REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE COUNCIL DINNER OF THE LAW SOCIETY OF NORTHERN IRELAND
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE COUNCIL DINNER OF THE LAW SOCIETY OF NORTHERN IRELAND FRIDAY, 8th OCTOBER, 1999
Some might wish to live in less interesting times, times when the demands on us, particularly the demands to change, to compromise, to review old certainties were less strident, of much less historic consequence. But like it or not these are our times and it does matter how we respond to this time of challenge.
Here, in this part of our island, the new-found peace, incomplete as it may be, is allowing many people to look forward in hope for the first time. John Hewitt, in his poem “Winter Day”, says of Ireland:
“the past persists in every knuckle and sinew….
the future can find no crevice to enter by….”
The persistence of the past, its capacity to poison the future with its old hurts and contempts, the drag of its millstone of fears, its morbid distrusts, has been and continues to be a cloud over the future, threatening to make every unscripted day, every unlived day, just another day when we go around in the same old circles.
Yet the future has found a crevice to enter by at last. Propelled by the determination of the majority of people to craft a new future, this phenomenon we call the peace process was born, and out of it the Good Friday Agreement, overwhelmingly endorsed by the people of this island eighteen months ago.
It is no easy thing to take a culture of conflict with long tangled roots which have shaped and ensnared every one of us to some degree or another and to consciously try to build out of its raw wounds, a culture of consensus. Yet people of courage are slowly, painfully doing just that. In spite of the pain and hurt endured by so many, a society rooted in peace, justice, respect and reconciliation sits just on the cusp of reach. We know, because we have been graphically told this week by George Mitchell, that it could all slip away into that grim freefall which none of us can fix the limits of. What an awesomely awful gift to the children of a new millennium, the dubious gift of failure, especially a failure out of such a spectacular, globally welcomed and hope-filled near, almost there, success. It is unthinkable, yet it is a choice. Ironically, it is a choice most people say they do not want - on all sides and from all perspectives and persuasions the deepest wish is for the construction of better days, better ways of relating to each other in spite of the past and because of the past.
My decision, nearly three decades ago, to study for a career in the law was - as it was for a great many of you - profoundly influenced by the experience of growing up in a divided society, a cantankerous and disputatious society where people had very different views on what should be changed and how it should be changed. For me, for many of us, the law represented an attractive and challenging way forward. True, as some pointed out, the law was not always blind - people did not always come before it as equals. It was often imperfect and it was frequently slow, its language, its rituals poorly understood, sometimes even by those of us on the inside. But it did offer a legitimate way to metamorphose society, to nudge it by instalments to a fresh new vision of itself. And there is no doubt that society has changed. Things, while not yet perfect, are not as they once were.
But pursuing change through the law did not, by any means, always represent the easy path to take. There were many for whom the prospect of change was, and continues to be, difficult and unsettling. They are fearful of change, uncertain of the new landscape it is shaping, of their place in it, unsure of their capacity to change, sceptical of the capacity of the other to change too. Some are more comfortable with stasis, even with paralysis.
And, of course, there are times when those who, however justifiably, seek change do not adequately acknowledge or build on what is good and positive about existing realities. The law and its practice have a particularly rich tradition which cannot be lightly ignored. And in a divided society, where perspectives and experiences can differ so radically, there is a need to be acutely sensitive to, and respectful of, the full range of views and expectations.
Throughout the dark years of our recent past, those who practised law often paid a very high price for their commitment. I am thinking here in particular of the judges, the magistrates, the officials and their families who were murdered or injured. I am thinking of solicitors like Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane. All paid the ultimate price for their belief in the capacity of the law to deliver justice.
They operated at the coalface in circumstances they knew were fraught with danger, offering an alternative to people who sometimes felt they had none. They showed many, who were understandably deeply sceptical of its merits, that the law could, and should, deliver real change in people’s lives. Demonstrating how the practice of law can be at its finest, they were leaders in their communities - advocates for, and agents of, change. Their deaths allow no-one to give up on law and legal systems. They are, if anything, a call to a profounder faith in, an even richer commitment to this social phenomenon we so simply describe as ‘the law’.
What of what the Good Friday Agreement promised to the people has been, or will be, underpinned by law - constitutional change in Britain and Ireland; provision for the new institutions it envisages; provision for the protection and promotion of the rights of all members of society and the establishment of new Human Rights Commissions, North and South, and an Equality Commission to ensure that those rights can be vindicated. A review of the Criminal Justice System is currently underway and we have recently seen the Report of the Patten Commission and its recommendations for change. Each will promote and provoke considerable debate. Views will oscillate where two or more are gathered, not least where two or more lawyers are gathered, but that is exactly as it should be in a society contemplating and committed to the awesome task of turning its back on a culture of conflict and building a culture of consensus.
Lawyers will bear a not inconsiderable burden in these rapidly changing times. There is in this professional Society a valuable legacy of leadership which is an important resource in these times when fear is more easily fuelled than trust.
Long before cross border co-operation was profitable or benignly viewed, both Law Societies on this island had developed close, friendly and co-operative relations. In fact long before east-west institutional models were devised, the fluent, collegial and sustained relationships between the Law Societies on these two neighbouring islands was already long established and paying dividends. This is, of course, now reflected in an ever-increasing amount of collaboration on a practice-to-practice level; it is reflected in the special practitioner transfer arrangements; it is reflected in the close cooperation on legal education; but it is also reflected in the extensive network of friendships which will be an important and rich resource as we go forward.
Friendships, respectful friendships between people who agree and disagree about many things, these are the places where trust grows almost imperceptibly.
Your invitation to me was an act of friendship, an act of trust to an old friend, now President of that neighbouring state. Like John Hewitt I too can say:
“Born in Belfast, which drew the landless in,
that river straddling, hill-rimmed town, I cling
to the inflexions of my origin.”
I cling to them proudly, proud of its people, protestant, catholic, agnostic, poet, labourer, politician, lawyer.
I trust these people who have broken each others hearts, who have had the courage to pick up the fragments and cement them into a rough-hewn peace process. I trust them, I trust you, despite the jeremiads and the omens, to make the crevice the future will enter by.
My renewed thanks for the invitation. I wish every success to the Law Society and its members as they go forward into the new Millennium.