ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE NORTHERN IRELAND MEDICOLEGAL SOCIETY MEDICAL BIOLOGY CENTRE
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE TO THE NORTHERN IRELAND MEDICOLEGAL SOCIETY MEDICAL BIOLOGY CENTRE, QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
Ladies and Gentlemen, A chairde:
My thanks to all of you and in particular to Peter Curran, for inviting me to be part of this pleasant, collegial occasion where law and medicine meet by deliberate choice rather than chance. This Society is an especially apt place for both Peter and I. He has a long association with the Mater Hospital. My primary school was right next door to the Mater and for both of us the immediate landscape was dominated by three large edifices, one was the hospital, another the Crumlin Road Courthouse and the last the forbidding Crumlin Road jail. At least two out of the three are represented here tonight.
My school is no longer there. In the near future a generation of North Belfast youngsters will know only of the jail and courthouse from the history books. Life moves on, landscapes alter, things which seemed immutable, unalterable mutate and change. Sometimes the pace of change appears to be so glacial, we, with our short human lives, fail to appreciate the extent of the incrementing new world. Sometimes the pace of change is so rapid it scares us rigid - we stop trapped in its spotlight, torn between going forward to the unfamiliar and going back to that which is known.
It is getting difficult to tell which world we are living in for we meet in times when the focus is a little blurred. We greeted the Third Millennium with real hope that a critical mass of people were willing - on the success of a new political dispensation; that out of that dispensation would come an egalitarian society here in Northern Ireland at peace with itself, its internal civic relations governed by mutual tolerance, by respect for human rights, its less than satisfactory relationship with its neighbours on this island characterised by increased ease, trust and mutually beneficial partnerships. We have watched that embryonic dispensation take shape and form, fuelling hope as a highly innovative form of consensus-based government and a litany of new support institutions started to find their feet. The wrapping paper is barely off this exciting and hope-filled gift to the children of the 21st century and suddenly its fragility is starkly evident. This gift is a living thing. It needs sensitive expert care to help it to grow robust and it also needs the right atmosphere, a healthy ecosystem in which to flourish. The first is the work of the world of politics and politicians, the second is the work of the people.
At this highly sensitive time for the peace process, a time during which people of good faith on all sides are struggling to find a way forward together we rely heavily on the vision of the politicians who are attempting to resolve complex and emotive issues. No one envies them their task and indeed we wish them well in it but neither do we have the luxury of being mere passive spectators.
No government, no law can make one human being respect another. No doctor can take the hatred out of a child's heart. That is the work of the people, that is the work of each one of us, whether in the home, the street, the work-place, the golf club, the medico-legal society, wherever two or more are gathered it is our work and it is urgent. Unlike institutions it cannot be suspended; we cannot put into cold storage our individual responsibility for building friendships in places where there was fear or enmity, for stripping away the scourge of sectarianism, for taking and creating opportunities to show those from whom we have been estranged politically, culturally, socially that we mean to take risks to build or as the poet John Hewitt says, “to fill the centuries arrears”.
This is the historic work of reconciliation which our generation is called on to do. This is the work we call the peace process. It is the overarching and crucially significant context which can open wide the space for politics and close down the space for paramilitarism.
More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates told us that ‘healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.’ The science of medicine has grown up around this principle that assisted recovery, when skilfully managed, has a far greater prospect of success than just leaving matters to chance. I believe that the same principle applies in the case of an unhealthy society where relationships have become infected with the toxin of distrust, hatred, bitterness, woundedness: its best chance of becoming healthy and whole once again, comes when all of its members assist in that recovery.
There may be times in any recovery process when the patient wonders is it all worthwhile: the painful treatments, with no guarantee of a permanent cure; the unexpected setbacks which drain away optimism and self-confidence. It is then that the role of the doctor in sustaining hope, bolstering the patient’s own belief in the possibility of recovery, becomes just as important as any physical treatment. This society needs people to sustain that hope, champions who will refuse to give up, because they know that recovery is possible, but that it can only come from within, through a process of self-healing.
‘Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self healing’.
These words of Seamus Heaney from his ‘Cure at Troy’ have never rung more true. The scars we carry after long years of division will take time to heal. Some of them never will and of course there are still those who refuse to acknowledge the sickness at all. I believe we can create our own miracles and that the work is already well in hand. We are on the way to creating an island community of neighbours not just at ease with their diversity, their mixed identities, their shared but differently viewed histories, their separate traditions, but celebratory of them, joyfully curious about them, eager to give each its place, its space, eager that each woman, man and child will, feel that he or she counts.
In a week like this when there is a focus on failure, when things have not gone as we would have wished, it is important to remind ourselves just how far we have come in a short time.
As I go about my work from day to day, I encounter many people who are already engaged in creating that new society. Some have been at this work a long time, during times when it was difficult and dangerous. I visited one such group earlier this afternoon – the Community Development Centre on Cliftonville Road. Others have joined the journey in more recent times, empowered by what they see as a changing mood and determined to make their own contribution now that they feel more trusting and more hopeful. They have broken out from old certainties, old comforts and embraced the challenge of change. Through a myriad of organisations cross-border, cross-community, young and old, business and charitable, religious and secular, cultural and sporting, security and political, they have created and continue to consolidate what I like to think of as a disorganised but effective conspiracy for good.
It is a conspiracy in which all can participate, challenging orthodoxies, stripping away prejudice and taking responsibility for building a new and better future together. At a time when we are encountering political difficulty, it is all the more important that all of us, who have so much to gain through a lasting peace, do all that we can to move forward and to overcome the divisions of our past.
Seamus Heaney's poem “Whatever You say Say Nothing” paints an unflattering but deadly accurate picture of "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod”, of “open minds as open as a trap". He says:-
"Smoke-signals are loudmouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school."
If we are to truly let the future in, to paraphrase that other great Northern poet, John Hewitt, we know it is time to get loudmouthed about what we want the hallmarks of that future to be.
I know that as practitioners of the law and of medicine, as people to whom others look for guidance, as individuals who have close contact with people from all backgrounds and communities, who have borne the brunt of much of the chaos of these past hard and hurt-filled years, many of you will wish to play your full part in bringing this change, this future about.
Those who are medical practitioners have seen the physical and psychological effects of the violence of the last 30 years: not just the horrendous injuries and the terrible waste of life, but also the deep-seated psychological damage inflicted on entire communities. You have seen the impact of that poisoned history on all of us: how it skewed relationships, twisted and contorted lives dreadfully. And the lawyers have picked up the pieces too of the devastating fallout of a society imploding.
‘More substance in our enmities than in our love’, Yeats has said.
And perhaps that has been true. But it need not be.
All of you – both legal and medical practitioners - have an important role to play, if you choose to, in building an alternative to the world we have come from. You are respected, your attitudes matter. Whether it is in the support and encouragement you give clients and patients who have suffered and are still suffering, whether it is in the relationships you build with colleagues within your own profession or across disciplines, whether it is in the values you give your children, you have day in and day out opportunities to do things which keep the future locked out or which let the future in.
This Medicolegal Society itself was created out of a recognition that professional boundaries need not and must not be barricades, that the medical and legal professions had much of value to share with each other and to learn from each other. There is a certain humility in the existence of a Society like this, it challenges and confounds the institutional vanity which professions can easily suffer from. That virus of vanity, of assuming that our perspective and no other is of value, that we have nothing to learn from those outside our own hermetic circle, and nothing to offer them not even respect, that virus has bedevilled our past. It has kept us from enjoying each other’s company, from understanding each other’s cultural heritage, from appreciating the giftedness of each tradition, from growing, blossoming humanly together on an island characterised by the physical beauty of its landscape but pockmarked by man-made ugliness. It is time to end its run.
Here in this Society you meet both doctors and lawyers. You debate, discuss, eat dinner, befriend. At the end of it all the doctors are still doctors, the lawyers still lawyers, no one and no-one's profession has been diluted or diminished by the contact, the partnership. In fact quite the reverse: a new generation of medics and lawyers have widened their perspectives, grown in understanding of each other, delighted in new friendships, perhaps even helped each other to deal more effectively, more insightfully with their professional work. You know what partnership offers. There can be no better ambassadors for this new beginning, which for all its faults and false starts, its ups and its downs, is still without a doubt our greatest source of hope. More than that - for those of us who love this place and love its people, who know intuitively the reservoir of warmth and the goodness which lies beneath the coarse, cold tongue of history - these past few weeks have given us a taste of what it is to feel real pride, real joy in politics of all the people, for all the people and by all the people. This gift is precious- it needs doctors to care for it, advocates to champion it. I hope you will.