REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS 90TH ANNIVERSARY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LUNCH TO MARK THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS 90TH ANNIVERSARY
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith i bhur measc inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo. My thanks to you all for your welcome and Denis McCarthy for the invitation to this lunch which marks the 90th anniversary of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.
The words Chartered and Institute conjure up as they are intended to do images of professionalism, high standards, timeless values. In your case these things have been distilled over these ninety years into the professional formation of many tens of thousands of members world wide so that today you represent over 172,000 members and students, in 165 countries right across the world. Importantly for a divided island which has suffered deeply from the fault lines which underpin its division your Institute operates both North and South and with a membership of almost 8000, constitutes a business and professional network which quietly but effectively contributes to stable and healthy civic relationships across that once-vexed North South axis.
Over these past ninety years this Institute has by dint of its own efforts put itself on the map as a leading global professional body for Management Accountants. It now has a reach and an influence commensurate with the huge investment it has made in a personal professional development which is rooted in scholarship, skill and integrity. Your qualifications whether they are used in the public or private sector carry an ambassadorship for the Institute which is tested rigorously in a wide variety of workplaces every single day. So it has to be relevant and up to date and I know you invest heavily in life-long professional learning to ensure that those who are the Institutes ambassadors, those through whom it is judged by the public, are people who showcase management accountancy at its best. The advice, insight and wisdom of your members is an essential tool in the complex world of business for it is fundamental to making informed choices and sensible planning. At a time when economic difficulties are forcing so many organisations to review their structures, their costs and their future plans, when many feel the marketplace has become capricious, cruel and unpredictable, the steadiness and surefootedness of your advice and guidance, based on well analysed objective data, helps muster the confidence to find ways through these very testing times. So your work matters not simply to your individual clients or workplaces but to the proper, balanced and sustainable economic development of the island of Ireland. You have seen the market swing from virtually full employment, high borrowings and high growth to downsizing, redundancies and high debt. And you know that in your business there is little apart from chastened wisdom to be gained from ruefully surveying the doors that have closed behind you.
Your vocation brings with it considerable responsibilities to both the present and the future, as well as the continued management of those past problems which cast shadows over both. The stakes are about as high as they can be and I know you do not take those responsibilities lightly.
The global financial crisis and indeed our own local, hopefully temporary, fall from economic grace, shoved corporate governance into a very searching and unflattering spotlight. Trusted institutions whose names were thought to be commensurate with probity and rectitude were found to have behaved at the very best foolishly and there is now an understandable dilution of public trust and confidence. The statistics can show us the damage in terms of trade lost, income lost, jobs lost, the media can interrogate the impact on individual lives scarred by redundancy or negative equity but there is another very insidious realm of damage and that is in the cynicism, gloom and defeatism these events have engendered so widely within civic society. That mood while understandable is not one which galvanises the momentum we need to reconstruct our economy on firmer foundations. You have a key role to play in countering that mood by ensuring that sound, sensible, corporate governance is at the heart of new and re-constructed enterprises, at the heart of the training and discipline of all those who work in the sphere of management accountancy and that there is both a consciousness of and a conscientiousness about practices which conduce to our collective well-being and practices which conduce to dangerously insidious sectoral self-interest. One thing we must surely learn from recent past mistakes is that ‘Ar scath a cheile a mhaireann na daoine’ - we live in each others shadow. Pull one part of the web and the whole web moves. We can affect and infect one another’s lives with an ease that is healing and wholesome when used well but appalling when abused. So revised structures and strategies designed to deliver good governance are one thing and important but they only have life beyond well-meaning words when they are deeply internalised and lived out in the push-me-pull-you of everyday life. Ethical standards expressed in the work of men and women in their workplaces have to be capable of transcending institutional biases or embedded cultures which once rewarded behaviour now regarded as perilous and unacceptable. The tectonic plates have shifted. The virtual economic earthquake has changed the landscape forever. There are casualties who may never recover. There are tomorrows now to be planned for the survivors by the survivors. They have already taken considerable pain and made a lot of sacrifices to steady the ground and to fill in the gaping holes. There is a lot of work in front of us before we can say we have put this mess behind us.
There have been many messes to be cleared up in the history of this Institute for it is a living organism directly plugged in to and affected by the world around it. Over this past ninety years the world, especially our own continent has packed in a scary litany of wars, recessions, depressions, natural disasters and man made disasters. Yet for all that our own country at the end of the ninety years is despite the finances of the moment, much more advanced, educated, liberated, sophisticated, globalised, industrialised and resourceful than ever in its history. It ranks among the world’s wealthiest and highest achieving nations. We enjoy a standard of living and a quality of life that the vast majority of the world’s citizens will not see in their lifetime or their children’s lifetime. We have a peace that eluded every past generation and that is still in its infancy - its full potential yet to be revealed.
We have phenomenal friends and partners in the world through our membership of the European Union, the United Nations and through our global Irish family who hold so many friendly doors open for us around the world. We face our testing time with a panoply of resources to call in aid, including the spirit of the meitheal which introduces us anew to our interconnectedness and to the strength that we can muster when we work together.
Your Institute is itself such a meitheal. It has reached a venerable age but is through its membership destined to be ever young, ever growing, ever adapting to a capricious world but never adopting or teaching or promoting anything less than the best human values. So enjoy this birthday and look forward to the 100th when with your help between now and then a remarkable new chapter of success and transcendence of adversity will have been written in Ireland’s book with the help of your members. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.