Remarks by President McAleese at the 40th Anniversary of the Irish Association of Social Workers
Dublin, Friday, 17th June, 2011
Dia dhíbh a chairde, thank you for your warm welcome and I’d particularly like to thank Ineke Durville, President of the Irish Association of Social Workers for her kind invitation to join your 40th Anniversary celebrations.
Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that ‘Life's most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?’ Well, with confidence we can say that each and every person in this room today lives the answer to that question for you have made the care of the most vulnerable “others” your life’s vocation. Yours is a profession and an academic discipline that works to address the individual and collective brokenness that in so many ways conspires to prevent the full flowering of the potential of human beings and human societies. Your field and clinical work brings practical help where it is needed. Your scholarly analysis distils the wisdom gleaned from practice and research and develops it into the information and insight that we need to improve the quality of life for our citizens and our country.
You are acquainted with life at its most fragile, tortuous and chaotic. You deliberately choose to place yourselves into that messy arena so that with the help of your skills, experience and the tools at your disposal, some kind of workable pathway through the disarray can be found. You offer the prospect of structured, professional and effective action in situations that families, friends and communities often think are beyond their coping skills. The complexity of those situations and the high level of judgement needed to circumnavigate them are evident in the huge spectrum of work settings you operate in each day and the volume of people and services you have to engage with to get the work done. You work with or through statutory, voluntary and community social services; you engage with adoption agencies, child and family centres, community development projects, counselling services, child protection services, learning disability services, mental health services, hospitals and clinics, the probation service, an Garda Síochána, the Health Service Executive and Local Authorities. You work with individuals, with families, groups and communities and always where you work you are challenged to be a source of problem solving and positive change.
The impact your members have had on the lives of individuals, families and our society as a whole is very difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy but we do know that over the forty years since this Association was founded the impact of your work has been life-altering and life-enhancing for many people. You have had your successes and your disappointments. You have accompanied men, women and children through very tough parts of their life journey. You have championed the changes that are needed to prevent or mitigate the effects of dysfunction. You have educated our society about social justice and you have vindicated the need for supportive interventions in lives that are beset by great difficulties.
Those who established this association in 1971, including your first President, the late Ms. Maureen Murphy, set good foundations. They could not have foreseen everything that lay ahead for there have been many different Irelands during these forty years and plenty of people and problems clamouring for the attention of social workers.
There are systemic barriers, inequities and injustices that continue to blight the lives of some of our citizens. There are personal circumstances and calamities that impact dreadfully on lives no doubt compounded by the impact of economic recession in recent years.
There can be no doubting the difficult and attritional nature of the job that you do today, nor the complexity and sometimes intractability of the challenges that you face. The solidarity offered by this Association is part of the network of support and re-energising you need to keep on going, to persevere and to stay fresh in your enthusiasm for this profession.
Conferences like this allow you to exchange best practice, learn of new developments, hear expert speakers, assess new ideas and issues, take pride in achievements and build the kind of robust professional links, nationally and internationally that will be needed to get through the next forty years successfully.
An important characteristic of the Irish Association of Social Workers is that it continues to operate on a voluntary basis and that brings under the one roof the rawest recruit and the most seasoned senior social workers. Today there is time for celebration, reflection and future planning. The insights you share here have the capacity to transform the decade between now and your fiftieth celebrations. I wish you well in them knowing that what you do strengthens us as a civic society and as a caring community.
I congratulate the Association’s over 850 members and thank each one of you for stepping up and taking personal responsibility, for not simply the social work profession in Ireland but social justice in Ireland.