REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A DINNER HOSTED BY THE NORTHLANDS CENTRE CITY HOTEL, DERRY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A DINNER HOSTED BY THE NORTHLANDS CENTRE CITY HOTEL, DERRY THURSDAY, 29 MAY 2008
My thanks Declan [Doherty, Chairman of Northlands] for those kind words of introduction and my thanks also to you all for that warm welcome. Thanks also to Denis [Bradley], and the Board of the Northlands Centre, for your very kind invitation to join you for this great celebration of the achievements of a remarkable group of people who have faced into the chaos of addiction and have conquered it, bringing hope, opportunity and peace of heart into their lives and the lives of those among whom they live and work.
Northlands’ Celebration of Recovery Week highlights and showcases stories of transcendence over the curse of addiction whether to alcohol or drugs or both. These are stories of wasted years, of messed up relationships, of jobs lost, talents neglected, of being given up on by family and friends, of deep loneliness, depression and at times bottomless hopelessness. And then somehow, somewhere in the pit of darkness a light of determination began to flicker in the only place where change can truly emerge from and that is the addict’s own heart and soul. That determination not to be forever defined by addiction, not to be forever held hostage by drink or drugs or the complex mix of forces and experiences that brought people into their orbit in the first place, that determination is what we acknowledge here today.
Yes the journey to success was a journey that needed and benefited from company, especially the company of professionals trained in this very specialised field; and yes, as the old Irish expression says, two shortens the journey. But you can have the best care in the world, the most sophisticated recovery systems in the world and if the addict does not turn up to use them and work with them, you might as well close the doors. For every parent who is today verging on saying “enough is enough”, for every spouse who just can’t take any more, for every child who veers between love of a sober parent and fear of what one child described to me as her alcoholic parent’s evil twin, the stories that we gather to give credit to today are stories that they need to hear because they bring some level of hope that change is possible, that the future is worth looking forward to, that help does exist and that recovery does happen. In the poignant words of T.S. Elliot:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Opening the door into that lost ‘rose-garden’ means that addicts and their families have to dig deep. There are no quick fixes as with drugs or alcohol, there are no easy, soft options. In a place where pride and confidence may be hard to come by, they must find the inner resolve, patience and commitment to turn the tide. They have to light the flame inside themselves. And when that is lit they need the humility and wisdom to know that the next steps are best taken with good sound help and support.
Sometimes the support mechanisms the rest of us take for granted and that kick in when we are sick have fallen away, fed up, discouraged, tired out. Sometimes friends and family astonish us by their resilience, their ability to stick with us through the worst of times. But they too need support and expert help through this miserable illness. That is where community matters and where a place such as the Northlands Centre gives outward expression to the community’s care for its weakest and most vulnerable.
The Northlands Centre is there to give a helping hand up where, when and how it’s needed most. It helps through its family-centred approach to aiding recovery. It helps though its imaginative approaches and its empathy with sufferers and their families. It helps by challenging community and individual to have faith; to borrow and paraphrase Phil Coulter’s words - that spirits may be bruised, but never broken.
In these more prosperous times for our island, increased levels of dysfunction arising from alcohol and drug consumption have become very unwelcome companions on an otherwise-optimistic journey forward. They have consequences that permeate all levels of life - our homes, our families, our schools, our workplaces and our communities. They spread a toxic legacy of betrayed love, of frightened children, of violence in homes and on the street, of work badly or dangerously carried out in the work place, of squandered days and years when life could have been good but was instead made utterly miserable.
Here we have the best educated, the most accomplished, the most high achieving and problem solving generation in our history. It has brought a fresh and effective imagination to our age-old conflict redeeming it with a new, generous wisdom for the first time in centuries. Yet one age-old problem persists and that is our cultural aneurism around excessive alcohol use now compounded by drug abuse. It is far from being a problem that politics can solve, though politics plays a part.
Ultimately it is about behaviour, about how individuals behave, how they are encouraged to behave by their peers, how they are educated to behave by their parents and role-models, how they look at socialising, how they avoid the hard questions that result from their behaviour, how they are allowed to keep on avoiding those hard questions. North and South we are paying a heavy price for our embedded acceptance of drug and alcohol related behaviour that is robbing so many, so unnecessarily, of their peace of heart, and their safety. It really is time that we put our collective brainpower to work to rid our communities of what is a scourge.
The effort made by the individuals we celebrate today to bring that scourge to heel in their own lives should give us reassurance that even this age-old problem has its answer. Thank God for people who refuse to give up, who insist on finding answers - people like the remarkable Denis Bradley whose belief in the capacity of the human person to change for the better has seen him immersed in bringing sobriety to Derry’s troubled addicts and bringing peace to Ireland’s troubled people. Never a man to take on the easy jobs, as one of the co-chairs of the Consultative Group on the Past his work will, we know, help on the difficult journey to healing the loss and hurt which has been the bitter harvest of history. As the Ulster poet John Hewitt said, “we build to fill the centuries’ arrears”.
At last at the political level we can see history’s arrears being filled just as at the individual level the Northlands Centre has helped so many men and women to fill in the arrears in their own lives by taking on their demons and discovering that they can, after all, be tamed. There is no bravery in alcohol or drugs but there is real heroism in moving out from under their shadow and reclaiming your life. Pills and bottles don’t need role-models. Success or failure is of no matter to them.
We human beings are different. Failure diminishes us individually and collectively. We are strong as individuals when we are problem solvers and not problems. We are strong for our families, our communities and our country. Today we celebrate those who have graduated to becoming problem-solvers par excellence. Congratulations to them and to those who accompanied them on their journey to the success that sobriety can bring.
Thank you.