REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE IRISH PEACE INSTITUTE 25TH ANNIVERSARY GALA DINNER
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE IRISH PEACE INSTITUTE 25TH ANNIVERSARY GALA DINNER CASTLETROY HOTEL, LIMERICK
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a pleasure to be here this evening to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Irish Peace Institute and to remember your inspirational founder, Dr. Brendan O’Regan. I would like to thank the Chair, Pat O’Sullivan, the Vice-Chair, Hugh Logue and the CEO, Dr Matt Cannon for the kind invitation to join you here.
In 1984, the year the Institute was founded, 72 people were killed as a result of the political and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. The most recent chapter of an embedded generations-old conflict, a chapter which came to be known as the Troubles, was showing no sign of ending. There was little cause for optimism and a wide chasm to be bridged before any prospect of reconciliation could be realistically constructed. With a deeply divided population immersed in estrangement and mutual incomprehension, the scene seemed set for the jeremiads to claim that ours was an intractable, an unending conflict destined to bedevil one generation after the next.
Yet, away from the cynical front pages and the angry politics of the last atrocity, deep inside the world of the everyday life of civic society, there were men and women of unconditional goodwill who knew that there was only one way to fill in what John Hewitt had memorably described as “the centuries’ arrears”. Quietly and relentlessly they had been doing the work of bridge-building, person to estranged person, community to estranged community that would in time lay the foundation for a mass movement which we today call the Peace Process.
Dr. Brendan O’Regan was an early champion of reconciliation and peace-building. He had been involved in the creation of Co-operation North in 1979, an organisation which just recently celebrated its thirtieth birthday in much more optimistic times for peace than any previous birthday. Five years later there followed the establishment of the Irish Peace Institute, a space specifically dedicated to the promotion of reconciliation through the study of conflicts and their resolution.
In his last address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1963, President John F Kennedy said that “peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And, however undramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on.” It is a telling and accurate description of the journey to peace on this island. There have been iconic moments and photos, days when the public expressed their growing solidarity through referenda or shared sorrow but in behind each of those revealing and reassuring moments there has been a mountain of insistent, almost unnoticed facilitation of serious and sensible dialogue between those who lived determinedly at arm’s length from one another and who had little or no scope for meaningful, mutual engagement.
Brendan’s ambition was to bring those who were unreachable into each other’s orbit, not for fleeting photo opportunities but for a sustained culture change which he firmly believed would gradually evolve from a process of respectful and indeed pioneering ‘managed cooperation.’ Through projects such as Arts Focus, the North South Concert Series and the Horizon Schools Programme, the joint concert of the bands of the Garda Síochana and the RUC, the visit of the Ulster-Scots Fowk Orchestra to Limerick, landmark opportunities were created for people from divided communities to enjoy each other’s company and learn about each other in a safe, entertaining environment. More and more people whose profound differences of politics and identity had led them to believe that such encounters would happen over their dead bodies, discovered that they grew personally and holistically through such encounters without sacrificing their beliefs and importantly they began to see how much a peaceful and prosperous future depended on learning to live humanly and decently with difference. Such men and women painstakingly built the peace one person at a time.
Brendan brought to the work of peace his vast experience as a highly successful and innovative businessman. His work with the Shannon Duty Free Zone, Shannon Development and Bord Fáilte had long convinced him of the huge economic benefits that would follow from a new culture of all-island cooperation and good neighbourliness. Today the phrase “all-island economy” is well known and North South cooperation is growing apace, thanks, in part, to the cherished seeds planted and nurtured here in Limerick over the last 25 years. In this anniversary year the Institute has much to be proud of and hopeful about. But that hope needs hands and hearts to bring it to life. The solid achievements of the last fifteen years or so are exemplified by the Good Friday Agreement, consolidated in the St Andrew’s Agreement and lived out in the new institutions and relationships that are defying the once inevitable stranglehold of history. Make no mistake about it, long after the vale of current economic woes has passed into history, the dominant headline and most valued legacy of this generation will be seen to be its resolute, generous and imaginative initiation of a culture of cooperation in place of a centuries-old culture of conflict. It has taken brain-power and heart-power and, though it is still only in the early opening chapters, the potential it is gradually harnessing will one day reveal this island at its consummate best.
Meanwhile the remaining sectarian and political fault lines still demand our attention and our commitment if we are to maintain the hard-earned momentum which has brought us to these times of hope. The tired culture of paramilitarism is fading but has not yet gone and even in recent months has claimed new victims. There are some knots that are so tight that we ignore them at our peril. There are still communities which are hard to reach and which remain seriously disaffected from the positivity which now energises the peace process. The dividend that comes from having education, jobs and hope is still precarious in their areas where a mood of drudgery still prevails and where drug and alcohol abuse allied to anti-social behaviour make life unnecessarily tough. Within those communities, there are community activists, men and women of huge courage, often with backgrounds in paramilitarism who have embraced peaceful and democratic values and are now trying their best to bring their communities into the mainstream. They know at first hand the wisdom of George Bernard Shaw’s remark that “peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous”. The changes of attitudes and behaviour, of structures and practices which an enduring peace demands need champions like the Peace Institute has been these past twenty-five years. Brendan had a goal which is very simply stated to “abolish violence and the fear and hatred on which it feeds”. It is not so easily accomplished and that we are on the road to its accomplishment, that we are the first generation to realistically see reconciliation as achievable and to put violence behind us, is in large measure thanks to such champions. The mark of peace is the indelible mark of this generation and of the twenty-five years invested by the Irish Peace Institute in making the estranged who share this island into good neighbours, partners and friends.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh. Gurb fada buan sibh ‘s go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.