REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT SCHOOLS’ MENTAL WELLBEING CONFERENCE GRESHAM HOTEL, DUBLIN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT SCHOOLS’ MENTAL WELLBEING CONFERENCE GRESHAM HOTEL, DUBLIN SATURDAY, 21 MARCH, 2009
A cháirde, tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh inniu agus muid ag céiliúradh an ócáid mór seo. Ba mhaith liom bhuíochas a chur in iúl daoibh as an gcuireadh agus as fáilte a bhí caoin, cneasta agus croiúil.
Good morning everyone and thank you for your warm welcome and for the invitation to this event with its focus on the area of mental well-being, a subject we so often find so difficult to discuss. It is good to be part too of the celebration of 400 years of the Loreto Sisters so a special thank you to Sister Rionach Donlon for the invitation and to the Loreto sisters for an investment in Ireland through education which we could never quantify or adequately repay. I have some insider knowledge here as the mother of two Loreto girls, a role which allowed me to be an observer of the Loreto charism at work. It has been at work a long time - since 1609 and that longevity, experience and distilled wisdom shows.
It has been remarked that to educate a man is to educate one human being but to educate a woman is to educate a family. Yet for many centuries the world languished in the certainty that to educate women was a waste of time. IBVM, The Loreto Order, is just a few years younger than Trinity College, the doyenne of Irish Universities yet, for the first three hundred of its four hundred year existence, Trinity College was closed to women on grounds of principle. The pressure to change its views, as with other universities and professions that were closed to women, came from the growing number of young women who got the chance of second-level education offered by the great teaching orders like Loreto and who became ambitious for third-level thanks to the encouragement of their teachers. In their own quiet way the teaching nuns who predominated in those days were fomenting a social revolution which would only come fully into its own with the advent of free second and later third-level education and the levelling of the education playing field for women. We will never know how many women led lives of the most appalling misery and frustration, unable to access education or, having accessed it, unable to make the free career choices that were open to men. Both Loreto and Trinity College were well into their fourth centuries before women were allowed to vote. By the late 1960s when I went to Law School the text books for my course still said emphatically that the law was no career for a woman - that we were unsuited to it but could use Law School to find husbands.
Today women predominate in university life generally. They excel in all academic areas and dominate the high entrance points subjects such as teaching, law and medicine. They have opportunities and choices that their mothers and grandmothers could never have imagined for so many of those older generations had little choice but to settle for living lives that were constrained by huge cultural barriers and prejudices which were directed against women and which ignored their talents, ambitions, desires and their right to freedom of choice. Loreto has accompanied generations of young women on the journey through many different chapters of history. Mary Ward, Loreto’s great foundress knew a thing or two about adversity and the appalling mental and spiritual pressures that come from being deliberately misunderstood and marginalised. Her strength of character and independent spirit has long been part of Loreto’s charism. With that determination and a commitment to gospel values, Loreto has helped open opportunity for women in the Western world and can count an historic first here in Dublin with the Appointment of Sr. Elizabeth Cotter as the first Vicar General for Religious who is neither a man nor a priest.
Loreto has accompanied the women of the developing world, many of whom face appalling suffering and oppression - one former Loreto girl is the current Ambassador of Kenya to Ireland. Loreto has updated and adapted over these centuries, embracing the fresh new mentality unleashed by Vatican II through a global process of profound reflection and deliberation. It has seen its membership rapidly decline just as its life’s work in the education of young women was being crowned with outstanding success. If ever an organisation was well placed to pose profound questions about mental well-being then Loreto is one such institution.
Academic achievement is important but you have also educated holistically, encouraging the growth of the whole, rounded human being, able to live and grow, relate and connect, know themselves and know others – all this in a healthy, open and confident way, underpinned by a value system based on the great commandment to love one another. Negotiating one's way from childhood through adolescence to adulthood requires the development of complex skills and values. We each of us need to be prepared for social and economic participation, lifelong learning, healthy relationships in the home, the community and the workplace; we need good coping skills that help us to become good citizens, makers of good decisions so that we are problem solvers rather than problems. The world will test each of us in random and often unexpected ways. There is a wise saying - test your friends before you need them - but really we also need to test ourselves before we are hurled into the centre of life’s storms. We need to know what we are made of, what strength and weaknesses do we have when faced with provocation, bullying, disappointment, hurt, illness, pressure, responsibility, stress, anxiety, deadlines, betrayals, mistakes, rejections, doubts, abuse, or any of the litany of things that can come between us and our peace of heart and mind. The stronger our mental well being the better able we will be to transcend these things rather than being dragged down by them.
Professor Pat Dolan, UNESCO Chair of Children, Family and Civic Engagement at UCG, said only recently, “family, friends, school and community are the primary sources of help for children and are often the unsung heroes in the lives of young people”. He went on to describe this community as the “natural army of help” to the physical and emotional wellbeing of our young. Yes, Loreto already is a reservoir of experience and wisdom on the topic of this conference, for it has been part of that army of help for generations, intuiting with the wisdom of ages the warning signs that show distress at work in the life of a student. Loreto has also centuries of community living behind it - that most unusual space where adults live out their religious lives at close quarters to one another, trying to create the bonds of family among strangers, to maintain equilibrium enough to let individuality shine, to let the gospel work and to let the institution function effectively.
Ireland’s young people have grown up through times of relative peace and prosperity - both those things eluded every single past generation and they are still barely fragile saplings. Both are assailed by enemies - those who continue to believe in political violence instead of dialogue and those who believed in the greed of short-term gain and the lure of easy rewards for little visible productivity or input. We have been hollowed out by both to one extent or another and now we face the uphill climb to securing the peace and restoring the prosperity. They are both noble works, for peace is a miracle whose absence makes life utterly miserable and prosperity confers on people the dignity of choice and opportunity and of making the fullest contribution of their talents.
Our young people need to be mentally strong and resilient to face down the challenges that their generation faces and that they face as individuals. Hopefully here your debates and deliberations will help chart the pathway to hope, to passion for life, to self-belief and self-esteem - all of which are so essential to our mental well-being. The suicide statistics for the young make such a debate essential, for it shows the tip of an iceberg of discontent and disconnectedness leading to mental ill-health, that we need to gently probe, address and heal. Any one of us who has ever felt loneliness and despair in our lives will know how vital this conference is. In this week when we honour St. Patrick, we remember the words of his beautiful prayer-poem The Deer’s Cry. I arise today through a mighty strength. May this conference help us to do just that each day of our lives, to find the mighty strength that is such a vital part of mental well-being.
I wish you the best of luck with your conference and here’s to the next 400 years of work and achievement by the Loreto Education Trust.
Go fada buan sibh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.