REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CONFERRAL OF AN HONORARY DOCTORATE DCU SATURDAY 29 MARCH, 2008
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CONFERRAL OF AN HONORARY DOCTORATE DCU SATURDAY 29 MARCH, 2008
Chancellor,
President,
Fellow graduands,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am grateful to the University for this day when Martin and I have the honour of being admitted together to honorary degrees.
Today we join a gathering of graduating students and their families, each one filled with pride at the individual efforts, sacrifices and achievements which have led to this day of celebration. The graduands are entitled to feel pride in their accomplishments, to have confidence in their abilities but the context in which those things will be showcased over a lifetime will of course be in relationships, in families, workplaces, communities, organisations and societies, all of which will be enriched, deepened and strengthened by that mix of intensely differentiated talents and personalities that we celebrate today. They will also be showcased in the social and historical context that accident of birth has placed you in.
For so many past generations that context was homogeneity, poverty, underachievement, mass emigration and the menace north of the border of political and sectarian conflict. For this generation the context is growing prosperity, inward migration and developing heterogeneity, multiculturalism and a new political dispensation which has already substantially recalibrated relationships between Great Britain and Ireland and between North and South. There is much to be grateful for when we look at that changed context. The peace we mark in this anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement did not happen by coincidence. Its cost in human terms was outrageous and it took the combined efforts of people at every level of society as well as considerable help from abroad to effect the changes of head and heart that led eventually to the Good Friday Agreement and beyond it to a sustained peace building process.
The prosperity which Ireland enjoys today also did not happen by coincidence but is rooted in the widening of access to education which began in earnest with the provision of free second-level education at the end of the 1960s. Not until then did we start to harvest our best natural resource, the brain power of our people. It is still our biggest and best asset and, here in this University, you have always believed passionately in education as the surest pathway to revealing and releasing the potential of both the individual and the nation. We know that every extra year spent in education galvanises that potential and that third-level education, in particular, gives to graduates a unique traction in their adult and working life. Your innovative outreach and access programmes have opened up the realm of opportunity offered by third-level education to many people who thought it beyond their reach, beyond their hopes. You became their champion and friend while they were in school, encouraged and supported their often complex pathways to and through university, listened to and responded to their needs and enjoyed with them days of triumph and transcendence like this.
Education altered our country’s destiny, slowly at first, but now at a pace which is simply astounding, making this once-poor country the economic success story par excellence of the European Union and a cultural powerhouse. This experience, if it has taught us anything, must surely have made us deeply curious and hopeful about what we could accomplish if we harvested and harnessed effectively for the individual and the common good, the talents of all our people and put them at the service of the individual and the common good. We are a people with a vision for our future. It is set out both in the Proclamation and in the Constitution. It speaks of a nation of equals, a place where the children of the nation are cherished equally, a place where there is a true social order where the dignity of each human being is honoured and vindicated. It calls us to build our prosperity and share it wisely. Our common vision is set out too in the Good Friday Agreement where we work as John Hewitt would say “to fill the centuries’ arrears”, building up good, neighbourly partnerships in place of wasteful enmity. It is set out in our membership of the European Union where our futures are twinned with those of the citizens of twenty-six nations whom we are now befriending in ways that were impossible only a short few years ago. It is set out in our global outreach to the world’s poor, our membership of the United Nations, our ratification of the Charters and Treaties that champion human rights, our determined policy of military neutrality and our equally determined civic, global leadership in peace-building and elimination of poverty and disease.
That is your context and mine. This is the teamwork that needs your skills, talents, hearts and hands to make things better, to heal what history wounded, to consolidate the peace, renew and refresh the prosperity, to make Ireland the best it can be and to generate in our ill-divided and sometimes savage world a relentless momentum for the full social, political and economic inclusion of each human being.
Here in DCU you have been well prepared by your own efforts and those of the staff, for the journeys and challenges ahead. Tus maith is leath na hoibre. The good start has given you both a great degree and a strong value system. The other half of the work is now up to you and how you use them both to bring fulfilment to your own life and the fulfilment of our shared ideals to the world around you. We are very proud of you this day. Enjoy the day and the promise it holds out for you and through you for all of us.
I renew my thanks to the Governing Authority, through you, Chancellor, for this great honour, and of course your President, my former student, Professor von Prondzynski, who is such a dynamic force in the world of Irish education.
Thank you all very much, and enjoy your day.