REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A CONFERENCE CELEBRATING THE ROLE OF WOMEN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A CONFERENCE CELEBRATING THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN BELFAST HARBOUR COMMISSIONER’S OFFICE
Thank you very much for such a warm welcome. I would also like to thank the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Councillor Tom Hartley, for his generous introduction and for inviting me to speak today.
It is a particular joy to see a Belfast man organising a conference in celebration of Belfast women. It’s a great subject! And no doubt this conference will deepen and widen our understanding of what women have contributed to this city but before anyone suggests that this focus on women is unnecessary, that it raises a gender barrier that obscures the full story of all those, both men and women, who inhabited and shaped this city, it is important to acknowledge that the same history and the same events can be and often are, experienced very differently by men and women in their lived everyday lives. I could talk only about the famous women of this city or the infamous women but that would be to narrow the celebration too much for, in truth, the heart of this city has so often been kept beating by extraordinary, ordinary women who were overlooked in the grand scheme of things. The last thing we should do today is indulge in any more overlooking.
This city was the first place in Ireland to give women householders the Municipal vote almost one hundred and twenty five years ago. They would have been drawn from the better-off classes who made their money in this city and made their mark in its solid architecture and commercial history. I experienced Belfast as most of its citizens experienced it, as a city of workers, men and women, many of them the first generation to leave rural Ireland and make their lives in a prospering, busy city.
Throughout my childhood, Belfast was a smokestack industry city characterised for many of its inhabitants by the tens of thousands of men who took to the streets with their lunchboxes in the early morning on their way to the shipyard, Sirocco works, ropeworks, Mackies or Shorts but I was reared under the shadows of the linen mills and on our streets it was the millies and doffers we saw on their way to work, for linen-making was women’s work.
My primary school was then situated between the Mater Hospital and the nurses’ home, another landscape utterly dominated by working women, the starched uniformed nurses and the even starchier nuns of the Mercy Order who ran both the school and the hospital. I was fortunate to have been born within a few years of the advent of free, universal, second-level education and even more fortunate to have had the opportunity to be educated by both the Mercy and Dominican nuns who invested their lives and vocations in the education and advancement of women. Somewhere in the voices of women like my mother and grandmother whose life’s chances, like those of their husbands, had been reduced by the lack of opportunity for formal education, I learnt that this chance I had for education was a passport to a new kind of freedom for women, a freedom that we are still only writing the opening chapters of.
We could see the valiant struggles of women as they coped on little money, in poor housing with large families. We could see their talents absorbed, exhausted in getting by. We saw their self-sacrifice and their ingenuity in how they mended and made do, scrimped and saved, knitted and sewed, cooked and cleaned, nursed and bandaged, their lives lived in the service of their families and their communities. We saw the women who got on, got jobs, made careers in public service jobs, routinely forced to give up their jobs on marriage. I saw my Roscommon grandmother’s three sisters from the West of Ireland run their own small businesses throughout their lives, circumventing, even flaunting, the received wisdom of the era which entrapped so many women in a culture of limited opportunities, opportunities limited by history’s gender bias.
In a couple of generations it all changed dramatically. In 1969 when I went to Law
School at Queens, one of the main legal text books had a chapter entitled “Women” which basically said we had no business aspiring to be lawyers and the only excuse for being a woman in a Law School was to search for a suitable husband. We were then a tiny minority but today in any university and in virtually every subject area women are at least fifty percent of the student population and generally considerably more. For that we have to thank the women among them, the women of this city who pushed out the limits of the opportunities available to women and we are also indebted to the women who took those opportunities and proved their worth to themselves, to Belfast and to the world. But Belfast women have proved their worth in many other ways.
I think of the women whose centenary we will hopefully celebrate in 2011 - the millworkers who went on strike to protest at slave wages and outrageously dangerous working conditions. I think of the tens of thousands of women who lost their spouses, sons, brothers and fiancés in the trenches of the Somme, who bore the emotional brunt of appalling loss in the worst wars in human history, who had to help remake the world with virtually no political clout and even less notice taken of them. In our time we have witnessed the women who were the peacemakers, the bridge-builders, in the teeth of sectarian and political conflict that tore this city apart and made it a place of dreadful unhappiness for so long. In their homes and in their broken hearts it was so often they who kept the pilot light of hope alive, when the barren world of macho violence, shape-throwing and retaliation dragged us further and further from the noblest and most decent of human values and ideals.
The real seed-bedding of the Peace Process, a process designed to restore to daily prominence the most decent of human virtues, tolerance, forgiveness, respect, equality, fairness, was done by a massive volunteer army whose quiet, unseen work in their homes, streets and communities, changed the thinking and changed the future. Women have been central to that work. They still are. They deserve to be celebrated. Two of them became Nobel Laureates, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, but in truth that shared prize bore witness to the massive work of women below the radar in shifting this city out of a culture of conflict into a culture of consensus.
The obstacle course that historically faced women in many spheres of life has still not been completely flattened. The number of women who represent this city in politics is still very small but, as in civic, sporting and cultural life, their presence grows more evident, more effective with each new generation. There is an historic female roll of honour here in Belfast second to none, clerics, entertainers, writers, educators, researchers, professionals in every discipline, businesswomen, sportswomen, mothers, friends, community-builders and peace-makers. And there is a story worth celebrating today. But the truth is that the best is yet to come and that story yet untold of the future of women in Belfast is worth looking forward to with relish. In this city over forty years ago I first said out loud that I wanted to become a lawyer. The next words I heard were “You can’t – you are a woman.” No one hears those words today in Belfast. They hear them in many other parts of the world but not here and never again here.
All over this island where women’s life chances were reduced by a culture of misogynistic bias for generations we flew on one wing. Now we have the chance to fly on two wings and to get the velocity, altitude and focussed direction which will reveal to the coming generations what this city and this island could be like when its people work with each other as partners and as equals, men and women, in the fullest freedom and in this miraculous peace. It is no accident that this peace, which utterly eluded all past generations, has been constructed in this generation, the first to experience and benefit from the talents of women going where they will rather than where they are permitted to go.
So let’s celebrate the women who got us to this point and encourage those who will complete the journey to the best Belfast ever.
Thank you.