REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION TO MARK THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF NALA
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT A RECEPTION TO MARK THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NATIONAL ADULT LITERACY AGENCY
Dia dhíbh a chairde, I am delighted to extend the traditional welcome of the house, céad míle fáilte as we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the National Adult Literacy Agency.
For men and women with literacy problems life can be a very lonely, private journey. I have met many of them over the years that I have been Patron of NALA and they have told me over and over again in unforgettable stories that NALA became their friend, teacher and guide and, through NALA, they were introduced to themselves all over again, but this time with confidence in themselves and hope in the future.
I am regularly asked who is the person who has most impressed me since I became President and I am sure the audience expect me to name someone well-known nationally or internationally. But I always give the same answer that the most impressive people I have ever met, I met through NALA, one a woman and mother who left school without the ability to read or write, reared her children without ever being able to read them a bed time story or help with their homework and who experienced dreadful levels of shame, unemployment and lack of confidence which made her life secretly and silently miserable. Then she got the courage to seek out NALA. She started like a junior infant with the alphabet and by the time I met her she was doing postgraduate studies in Trinity College. I cannot even begin to imagine the courage she had to find in order to start all over again. What I remember most though is her radiance, her joy in life and her restless curiosity to see just who she truly is and could be.
Close behind her was a man who had a job but could never join his colleagues at the coffee break where they would be talking about the things in the newspapers for fear he would reveal his inability to read. I met him the night he read his first poem in which he described the sheer thrill of being able, with the help of NALA to write the name of his wife and daughters on a blank page.
One woman told me that before NALA she lived her life as if she was inside a matchbox. Another told me of bringing home what she thought were yellowpack baked beans only to discover she had bought dog food. She said every last vestige of self-belief evaporated on that day but then it became the thing that propelled her into NALA. And when those men and women cross the door of NALA the story changes from dark to light, from a problem endured to a problem solved.
NALA’s professional and volunteer team has for thirty years been a source of liberation and encouragement to thousands of people. In their homes and communities they have each been powerful witnesses to the way that education can open up a life. Some were brave enough and generous enough to share their stories on television through the programmes made with RTÉ. Those programmes reached huge audiences and gave a lot of people the inspiration they needed to seek out NALA and start their own life-changing journey to literacy.
Thanks to NALA we are all more clued in to the kind of problems people have with literacy issues including things like financial literacy, dealing with banks, building societies or credit unions, or jargon literacy - dealing with filling out complicated forms – all of these things help people to take control over their own lives and to ensure their fullest talents and skills are blossoming as they should.
To Inez Bailey, Director of NALA and all her team, to the many tutors and volunteers around the country, to the sponsors and supporters and particularly to the past and present students of NALA, I congratulate you on your wonderful, inspirational, life-enhancing work of the past three decades. I am so proud of what you have achieved. Enjoy every moment of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations and I look forward to seeing what NALA and its graduates can achieve in the next thirty years. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.