Remarks by President McAleese at the Annual Joint Conference of Soroptimist International ROI & NI
Remarks by President McAleese at the Annual Joint Conference of Soroptimist International Rep. of Ireland and Northern Ireland
Good evening ladies… good evening gentlemen guests, and thank you for your very kind welcome and this invitation to join Soroptimists from both North and South. The last time I met members of this group a few years back we were North of the Border and the remarkable times we are now enjoying seemed an ambition too far. The generations-old toxic culture of conflict, so infused with an angry machismo seemed to be part of a relentless cycle we could not break no matter how hard we tried, no matter how dreadful and wasteful the loss. This organisation has always transcended that cycle, has always refused to countenance its focus on division, its fear of difference. You have quietly, solidly, steadily borne witness to another way of being with one another, a way of drawing difference into an energetic collegiality with a common mission to do good for each other and for the world. So these happier and more hope-filled times are yours in a very special way for they are how you have lived, they are what you have championed simply by doing.
Now you are the future and that bitter old narrative belongs to the history books. In truth, that passing narrative of Irish history was always painted in crude, broad brush strokes that often missed or deliberately overlooked stories like yours where there existed strong everyday links between Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, North and South. The Soroptimists kept their work focussed on the mission of their founders – to be sisters to one another, to do the best for one another and for the advancement of all women especially those whose lives are most troubled whether by poverty, disease, oppression, enslavement, or violence. That focus has kept you deeply implicated in the local and global pursuit of human rights, equality and peace. Your advocacy for women has ensured that the continuing wilful waste of women’s talents in so many cultures and spheres is challenged and that your own lives showcase the huge contribution women can make and must make if our world is ever to realise its fullest potential.
The Girls’ Public Speaking Competition makes sure there is a steady supply of future advocates for there is still such a very long journey to go. Those of us who remember hearing that old legend, “You can’t because you are a woman”, are grateful to live now in a country where young women can realistically contemplate becoming whatever they want. We are thrilled to see them coming into the professions, into business as entrepreneurs and moving into management in bigger and bigger numbers but with a mere 18 female MLAs and 21 TDs – two fewer than the previous Dáil – the story of women in politics and women as co-equal shapers with men of the future is far from fully scripted.
On the policy front, Ireland’s National Women’s Strategy is now just over one year old. Its vision, of “an Ireland where all women enjoy equality with men and can achieve their full potential, while enjoying a safe and fulfilling life” is one to which the Government has committed itself and one the Soroptimists could have written themselves. Similarly the setting up last year of the COSC, the National Office for the Prevention of Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence reflects a concern you have long been anxious to remedy. We know how rapidly dysfunction breeds where there is oppression, abuse. It infects lives for generations to come and leaves a trail of human misery in homes and in the community.
We have all been witnesses to the appalling wastefulness of these past decades of violence and now we have this once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-an-epoch chance to colonise the new emerging landscape of peace and good neighbourliness with things that lift the human spirit, that enhance human life, that confer dignity, promote harmony, that build up the capacity for good and close off the spaces in which misery flourishes and humanity flounders. We have never been offered such a golden opportunity before. The old compass points, the old props which kept the pot of conflict stirring – they are history’s footnotes and now we have to fill the future with new reference points, new language, new vision, new values. We will each get one go at this, our one personal and collective chance to disconnect us from a past which was particularly wasteful of women’s talents and voices and to grow a very different future, to watch a sea-change happen before our very eyes. A century ago the Provost of Trinity College swore that over his dead body would women get access to University for if they did they would be a danger to the men. Much, much less than a century ago, as the Soroptimists were forming, those who advocated the equality of women in Britain were labelled terrorists. Somebody had to shift a lot of obstacles to create the pathways we have been privileged to travel. We own them a lot. Now we are called to use our freedom, our prosperity, our time to dismantle the remaining obstacles in our own place and in those places where women still face the brick wall, the prison that is the old legend – You cant’s because you are a women!
I am proud to be among you tonight, and to wish you every continuing success, for your message of hope and help for women today is needed as much as it was when your founder first said it out loud almost ninety years ago. The big difference today is that there exists a huge cohort of successful women, ambitious women, educated, confident, resilient, achieving, prospering and while they are not a danger to men, they are a real and present danger to those who would diminish and dismiss women, for we are the living proof that the more we contribute, the wider our contribution, the better life is for all. Our lives reveal the lie at the heart of the repression of women and our lives are a long awaited truth: there is very little in this world that we cannot do simply because we are women.