REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INDEPENDENCE DAY LUNCH HOSTED BY THE US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INDEPENDENCE DAY LUNCH HOSTED BY THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FOUR SEASONS HOTEL
Dia dhíbh, a cháirde go léir. Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh inniu.
Good afternoon everyone, and a very happy Fourth of July to all our American friends. If you cannot be at home celebrating in the States, then Ireland, with its massive US links, has to be the next best thing! My thanks to Joanne [Richardson, Chief Executive], for inviting me to be part of this mix of celebration and business lunch.
It’s the 232nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and in a world where so many people are still tragically and cruelly unfree you cannot declare often enough those great inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It was often the absence of those very human rights that forced millions of Irish men, women and children to abandon their homeland and strike out for new lives in America. They are the source, the very bedrock of the great affinity between this island and that massive next parish to the west.
The historian David Fitzpatrick once observed that “growing up in Ireland meant preparing oneself to leave it”, but those who left brought with them the culture and story, the music and dance, the love of life and passion for justice of their native land. These things they planted in American soil along with their determination to make good and help their children to flourish. Through them we grew this remarkable, global Irish family with its links around the world and its reach back down through generations.
The story of today’s peaceful and prosperous Ireland is the vindication of their sacrifice and their faith. Today their descendants criss-cross the Atlantic on business or as students or tourists or as short-term and highly skilled migrants. Today we also acknowledge the role played by our friends in the United States in helping to change the story of modern Ireland. The peace process was painstakingly constructed with the considerable and invaluable help of successive US administrations. Irish-American politicians of all political persuasions spoke on Ireland with one voice. Irish America and its massive cohort of friends devised the American Ireland Fund which invested its generously given money in projects on this island that helped end sectarianism and build intercommunal trust. All of them knew they were in for the long haul and even when things were at their most depressing they were always at our shoulders, willing on the peacemakers. Our debt to them is enormous.
The United States has also played a prominent role in the economic transformation of Ireland. Some 470 US companies in Ireland employ almost 100,000 people in a range of high-end sectors and they have helped to seed-bed a successful, native, entrepreneurial culture which is today returning the compliment. Irish investment in the US has increased ten-fold in the last decade, so that we are now one of the ten largest investors in the US market, with Irish-owned companies employing more that 80,000 persons in over 200 companies across 1,300 locations in 50 states.
The media are awash with stories of economic gloom and certainly, as the old saying goes, misery loves company, but there is another kind of company - and that is the more than 66 Irish companies which have opened new offices in the US market in the last eighteen months. These, and many more like them, are working assiduously and courageously in this tough economic climate to keep the wheels of commerce moving, to keep people in jobs, to open up new markets, to invest in new products, to ensure that the march of egalitarian prosperity continues, for it is for so many the march to freedom and opportunity, the march to revealing the world’s truest and best potential.
So we look to our strengths: our membership of the EU and the Eurozone; our position as a key, strategic location for forward-thinking US companies seeking to service the EU market and beyond; our very young, confident, flexible and well-educated population; our business-friendly environment; our ease and fluency in the global marketplace.
We are reinforcing our strengths, increasing our spend on higher education at more than three times the rate of the rest of the EU and the OECD, to ensure we are well ahead in the knowledge economy. We are tenaciously protecting our corporate tax environment, investing heavily in our infrastructure and indeed the infrastructure of Northern Ireland because we believe in the many benefits to be derived from all-island economic cooperation and partnership. We are playing our full, global citizenship role in terms of stewardship of the environment, of world peace and of the world’s poor.
Along with the rest of the world, including our friends in the United States, we are facing into a period of economic uncertainty. Other generations faced periods of economic uncertainty too. None of them faced them with the remarkable set of resources we have available to us - the problem-solving skills, the widespread education, the networks, the achievements and the confidence that are the strength and hope of this generation.
But when all is said and done, among the most important things that make our individual lives worthwhile and fulfilled is to have good friends, and that is what Ireland and the United States are - the closest of friends - a friendship forged by millions of handshakes and sustained by people like you from one generation to another.
Thanks again, then, to Joanne and the Board for the invitation. I’m delighted to see my next door neighbour Ambassador Foley here too. He is generally the quietest of neighbours but I suppose we should expect and welcome fireworks tonight. Have a wonderful lunch, enjoy tonight’s festivities, and for those of you who will shortly be taking a break, have a wonderful summer.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.