REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE FINALS OF ST FINBARRE’S BEYOND 2000 INTER-SCHOOL DEBATES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE FINALS OF ST FINBARRE’S BEYOND 2000 INTER-SCHOOL DEBATES ST FIN BARRE’S CATHEDRAL
Is mór an chúis áthais dom bheith anseo libh ag an ócáid seo agus tá mé thar a bheith buíoch díbh as an bhfáilte chaoin.
It is a great pleasure to join you here this evening in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral for the final of the Beyond 2000 Inter-School Debates.
The St. Fin Barre’s Beyond 2000 Project has its origins in necessity: the requirement to raise a substantial amount of funds for the restoration of this magnificent Cathedral and the further development of an underground visitors centre. But these past 18 months have had a value beyond the purely practical. They have brought out a real sense of generosity and the inherent spirit of community in Cork people of all denominations and every walk of life. When we hear of Bishops scaling new heights, it is rarely meant in the literal sense – except in the case of Bishop John Buckley, who will surely go down in history for his mountaineering efforts last year up the Cathedral scaffolding to inspect the restoration of the Golden Angel. It is in such acts of friendship and solidarity, of shared pride in our common Christian heritage, that ecumenism is nourished and given life. And it is no coincidence that this Cathedral, the site of Christian worship for more than 1400 years and Cork’s most famous landmark, should have given rise to so many new friendships between people of different traditions in this city and county.
St Fin Barre’s rich history links our past to the present day. But it also provides a focus for looking to the future of this city and this country, a future whose script will be written by the young men and women who have taken part in this year’s inter-school debating competition. The motion for tonight’s final is both timely and relevant: ‘that the Ireland of today is opening up as a tolerant and progressive society for many’.
This very initiative, which has been so warmly and enthusiastically supported across the community, is proof of how radically relationships have changed between the Churches over the past couple of decades, mirroring changes within the wider society.
Membership of the European Union has played a significant part in that transformation, opening up our society to fresh influences and new thinking, freeing us from the old economic, social and cultural dependencies on our nearest neighbour, and generating a new sense of self-confidence and pride in being Irish. We owe much of our current prosperity to the export opportunities and financial assistance that membership of the EU brought with it. But we have also benefited in less tangible but equally important ways, not least from the ethos of equality and social justice which is at the heart of the European Union. We have learned that widening the embrace of opportunity, especially in relation to education, is not just a matter of human decency or egalitarianism: it is the bedrock on which today’s economic success has been built. Releasing new talents and capabilities that were once suppressed by poverty, discrimination or lack of opportunity has fuelled a remarkable economic and cultural renaissance. And nowhere is that more evident than in relation to women, whose genius and creativity has now been given full reign and has flooded and enriched every sphere of life in Ireland.
Our experience should teach us that the wider we extend the embrace of opportunity, the greater the benefits not just to the individual, but to society as a whole. Yet there are still many of our people who have not been included in that embrace, who remain trapped in poverty, watching helplessly and empty-handed from the sidelines. The extent to which we can judge ourselves to be an inclusive, progressive and tolerant society will depend on whether this generation can eliminate those barriers of inequality once and for all, creating an Ireland that is all centre and no margins, a land of opportunity for all its people.
Our prosperity has brought new responsibilities as well as benefits. In recent times we have become a country of immigration, but our imagination, our own perception of who we are as a people, is only slowly catching up with that reality. We have celebrated, and rightly so, the extraordinary achievements of the global Irish family around the world. We have taken pride in how much they have contributed to their new countries, just as in the past, we keenly felt the wounds of hurt and rejection when they met with prejudice, labelling or abuse. Now that we are the ones to whom others turn in search of a new life, it would be sadly ironic if we were to forget the lessons that we once learned so painfully ourselves: that a society which is selective in its tolerance will never achieve its full potential.
I hope that I have not anticipated too many of the thoughts of our debating teams and I congratulate all of the participants on doing their schools so proud by reaching these finals.
It only remains for me to thank Dr Michael Jackson for his invitation to join you here this evening, and to wish him, and all of the people of Cork, every success in this wonderful project of restoration and development.
Go gcúití Dia bhur saothar daoibh.