Remarks by President McAleese at the Ashton Community Trust’s 20th Anniversary Celebrations
Belfast, Monday,19th September, 2011
Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to have been invited by Paul Roberts to be part of the Ashton Community Trust’s 20th Anniversary celebrations. As a child of North Belfast, born and reared, I know how much I owe to the people who invested in community, the people who saw things to be done, who got organised and did them as you have been doing here for twenty years and indeed more if we go back to those humble beginnings on the front of the Antrim Road in the mid 1980’s. In those days long before the Good Friday Agreement or the advent of the successful shared devolved government of today, it took people of exceptional dynamism to begin to tackle the mess of problems associated with conflict, sectarianism, communal division, unemployment and social exclusion. Yet the remarkable thing is that no matter how difficult or daunting the hill to be climbed, there were people who started the long haul and stayed faithful to the journey no matter what.
Thanks to the work of the Ashton Centre opportunities have been created for the regeneration of individual lives, the regeneration of this area and the regeneration of Belfast as a city shared as equals by people of many different perspectives but shared with a mutual respect which is the seed bed of safe streets and happy lives. Given the embedded difficulties some centuries old, the work of this Centre has been as difficult as it has been vital. But the evidence of your success is clear in the raft of projects and initiatives that are customised around the needs of local people, whether it is encouraging local business and entrepreneurship, or helping the unemployed, supporting those worst affected by the troubles; helping young people to engage positively with their education, their community and their country; tackling the mutual ignorance and distrust that breeds sectarianism by outreaching with generosity across the traditional divides. Every one of these things is a bridge to the future that is not a repetition of the past but a sea change, a new direction….. these are bridges that can only be built the hard way, person to person, handshake to handshake, committee meetings, intensive consultation and planning, trial and error, funding applications, fundraising and the kind of dogged determination that gets you through over twenty years of forcing change.
The continuing commitment of groups like the Ashton Community Trust says something very powerful and reassuring about the direction that Northern Ireland is going today. It reflects a strong desire for a just and fair society and for equality of opportunity but more than that it represents the effort and the energy that people are prepared to put in to make things work better. This place represents a taking of responsibility at local level for the kind of lives you want to live.
If the years since the Good Friday Agreement have made the political context considerably healthier they have also made the economic context a lot harder all over this island. The social context has changed too with greater ethnic diversity, higher unemployment and serious debates about changes in structure of education. The future always happens one way or another - but the Ashton Community Trust deliberately intervened to shape and control that future so that it would bring benefits, progress and hope.
Ahead of all of us is the coming decade of sensitive centenaries which raise particular concerns in areas that are still prone to outbursts of sectarian tension. It would be a source of great pride and a generator of huge international respect if those events could be conducted with the same mutually respectful generosity of spirit that characterised the recent State Visit to the Republic by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. That visit, the first ever such visit, in either direction and the first visit to Dublin by a reigning British monarch in a century, was a symbolic but very powerful acknowledgment that while we cannot change even the most regretted and regrettable past, we have deliberately chosen to change the future. That mentality, that thinking is exactly what led to the formation of the Ashton Centre and later the Trust.
You are no longer at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the long haul. We may not be looking down from the summit but we are looking at a transformed and transforming landscape in which there is today much more structured hope than there was twenty years ago. You did that. You climbed that hill, step by hard step. You did it – not for recognition or thanks because you care and it was great to see your success rewarded back in April of this year when you won the Best Social Enterprise Award at the Belfast Business Awards at City Hall. Congratulations to all of you on that achievement, congratulations on twenty years in this Centre and every success as you continue to be the flagship for the future of community development in North Belfast. You light the way and you lead the way. May your nerve, resources, courage and commitment be more than enough for the next twenty years and may you see the fruits of your work in good lives, in a prospering community and in peace.