REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE CONFERRAL OF THE DISTINGUISHED FELLOWSHIP AWARD
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE CONFERRAL OF THE DISTINGUISHED FELLOWSHIP AWARD GRIFFITH COLLEGE, DUBLIN 13 NOVEMBER 2007
Is cúis rí-áthais dom bheith anseo libh i gColaiste Ui Griofa ar son an ocáid speisialta seo. Is mór liom an Comhaltachta Oirirce atá sibh i ndiaidh a bhronnadh orm.
President Hegarty, may I first thank you and the Board of the College for honouring me with this Distinguished Fellowship Award. My old friend, Professor Wally Ewart’s words were very generous and much appreciated but the very best part of this day is the chance to join this year’s graduating class on a day they will remember throughout their lives and a day that marks one of the biggest watersheds in their lives.
I have attended a graduation ceremony or three - first as a student, later as a university lecturer and more recently as a parent. The personal sense of relief was probably most palpable on the last of those occasions when as a parent I could see the promised land of a child with a first paycheque looming on the distant horizon.
But the overwhelming feeling on graduation day is pride, pride shared by graduands, family, friends and faculty as the piece of paper you will take home with you tells, in the terse language of the academic certificate, that you have been rigorously taught, tried and tested in your subject area and you have come through successfully.
There is too a mood of nervous excitement about what the future holds now. There is the sadness of realising that friends with whom you have shared these months and years of study will be heading off in different directions and the cosy camaraderie of student days is coming to an end. But what is now beginning for the graduating class of 2007 is a remarkable journey into your own lives and the life of your homeland wherever that may be, for I know that Griffith College is the alma mater of students from all over the world with an international student body of 1,200 students from 62 countries.
For Irish graduands, there has never been a better Ireland than this, though the expectation is that your generation will make it better still. Not that long ago your feet might barely have touched the ground between graduation ceremony and port as you followed countless generations into reluctant exile. Today you enter a thriving Irish economy. Twelve per cent of your future colleagues will have been born abroad. There will very likely be a healthy mix of genders as well as races in your workplaces. The people around you will be, like you, highly educated, confident, ambitious for themselves, their families, their communities and our country. You are part of the most successful, problem-solving generation this country has ever produced. You are inheriting this magical confluence of peace and prosperity and while new problems grow up in place of old ones, there is real traction in our successful transcendence of old deep-rooted problems - enough to give us faith in our capacity to deal effectively with the new.
Here in Ireland we are not simply focussed on our own country. We have a strong international perspective and reach forged by the millions of our own who emigrated around the world, underpinned by the investment in education and health care of the poorest of the poor made by our missionaries. Today, as one of the great success stories of the European Union, with a globalised economy that trades the length and breadth of this earth, our need is for graduates who cherish lifelong learning, who are committed to improving their own lives and the lives of those around them, who are civically responsible, who are internationalists with a deep curiosity about what we can learn from the rest of the world and what we can share.
Here in this College with its cosmopolitan student mix, its broad educational outreach to other countries, its many scholarly international links and opportunities, you have been prepared well for the journey ahead. For many of Griffith students, being here represents a return whether to second-chance education or to a more flexible educational option and so this day is the culmination of courage and commitment of endurance and serious time management by both student and family. On all the days when you were overwhelmed with work and worry and came close to giving up, you didn’t and the reward is this day and the doors it now opens.
To be part of Griffith’s graduation day you had to be good students and the teachers had to be good teachers and each of you had to be well supported administratively and practically, from the Board room, to the library to the cafeteria. It’s pretty clear that a lot of people’s hearts and hands went into this wonderful day. As a new alumnus of the College I thank them all for this powerful investment in the individual. From here comes a liberation of talent and skill. Each graduate adds to the intellectual, social and civic strength of our country and tomorrow’s homes and marketplaces will be shaped by your genius, marked with your unique imprint.
It is a privilege to be part of your special day when you become the best adverts Griffith College could ever have. Every success to each of you and to the College.
Mo bhuíochas libh uilig arís as ucht an onóir seo. Tá súil agam go n-éireoidh go geal libh i ngach atá romhaibh mar dhaoine agus mar céimithe.