – the confidence and capacity to choose your own pathway through life – not a route pre-ordained by society, family or circumstance. To choose, also, how to use those talents and abilities which education has honed – whether to use them for purely personal advancement or to take a wider and more generous view of how they might be applied. The educational opportunities and choices we now possess did not materialise by magic. They were crafted slowly and painstakingly over generations, by the hard work and personal sacrifice of many parents and the vision, idealism and unselfish dedication of those who chose public service, civic leadership as their vocation.
We owe so much to those individuals who never saw their dreams realised in their own lifetimes, but who sowed the seeds, - to use the words of Sr Stanislaus Kennedy – that would be reaped by the next generation and the generations to follow.
The idealism that inspired that ethos of public service is as important, perhaps even more important, than ever today. It may seem at a first glance that no challenges remain. After all, we now preside over a society which has witnessed a reversal of the tide of emigration, the imminent approach of full employment, a surge in cultural confidence and pride, a greater respect for diversity, and the increasing depth and reach of the peace process. We can all rest happily on our laurels – hasn’t paradise been regained? We know the question is ironic for already we see the downstream consequences, the equal and opposite reaction to so much that is good: the accelerating "left-behindness" of the marginalised. This is a fast moving society. If you are stuck and going nowhere, those who are moving disappear from view very rapidly. A society where the stuck and the moving lose sight of each other is not a healthy place.
We see it in some of the racist attitudes to economic refugees. It is of course a relatively new phenomenon for Ireland to be a land of fresh and hopefilled starts, but our experience as an emigrating nation teaches us, or should, that short-term views conduce to prejudice and stereotyping, long term views see once tragic and confused people, settled, contributing, working, the achievements of their children and children's children a source of pride.
Some kind of earthly paradise is of course still a very long way away for many in our society, those for whom the horizon of expectations is not a five-year career plan, but how to get through the next week. Theirs is a world where the little energy each day brings is spent on basic survival, where the provision of free third level education is tragically irrelevant to them, and even more tragically out of reach for their children. They look at the prosperity of this country, not as participants but as spectators on the sideline, unable to join in, knowing only that this confident society is not their Ireland, their world.
Our very success makes the continuing blight of exclusion and poverty even more intolerable than in previous generations, for it is no longer a question of whether we have the means to tackle such problems once and for all. It now comes down to whether we as a people have the will, the imagination and the determination to address these issues and the new social challenges which have emerged: the tragic deaths of young men through suicide; the despair of drug addiction; growing levels of hostility towards asylum seekers – the list goes on. The unconvinced wonder why they should be bothered, why the lives of the poor or underachieving should be their concern, what is to be gained from trying to change things?
We have seen in the past how the widening of opportunity does not lead, as some feared, to the lowest common denominator or to a dilution of the knowledge equity. The more we expand opportunity the more we release individuals from the prison of underachievement, the more we benefit from fulfilled, contributing individuals, from vigorous and achieving communities. Our experience, not least in the field of education, has been that extending the reach of opportunity releases a surge of energy which benefits the entire society. And we are still nowhere near our full potential as a people. Our business life, our workforce, our culture, our community sector – every facet of Irish life – can benefit from creating a society that is all centre and no margins, a society where each child is given as her birthright effective opportunities to blossom fully.
But that society will not be created by chance, by leaving it to others to do, or worse, by dismissing those who work in the service of others as misguided idealists, out of touch with reality. Those who recognise that the natural symbiosis of life in this society has not yet been achieved, that it is still scarred by elitism and considerably short of its full potential, are the true realists. They recognise that the faults and failings of Ireland in the twenty first century are not inevitable, that they are amenable to change, and that there can be no greater challenge or fulfilment than knowing that their commitment, their actions and their sense of hope, has made a difference to the lives of others. There is a fundamental difference between a realism which induces cynicism and one which provokes change. Cynics cast around for someone to blame. Changers, doers, see not only that something needs to be done, but also that they can contribute to bringing about that change, more importantly they intuit that if they do nothing then it is possible that nothing will be done.
It takes courage and independence of mind to commit to crafting the new social dispensation which lies now within our reach. But I hope that some of you will. That you will use the education that you have gained here, whatever the discipline, as a springboard to participating in Irish public life, whether in politics, the civil service, local government, social services or, dare I say it, even the Presidency. There is no doubt that our system of governance was impoverished in past generations by the deliberate exclusion of women. That failure to make use of so much talent, of the particular insights and perceptions that women could have brought to bear, resulted in a lopsided and narrow process of policy and decision-making that is only now, slowly, being reconstructed. We have an opportunity to make this century, from its outset, one which is enriched by the full participation of women in every sphere of society, and especially at the most senior levels of our public service. I believe that the will is now there for this to happen, but it can only happen if women of your generation respond to that challenge.
Our society is only as good as we make it, only as open and dynamic, as inclusive and generous, as we want it to be and work for it to be. And the evidence is all around us that there is a strong public will to make life better for all our people. Whether you look at the results of public opinion polls, or the vibrancy of community and voluntary activity, or the breadth of political discourse, Irish people consistently show a remarkable level of genuine altruism, unselfishness and concern for the welfare and wellbeing of others. They want a society they can be proud of, a place where equality of opportunity is not just an academic concept, where a decent standard of living for all is more than just an aspiration.
We are well on our way to achieving that society. We are nearer than we have ever been. We are starting to believe it is within our grasp. And yet still a small but lingering doubt remains: is it all too good to be true? Can we really make it happen?
Nelson Mandela has written:
‘Our deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is
That we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
That most frightens us……
As we let our own light shine
As we are liberated from our own fear
Our presence automatically liberates others’.
This is a good time to believe in ourselves, in our own power, to let our light will shine, liberating a new generation, creating a decent world to be proud of, to offer its light in turn to the rest of the world. Our descendants will sit in this hall, in these seats. They will debate what we did, what we failed to do. They will apply the hardest of criteria to us and rightly, for we have been given a lot and so a lot is expected from us. We have the doing of it, we can make them proud.