REMARKS BY PREESIDENT McALEESE AT A GRADUATION CEREMONY FOR THE MASTERS IN INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
REMARKS BY PREESIDENT McALEESE AT A GRADUATION CEREMONY FOR THE MASTERS IN INNOVATION MANAGEMENT FOR PUBLIC SERVANTS
Dia dhíbh a chairde inniu. Tá an-áthas bheith anseo ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
I have a particularly soft spot for graduation ceremonies and I have been to many over the years. No matter what the degree, the institution or the country, graduation day is always characterised by joy and pride as well as the inevitable struggle with gowns and hoods and mortar boards. The joy and pride is here today, the struggle with quaint academic garb too but there is another layer to this occasion which marks it out as particularly special, for of course, this is the very first graduating class in the Masters in Innovative Management for Public Servants. This degree which is itself innovative and about innovation has its first ambassadors in this group of public servants drawn from the different administrations and the different layers of administration right across the island of Ireland, north and south.
It is the graduates day. You are entitled to take righteous pride in the degree certificates which distil on paper two years of study mixed into busy working and family lives. The certificate doesn’t say it but we know that these have been two arduous and testing years, involving considerable personal sacrifices by the students and their families. A shared, tough journey and now a worthwhile destination.
But the investment you have made in this Masters degree doesn’t stop with you for as public servants seeking to enhance your skill and insight as public servants that personal investment will now roll out into the wider society bringing a fresh new energy, imagination and focus into the many spheres of public service which underpin our everyday lives as citizens.
Dynamic economies and societies need dynamic public servants.
Here in Ireland the public service has been central to developing our status in Europe and the rest of the world, in building peace and mutual understanding across the border and between Ireland and the United Kingdom, in planning the complex infrastructure for an expanding and high achieving economy, in responding to the challenges of multi-culturalism and considerable population growth.
The evidence is in of a job well done but also of a job which is relentless, ongoing, ever-changing and non-stop. Having helped bring us thus far you now have to service a population with an appetite and an ambition for things to be even better.
Those who devised this new Master’s Programme in Innovation Management for public servants, responded to those appetites and ambitions and went a stage further by recognising how important partnership between the public services on this island was going to be to the common good, North and South. The fluency of those relationships in the future has been strongly enhanced by this opportunity to study and learn together, to grow in friendship and in awareness of each other’s perspective and experience. The life-long dialogues you have stimulated and will now sustain are the building blocks of bonds of fearless professional collegiality.
I warmly commend the University of Ulster [Professor Richard Barnett, who helped agree the initiative and set up the contacts for the initiative - and also Dolores O'Reilly and Larry McCurry] and the Letterkenny Institute of Technology [Paul Hannigan Director, Jack O’Herlihy, John Andy Bonar, Anne Burke and Meadbh Ruane] - and express gratitude for the visionary way in which they responded to a need that was identified by both the Department of the Taoiseach and the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in Belfast.
I would also like to commend the two awarding bodies, the University of Ulster and HETAC (the Higher Education and Training Awards Council) both of which have worked so well and so effectively together in the course of validating the programme. Thanks to their care and that of the institutions involved, we have a state of the art programme of the highest calibre as well as a very powerful model of continuing education.
In so many ways this day is a milestone, a sign of the new future that is being created and revealed by those who are determined that there will be a truly uplifting sea-change between past and future. You are the advocates of a new paradigm and we wish each one of you well in the years ahead, when we hope our societies will vindicate your faith, your investment in their future.
Enjoy this day, take pleasure and pride in what you have achieved. I hope that you will enjoy many other days of achievement in your careers and perhaps in even further studies.
Comhghairdeas libh arís inniu. Go raibh maith agaibh.