Remarks by President McAleese at the Institute of Professional Legal Studies Presentation Ceremony
Queens University Belfast, Tuesday, 28th June, 2011
Director, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
It is almost twenty-four years since I first crossed the door of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies to take up the post of Director. Some of you were probably not then born, most of you were youngsters and a long way from forming the ambition to become solicitors or barristers. You were probably in playpens or buggies so you were at least learning that there are boundaries, constraints, things you are allowed to do, things you aren’t so maybe the first stirrings of the law were not that far away after all.
I have been back a few times since leaving fourteen years ago to take up a post I definitely had no notion I would end up in the day in 1974 that I, like you, finished my professional law studies at Queens. I am glad to be back among old friends and in this familiar place, in the closing months of my Presidency, and the good news is, Anne, that I am not looking for my old job back. I am at the end of my professional career, you are at the beginning of yours. It was Tennessee Williams who said “There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”
This is your time for departure and though hopefully you have already got jobs and Masters there is still no certain place to go, for we inhabit a universe that constantly surprises us individually and collectively with its capacity for instability and for changes we did not anticipate. Economic circumstances have already changed considerably and for the worse since you began your undergraduate legal studies. They will change again for the better but in a time-frame that no-one can guarantee. So what you depart with here today is not certainty but with the skills to cope with uncertainty, the qualifications that point you out as a leader, as a centre of gravity and wise counsel. You depart equipped not with a complete road map for life’s journey but with the confidence and the respect that comes from having been successfully and credibly tried and tested, having undergone intensive professional formation as a trainee lawyer.
Just getting to this day has been your focus for a very long time. As the proverb says “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday” but now, although you will have exactly the same number of hours in every day that you had last week and last year, the shape of your days and weeks will be different. They may not any longer be marked by major events like A Level results, starting University, finishing university, suffering the Institute Admission Test, getting to the finish line ……. All those big events are squeezed into the last five years and down the road there is no equivalent set sequence of landmark events. Time will start to behave strangely from here on in. Clients will want to talk all day to you. Judges will want you to keep it brief and to the point. You will soon know from first principles the truth of the observation that “time is an illusion and lunchtime doubly so.”
So what will you bring to this thing called time? We already know from the fact that you are here that you can use time well to set tough goals and achieve them. Now, your time will be primarily focussed not on yourself, your timetables and your exams but on other people and their problems. It’s a major shift of kilter, one that you have been preparing for, one that your clients, your employers and your profession, are depending on. They will all rightly expect you to keep up to date, to behave ethically, to seek to be the best lawyer you can be, the best active citizen you can be, and to be a credit to yourself and to the Institute.
Most of you will live and practice here in Northern Ireland where the new political and legal dispensation set out in the Good Friday Agreement has already radically altered the laws and systems which you will operate in - making for a very different intergenerational experiential context among citizens and especially among lawyers. For your generation, peace is a growing phenomenon. The tired but longstanding culture of conflict and paramilitarism is ebbing now, no longer able to withstand the tidal wave of cross-community solidarity around a shared future based on parity of esteem, equality and justice. There are occasional frustrating manifestations of the fact that the old culture still has a grip on some hardened hearts. In a world so full of wonder, at a time so full of the optimism that comes from this hard earned peace it is tragic to see the sheer ugliness that these diehards bring to the lives of others and to their own lives.
The toxin of sectarianism is still potent. There is an awful familiarity about the ease with which some marginalised groups reach for hatred of people who are near neighbours and ever likely to remain near neighbours in an utterly useless and unfocussed attempt to solve their problems. Yet in truth many people who once did exactly the same thing have moved from conflict to consensus and it is their momentum, the momentum of the peace-makers that is making Northern Ireland one of the most exciting, promising places to live and work within the European Union. You are the first generation to have the gift of a solidifying and robust peace. Use it conscientiously and guard it well as citizens and as lawyers.
You have done your best at the Institute and the Institute has done its best for you. I know how conscientiously and energetically the Institute staff, both past and present, has worked to ensure it is at the very forefront of professional legal formation worldwide and it is. In international competition after international competition, this tiny jurisdiction outshines all or most of the competition and not by any accident or coincidence but thanks to the pride and passion of both students and staff. You carry its imprint from this departure point into careers that I hope will be all that you dream they will be and more. It was Yeats who said “in dreams begins responsibility.” In an uncertain world there are a couple of certainties - today’s ceremony marks you out as responsible, professional lawyers. Tomorrow you take responsibility for yourself and for this great profession. Guard it as you guard this miraculous peace and all manner of things will be well.
My warmest congratulations to each one of you. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.