REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF CHARTERED SURVEYORS
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF CHARTERED SURVEYORS BURLINGTON HOTEL, DUBLIN
Dia dhíbh a chairde, and thank you for your warm welcome. My thanks to Society President, Ken Criben for his kind invitation to this annual dinner of the Society of Chartered Surveyors.
The food we know will be delicious and digestible. It’s the conversation around the tables that might impact adversely on our digestive systems, for against the backdrop of a recession which has hit your industry like a tsunami, what we hear from one another at events like these, what we share with one another has the capacity to lift our hearts or break them. You didn’t come here tonight to have you hearts broken neither did you come here to be fed an unrealistic Pollyanna view of the present or the future. But the human spirit in us which is coping with that present and trying to create that future needs the fuel of hope. Hope and resilience are strongly linked and it is important that we understand that we can be to one another, sources of hope and resilience. So around these tables we can be radiators of hope or we can be drains.
It is not so easy to be the former when your profession is like the entire construction sector, traumatised by the rapidity with which the boom years gave way to recession. You know the grim statistics but for you they are translated into friends and colleagues who have lost their jobs or who live with great economic uncertainty. The personal toll is already considerable and the immediate future, despite welcome signs of returning stability, is not a landscape for the faint hearted.
But then Chartered Surveying never was for the faint hearted. Your work has always placed you at the junction where creativity meets cold hard fact, where the architect’s vision meets the accountant’s bottom line. Whatever the project, small or large, public or private, you have needed to be hard headed, resourceful, inventive and realistic to bring it to fruition on time and within budget. The big project that faces all of us now is Project Ireland. Our people are hungry for a sustainable prosperity and economy. We felt the massive surge of confidence that lifted us through the years of the boom and while we do not want to repeat the mistakes that rendered us so vulnerable and brought so much grief, we are still ambitious for our people and for our country. We believe in our ability to transform and transcend and we need the resilience of the doers who can feed the fresh new dynamic that will improve our future prospects. So we look for leadership at every level, including from your profession and your Society. What does its history tell us about what we can expect.
Where would you rather be – here tonight or back at your foundation in1895, in a colonized, impoverished Ireland, the birth year of Sinn Fein parliamentarian Liam Mellowes who would be executed in 1922 and of IRA man Joe Murphy who would die on hunger strike in 1920, the year Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson would cross verbal swords in court with devastating consequences for Wilde. Votes for women were still decades away, Trinity College’s doors were years away from opening to them. In each generation since 1895 there have been convulsive changes many involving considerable pain; the Great War , the Rising, Independence and Partition, the Second World War, economic isolation, mass emigration, the Troubles. Yet through all these times there were those who kept their focus on the future and who planned the long haul to that future, the widening of educational opportunity, the push towards gender equality, the economic expansion of the 1960’s, membership of the European Community, the peace process that had defied centuries of effort. The evidence is in of a country which had dramatically pulled itself up by its bootstraps, which had jumped two large steps forward and was in the first opening chapters of an era of success when it was pushed one step back by powerful forces and factors, some of them global, some of them local.
The construction sector, your professional hinterland was a frontline driver of Ireland’s economic resurgence and is now to some extent its bellweather as we move from dizzying, unsustainable highs to today’s relative lows. There is no doubt that many people are expressing understandable anger and disappointment. Those feelings are part of the rite of passage through which we learn the hard way the mistakes to avoid in the future and the cost of past mistakes. I imagine that there has been a lot of such soul searching in your profession. Confidence and trust have been battered and the physical evidence is to be seen in the negative equity, the unbuilt, half-built or empty housing estates and commercial properties that will become the bread and butter of NAMA.
When your Society comes to celebrate its 125th year in ten years time how do you want this generation to be defined- is it by the historic success that moved Ireland from first to fourth gear or is it by foolish pitfalls that were our undoing and that brought us back down to third gear. There are global and national factors which will dictate how quickly and effectively we increase momentum. It matters around these tables that we acknowledge that we have been hit hard by recent difficulties but we simply cannot allow ourselves to be defined by them or paralysed by them. Even allowing for the worst the recession has thrown at us and the worst that nature has thrown at us, this generation is by far the most able, skilled, educated and liberated Ireland has produced.
We might be tempted to drown our sorrows but as Jackson Brown has pointed out that is futile, for sorrows know how to swim. Better to think more radically for as Einstein observed “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Yet the only way we can deal with them is by solving them and so we have to turn away from looking mournfully at the doors that have closed to us and instead we have to prise open new ones. That is now our generations challenge. Can we do it? Can we go down in history as the generation that overcame the worst recession, defeated the odds stacked against it and revealed a better, more wholesome, more humanly decent Ireland.
We’ll know the answer to that on your 125th birthday. Of course, the shaping of that answer is already underway – right here, right now. So maybe around these tables we can help each other to believe that on that day you and your colleagues will gather in an Ireland in fifth gear and cherishing all the children of the nation equally.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.