REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CIVIC RECEPTION HOSTED BY CAVAN COUNTY COUNCIL CAVAN TOWN
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CIVIC RECEPTION HOSTED BY CAVAN COUNTY COUNCIL CAVAN TOWN, 22 MARCH 1999
Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Many thanks for your very warm welcome. Last October, as many of you will be aware, I had the pleasure of coming to Cavan to officially open the new offices of the Cavan Partnership. I am delighted to have this opportunity to pay a return visit.
For so many years Cavan, as a border town, faced the same catalogue of exceptional difficulties which faced many of its neighbouring counties. With civil conflict on your doorstep and the drain away from the land, you had a hard struggle in attracting investment, employment and prosperity to the border region. Yet you kept hope and effort alive so that today we now face an era in which those past difficulties can be transcended. There is a tangible air of optimism as an era of real opportunity opens up for this region and for those willing to take that opportunity.
A fundamental building block on which this period of opportunity sits, is the radical new era of cross-border partnership offered by the Good Friday Agreement. Clearly there is still a long road to travel, a road filled with difficulties, setbacks and lamentable vacuums before peace - real and irreversible peace - can be achieved. We know it will require patience and determination. It needs the oxygen of trust and the dynamic of generosity if it is not to be subverted by men of violence and hatred, voices from the past still wedded to the culture of conflict. We are committed now to cutting the ties to that tired, corrupt culture where respect for the sacredness of human life was so cruelly absent.
This generation pledged itself in a powerful acceptance of the invitation offered by the Good Friday Agreement, to build a new, fresh culture of consensus. Today, I ask the politicians to whom we entrust the profound task of honouring the Good Friday Agreement, to begin to look at each other with eyes of trust, to listen to each other with ears of respect, to remember the children whose unlived lives they carry in their hands and hearts and to find a consensus based way forward.
The Good Friday Agreement was only achievable because people compromised. No losers, no outright winners. That same spirit is needed again. We don’t have to like it. We just have to do it because the options are grim and inhuman.
We hope and pray that in these crucial days the empowerment of the people, their will for peace, will give the politicians a clear message that we expect leadership, we need progress.
Nowhere are the potential benefits of peace more important than here in Cavan. Earlier today, I had the opportunity of visiting two community resource centres in Bailieborough and Tullacmongan. I was hugely impressed with what I saw in those communities. There is an extraordinary well of energy and enthusiasm among local people, a well of talent and creativity, that is invigorating the life of this county.
With your support, and the help of organisations like the Cavan Partnership, people are finding within themselves the capacity to change their own lives and the lives of people around them. People who in the past had dreams but little hope of fulfilling them, are now starting to find that a whole exiting range of new possibilities are within their reach.
That ethos, that vision, that energy and enthusiasm, is an enormous resource for the county. I warmly commend all of you who have worked so hard at local level within Cavan County Council, Urban District Council, the Town Commissioners and local development and community structures, to support and encourage this work. You are proving the truth of the old saying “Ní neart go cur le chéile”.
As we look forward with hope and conviction to a more peaceful, prosperous future, I wish you every success in your future endeavours on behalf of the people of Cavan.