REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CLOSING CEREMONY OF THE EUROPEAN YEAR OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE FORMAL CLOSING CEREMONY OF THE EUROPEAN YEAR OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL IN IRELAND
Good morning, and thank you for your very warm welcome. I am delighted to join you for this closing ceremony, as we reflect upon a year spent highlighting and publicising the righteous and insistent demands of equality under the auspices of the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All.
Very succinctly, that expression “Equal opportunities for all” states our ambition as a nation, our shared ambition as members of the European Union and our ambition for all the peoples of this complex and unequal world. Quite clearly on all fronts it is a journey we are on and not a destination we have reached though some of us are closer than we have ever been before and for many of us the European Union has helped to propel us rapidly through the equality agenda.
This special year of focus on Equal Opportunities for All has generated a widespread process of reflection, analysis and debate. It has drawn many people into that process, sharpening their awareness, expanding their knowledge and re-energising their commitment to doing all the work that needs to be done to make the ambition for equality a lived reality and not simply a noble but distant aspiration.
I would like to say a special thank you to all who have been involved in the projects associated with the Year here in Ireland. In particular, I would like to thank the Equality Authority, which has served as the National Implementation Body for the Year in Ireland for its ongoing work in this area, and its CEO, Niall Crowley, for his leadership, and, of course, for the invitation to join you this morning.
The equality agenda in Ireland is a dynamic one as you would expect in a society that has changed so rapidly and dramatically. It is an agenda which today covers age, race, nationality, sexuality, religion, gender and disability. These are frontline issues for Ireland for wherever there are obstacles to equality, wherever there is bias or bigotry ignorance, insensitivity or bullying ideologies that skew any of these issues, there are lives lived in pain, frustration and underachievement, and there is such tragic waste of talent and time. Historically neither Ireland nor Europe generally has much left to learn about such waste and its predictably grim outcomes both for individuals and societies. We are all, rightly in a hurry to put those times behind us, to get to the place and circumstances where we know humankind will flourish as never before and equality of opportunity is a basic building block of that place.
With the remarkable confluence of peace and prosperity, the reversing of the tide of emigration and the massive reduction in unemployment, Ireland can face these issues with a new level of confidence in our own ability to change things for the better, to solve problems, to get happier outcomes. Ours is a society where many more voices are now listened to than ever before and where the variety of voices and diversity of needs being articulated has broadened considerably. We have a lot to look forward to from creating a society where individuals do not have their lives circumscribed by false barriers and unjust impediments that prevent the realisation of their full potential.
Under the slogan, “Play Your Part”, the Equality Agency has engaged the Irish public in open debate over the past year on the benefits and meaning of diversity and on ways of valuing the differences found in contemporary Irish society. We are not a society of clones. We are a society that functions as well as it does precisely because of the massive range of random skills, talents, perspectives and passions that over four million individuals pour into our civic society every day. We are a society that believes in the equal dignity of each of those individuals. We are a people with a written constitution that says we are about the business of establishing on our doorsteps a true social order and there can be no such order without full equality in our country. Many people prefer the language of the Proclamation which puts it more poetically when it calls for a republic which cherishes all the children of the nation equally.
At last we have a generation which has problem-solving skills and success in abundance. So many of the old intractable problems have been reduced in scale or overcome precisely because so many more people have benefited from the equality agenda which opened up our minds, our hearts and our spirit. There is today a real and visible traction in our society, a momentum which simply demands to be used for the good of all, to create a culture of opportunity for all. That has to be the primary destination of our Republic and our Union. It was that impulse that brought us into the Union and convinced the peoples of our 26 partner states to pool our efforts and share our future. For all of them the past was a place of petty vanities and ridiculous divisions that corralled talent and often killed hope. The women who were told, you can’t because you are a woman; the men and women whose ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation placed them, at the whim of others, out in the cold; the disabled left to cope not just with disability but with attitudinal ice-bergs that condemned them ever to be spectators as others enjoyed the mainstream. That was the past. It is still for some the present, but it simply cannot be the future. This closing of the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All is where we reaffirm our commitment to opening up a future that all can look forward to, believe in and be a full part of. A big thank you to all those gathered here and elsewhere who have made the early delivery of that future their vocation.