REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT NATIONAL MARRIAGE WEEK IN IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT NATIONAL MARRIAGE WEEK IN IRELAND WEDNESDAY 10TH FEBRUARY 2010
Dia dhíbh a chairde. It's good to join you for National Marriage Week. My thanks to Paddy Monaghan for inviting me and thanks also to each one of you and your organisations for the work you do to support marriage in Ireland. Marriage is a culturally loaded phenomenon, varying greatly in its accepted characteristics from country to country and with a complex history also the world over, including here in Ireland. Today’s focus on romance, love, partnership and equality between the spouses would have been virtually unintelligible to our great-grandparents and their predecessors. For generations, marriage was a precursor to the formation of new households and the assumption of new, public legal rights and responsibilities. Today such households are regularly formed by cohabitation without marriage which while lacking the formal legal structure of marriage nonetheless is not without important legal consequences and protections. The longstanding view of marriage in christianised western cultures as a permanent union between a man and a woman has undergone considerable change in recent years with the availability of divorce and the introduction in a growing number of jurisdictions of provision for legally recognised same-sex unions.
Statistics and trends show us that interest in marriage ebbs and flows from generation to generation. For example we are currently experiencing a much higher rate of marriage than even fifteen years ago which some might interpret as a sign of the vitality of Irish marriage and Irish family life with which is it intimately though not exclusively connected. Today we expect parties to marriage to love one another, at the very least on the wedding day. It is fitting that National Marriage Week includes that great celebration of romantic love, St. Valentine’s Day. But when the chocolates are consumed and the roses wilting, there are 364 other days in the year when the stresses and strains of everyday life can test, stretch and challenge that mutual love and that is where your work has become invaluable in helping couples to make their relationships more resilient, more robust and better able to withstand the many temptations, distractions, worries and pressure of daily life that can come between a couple. When marital relationships work well, spouses are happier, children are happier and the benefits extend far beyond the home into the community. We have a collective vested interest in ensuring that relationships within households are healthy and not dysfunctional for we all pay a huge price for the damaged and dysfunctional men, women and children who emerge from the wreckage of bad marriages and bad relationships. Last week I met many lawyers who are involved in the field of family Law. Their specialism has over recent years had to adapt the old adversarial, winner takes all form of legal intervention so much a feature of our common law system. It is particularly ill-suited to a situation where a couple are still destined to be involved to some extent in each other’s lives, particularly if there are children. Each one of them will have experience of just how corrosive marital conflict can be and how essential it is that there are processes which focus on mutual co-operation, collaborative problem-solving and shared outcomes in which everybody feels respected. Concepts like counselling and mediation which many of you pioneered have become essential tools in the problem-solving kit that is available to those whose relationships are experiencing difficulties. The intrinsic value of that work is now recognised at government level through the services offered by the Family Support Agency which with your help is able to play a key role, bringing together programmes and services designed to promote local family, parenting and relationship support which goes a long way to helping prevent marital breakdown. Countless community and voluntary organisations around Ireland involve themselves in this critical work and in providing practical education to young people and those preparing for marriage. They are all needed for families today who, though having greater education and opportunity than previous generations , do not have the same level of access to networks of tight kinship and clan which often spontaneously helped with childrearing and relationship mending in the past.
Contemporary lifestyle often takes couples to live far from their homeplaces and families leaves them isolated and vulnerable when difficulties arise. As Margaret Mead once noted, “Nobody has ever asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.” As part of our answer to that situation in Ireland, National Marriage Week is an ideal time to highlight the huge and growing range of supports available to couples and to let them know that they do not have to face their problems alone. There is willing, expert and effective help available and the sooner they seek it the more realistic are the chances of avoiding escalation of the disharmony in the home.
National Marriage Week is also an ideal time to encourage and thank the massive number of couples who prosper in so many ways through their happy marriages, and which they work at keeping happy and harmonious. They showcase what is possible and through their lives we can see the deep abiding value to the individual and to society of loving relationships, loving marriages. The human person thrives in a loving, nourishing and affirming environment but withers were there is the misery of distrust, dislike, cruelty, betrayal and abuse. We would wish every marriage and every home to be a healthy environment but we know there is a cruel reality for a lot of men women and children who are this day locked into patterns of unhealthy, skewed and damaging relationships. Your work to keep marriages and homes healthy and happy is essential and provides us with manifest dividends in terms of social solidarity and stability. Your work to move the unhealthy homes from hell on earth to hope is not just good work it is great work. It is difficult, frustrating, draining, time-consuming and sometimes it goes around in circles but without it, without your patience, your passion for this work and your vocation of care to marriages, there would be a lot more lonely people, a lot more problems in our homes and on our streets. Ultimately you invest in this work because you believe in its abiding power of love to make lives whole and fulfilling and importantly you believe in its capacity to heal, its ability to find spaces even in the most intractable landscapes through which hope can do the work of creating a happier and better future. Thank you for choosing this work and this vocation.
Thank you for this and I wish you every success with the rest of National Marriage Week Ireland.