ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE NORTHERN IRELAND MEDICO-LEGAL SOCIETY TUESDAY, 18TH NOVEMBER
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE NORTHERN IRELAND MEDICO-LEGAL SOCIETY TUESDAY, 18TH NOVEMBER, 2008
Thank you for that warm welcome back to Queen’s and back to this society which I last addressed eight very short years ago. Meanwhile peace has blossomed and the Celtic Tiger has gone into hibernation. Devolved partnership government has arrived and perhaps not surprisingly, when we think of the huge change of culture it has entailed, its course has been at times uneven. There was the honeymoon period of buoyant hopes for progress generated by the remarkably warm engagement between then First Minister, Dr Ian Paisley and Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness. More recently the realpolitik has been very difficult but I know the Irish Government and people from the bottom of our hearts wish all the parties well as they try their best to transcend their problems and put Northern Ireland on a new, sound and proud footing. It is very heartening to hear that momentum is growing - more about that in a moment. However, if the shadows of the past hang over those problems, the shadows of the future are also not too far away and those shadows are looming over all of us and a great deal of the developed world.
Governments across the globe are feverishly grappling with financial systems, services and companies in freefall and utter turmoil – a process which has cascaded across countries and continents with the speed and ferocity of hurricane winds. The downstream consequences are only too evident in the consumer angst and the fears of redundancy and repossession that some are now facing. Time will tell, and probably quite soon, how well we are equipped to effectively chart a course through these choppy waters and not just in terms of our own civic, political and economic capital but importantly in terms of the robustness of the partnerships we have at regional, European Union and at international level. For one thing is absolutely clear, that while we each rightly do what we can to protect our sovereign interests, we can only find truly effective answers through international dialogue and partnership. The response of the European Union and the G20 are crucial in this now global debate on the future of our economic systems. It’s a debate now wide open for input from all those who want to see a change in values and in regulatory structures. There has never been a better and more urgent time for input, not just from business and commerce, from banks and economists, politicians and pundits but from the wide swathes of civic society whose entire futures have already been significantly compromised by practices and structures over which they had little control. We are in a moment when the new controls can be significantly influenced by voices willing to speak.
Meanwhile, neither the world of medicine nor law remains immune to the giddy push-me-pull-you of life’s tides. Conveyancers have gone from boom to bust and government health initiatives have fallen victim to financial cut-backs though the public still have high and demanding expectations when it comes to medical care. Inevitably your professions, besides having to cope with the impact on your own lives, will pick up the pieces that fall from these times, the worries that conduce to mental and physical ill-health, the problems that end up in both civil and criminal courts, the family breakdowns, the bankruptcies.
Faced with such fickle fortunes, it can sometimes be easy to give in to the counsel of despair yet those of us who did not come down with the last shower of rain know that with effort, this too shall pass. When I last joined you on the 15th of February 2000, the front page of the Irish Times carried an article about what was described as the “worst crisis” of the peace process because of disagreement over the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons. Sometimes it is important to remember what tempests we have already managed to navigate our way through and to recognise that we bring to the resolution of our contemporary problems much greater education, entrepreneurship, experience and confidence than at any time in our history.
What we need is determination and an openness of outlook to seek out new possibilities and to intuit where our next generation of strengths will come from. We also need, and thankfully have, the steadying influence of two old and venerable professions, medicine and law, whose distilled wisdom is the wisdom of ages - two professions which have accompanied the people who share this island through a catalogue of character-testing episodes over many generations, quite literally including wars, depressions and pestilence. If we have to face into hard times again, many of our forebears would be happy to swap their hard times for ours. But there should be no mistake or false reassurance and complacency. The forecasts are showing the storms ahead and there is no safe port for almost any economy. Those who simply wait and see, run the risk of being overwhelmed, like bathers on a beach pointing a camera at a tsunami. What is more, the speed with which these chillier winds and storms have come is quite remarkable. The people struggling now to find answers did not even know the questions only a few short months ago. In some cases the gap between calm and crisis was a matter of days. No wonder there is real concern.
That is why I was so pleased to learn of the news of the important breakthrough in Stormont today and every credit to First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness for the wise way forward they have negotiated in terms of the complex issues which surround the devolution of policing and justice. That breakthrough has in turn freed up the blockage on meetings of the Executive and I understand that several sessions are now planned in the coming weeks so that the many serious and difficult challenges facing the Executive, Assembly and indeed the people of Northern Ireland can be tackled and dealt with. We wish Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness and their colleagues in the Executive and Assembly well as they take forward this critical work.
One important dimension of today’s good news is the signal it sends about the growing maturity of the new dispensation at Stormont. Yes, it has taken time for this breakthrough to be achieved, but in the end it did get done and it got done by dint of the slow, painstaking process of talking and negotiating by the parties themselves, until an outcome was achieved that worked for all sides, and on a basis of mutual respect and interests. For the new dispensation to work, its DNA must clearly be characterised by partnership and today’s announcement suggests that we may dare hope that this is indeed the case. On a personal note, and in front of many fellow lawyers, may I say how pleased I was to hear that John Larkin QC is due to become Attorney General in the new arrangements. John is a superb lawyer and boasts a great CV. I am sure you all join me in wishing him well when the time comes for him to take up this vital new mantle.
South of the Border we face into these times with the confidence that comes from having turned a very poor, insular economy into a high-added value, globalised knowledge economy. We have a uniquely successful track record in attracting foreign direct investment in cutting-edge industries and in generating a new culture of entrepreneurialism. Despite the global turndown and the creeping up of unemployment, jobs are still being created and investors are still arriving with enthusiasm. So we look to our proven strengths and the resilience that comes from having faced tough times before to find the tenacity, self-sacrifice and creativity to see us through the period of retrenchment ahead.
Northern Ireland faces into these times with the great blessing of peace and with huge potential associated with political stability. Both peace and political stability are key drivers of the economic growth that generates prosperity. If the auguries for economic growth everywhere are less than encouraging in the short term, then it is all the more essential that during this time of recession, this fallow time is used well in all our economies, to invest in those things which will safeguard jobs, attract future inward investors and encourage local entrepreneurs. When the markets start to pick up as they eventually will, political stability and competitiveness will be high on their agenda and they will have a very hungry world of clamouring offers to choose from. It is also essential that, in the meantime, we use our resources well to maintain as much as possible of the momentum that we have built up and the investment we have all made - not least by those who lost their lives - in this precious thing called peace. As complex a concept as was ever contained in a simple innocuous-sounding word. There is the momentum of cross-community relationship-building, there is the momentum of cross-border relationship-building, there is the momentum of east-west relationship-building and there is the momentum of building our respective places within the European Union.
This is not work that can be left solely for politicians to do though their leadership during these unsteady times is absolutely essential in terms of reducing public anxiety and in terms of working with others to find sensible ways forward. Much of the work that needs to be done, however, is fundamentally the work of civic society, of doing the kind of thing you are doing here, doctors networking across borders and disciplines, lawyers networking across borders and disciplines. It is the work of so many groups and individuals who are gradually building robust relationships in previously wasted space and often quietly under the radar. It is in these very human endeavours, made handshake to handshake, phone call to phone call, joint initiative to joint initiative that ensure that all those wasteful historic faultlines of difference become instead places of bountiful creativity and shared progress. Already we can see the outline of what those endeavours are capable of delivering, the many shared medical services such as the patients in Donegal who can now access out-of-hours GP services in Derry, the patients from Armagh who can do the same in Monaghan, the shared psychiatric services for the deaf, the fluent cross-border cooperation between police services which makes our streets safer on both sides of the border, the cooperation between judicial systems which allows judges from one side of the border to take evidence on the other side, the many conferences and meetings where ideas are shared and gaps, plugged. There is a welter of both formal and informal, statutory and voluntary cross-border interlacing that is helping us all to get the best out of the moment we are living in.
We inherited a mountain of historical heavy baggage most of which when we unpacked it, was the dead weight of mistrust. Henry Louis Mencken said, “It is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest, that holds human associations together”. We have the mutual interests but it is the mutual trust and the human associations we need to build and to invest in to secure the peace and to create the necessary conditions for the growth of opportunity and prosperity.
Never, ever underestimate the powerful witness of your actions as individuals or as human associations in building that trust, for build it we must as our bulwark against being dragged backwards by the dead weight of that old historical baggage, just like Sisyphus and his infernal stone. As unemployment rates start to rise again for the first time in virtually a generation, as young people, particularly in the building, architectural and engineering fields both north and south, start to contemplate even short-term emigration, we need to be sure that we are doing all we can to consolidate the peace that will build the prosperity that will bring them back home.
Nothing did more for cross-border relations in recent times than Dr Ian Paisley’s meeting with former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern at the site of the Battle of the Boyne where they exchanged friendly banter and presents instead of the unfriendly fire of three centuries ago. That Dr. Paisley could describe the former Taoiseach as his friend, opened up more space for reconciliation than a library full of PhDs on conflict resolution. The warm welcome given to the English rugby team and their national anthem at Croke Park last year marked a genuine and heartening east-west reconciliation. Last month, I unveiled a magnificent memorial in Castlebar County Mayo to the memory of the Mayomen who died in the First World War. It was almost ten years to the day from the opening of the Island of Ireland Peace Park at Messines in Belgium and yet another strong indicator of how much progress has been made in retrieving old and valuable shared memories that were conveniently forgotten or neglected because they did not suit the protected narratives of either nationalists or unionists. Now we call the memories of those who died in aid, as we their descendants from every tribe, every faith and every perspective on this island try to put the past behind us by keeping the future before us. Thomas Kettle, a great Irish Nationalist, poet and scholar who died at the Somme wrote, perhaps prophetically,
“Used with the wisdom which is sown in tears and blood, this tragedy of
Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of
which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster
with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain”.
It has been a long and sombre prologue and it too has been tragically sown in tears and blood. But we can feel the pulse of reconciliation growing stronger by the day. It still needs good doctors to tend it, good lawyers to vindicate it. Late in the day, we are beginning to understand the hugely important role of simple, human gestures that are respectful of the otherness of others and of the iconic, inspirational aspects of good leadership. No one has to wait to be a national leader or leader of a major institution to show that inspiring leadership and that mutual respect.
Wherever there is division, wherever there is mistrust, human talent is being inhibited and wasted, leaching away into those fissures that were not any of our making but which are now in our gift to bridge, to unmake, to put to rights, through precisely the kind of unsung work that you are doing that makes good neighbours and good friends of strangers and estranged. Thank you for inviting me to be here and for the generosity that lies within that invitation. It all helps to keep us on the road to a future worth looking forward to.
Thank you.