REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE JOINT NORTH/SOUTH DINNER OF THE INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS OF IRL
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE JOINT NORTH/SOUTH DINNER OF THE INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS OF IRELAND, DUBLIN CASTLE
Thank you very much for your warm welcome and to Maura Quinn’s invitation to join this annual event which, for a long time now, has been nudging towards the emerging new culture of cross-border good neighbourliness and cooperation, and the new future it promises.
Long before the new cross-community political institutions in the North, long before the cross-border bodies initiated by the Good Friday Agreement, long before formal frameworks were set up to foster cross-border relations these two Institutes were quietly showcasing the benefits of bringing common sense to common problems. You invested in relationship-building when it was a rare and even dangerous innovation. But you knew that it would pay rich dividends in terms of building trust and creating economic opportunities which everyone would benefit from.
So now we have the miracle of peace underpinned by political partnerships that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. The old, skewed relationships that frustrated and wasted so many lives and chances have been realigned and are now set to harvest the positive energies this new dispensation has released. Within Northern Ireland, relationships between the once divided communities are healing. Between North and South, a discernible new mood of friendship is growing. Between the British and Irish governments there have now been several decades of mutually respectful and very successful collegiality. We can now say with real pride in the words of John Hewitt “that we build to fill the centuries arrears” and we can see the cruel gaps caused by those arrears filling in before our eyes.
Yet we still do not have the comfort of peace of heart and mind. Not everyone wishes the Peace Process well or believes in its potential. Some still believe that robbing soldiers and police officers of their lives can drive us back into the bunkers of sectarian fear and mutual loathing. They are wrong. In the wake of those vicious, pointless murders at Massereene and Craigavon, every voice that spoke, regardless of the section of the community it represented, said the same thing, that peace is owned by all the people and it is here to stay. That communal solidarity is a precious and hard-earned gift that we have to nurture and protect against those who would destroy it if they could.
Also coming between us and our night’s sleep is the sudden change in the economic climate. As business people you are right at the front where it is coldest and hardest. Each day brings a catalogue of more bad news and we need people of courage who are ready to take on the slow and humbling journey to recovery. The story of how and why things went wrong on the global and national economic fronts is chastening. The story of how we transcended the mess has not yet been written. That is the story we will tell our grandchildren and I hope it will be a story that despite the pain being inflicted day and daily, will in the end bring us pride in our capacity to adapt, learn, pick ourselves up and start again.
Many commentators compare this recession unfavourably with other times of hardship but we have strengths which were not to be found here until this generation. Peace on this island eluded us for centuries. Co-operation between North and South and between East and West is only beginning to get real traction and momentum. It is set to come into its own, to reveal its power in the years ahead. We achieved a level of economic development we didn’t even dare to hope for in previous decades so that Ireland is today the tenth largest investor in the United States and start-up business activity is one of the strongest in Europe. We have a fine, modern, physical infrastructure and an intellectual infrastructure like no other generation has known. New energies are being released by education, partnership and peace allied to research, development, cooperation and determination.
Now we need to speed up and step up the things which can bring tangible results. There are already many good examples to point to: the Single Electricity Market, pooling our brainpower to effectively build skills capacity North and South; collaborating on trade missions abroad; Enterprise Ireland and the IDA are collaborating with Invest NI, working together to create a business eco-system on the island which will help attract inward investment and assist companies in both jurisdictions to develop their capacity to trade and expand abroad.
The North/South Bodies are actively working in both jurisdictions in key areas such as tourism, food safety, waterways and in trade and business development and making a very positive contribution. As you all know, InterTrade Ireland has developed innovative new programmes which have brought tangible benefits to companies North and South – the total added business value from these programmes amounting to date to more than €200 million, with an estimated €300 million to come from ongoing programmes. There is also excellent cross-border co-operation on a wide range of issues such as spatial planning, labour mobility, health, education and transport, to name but a few. The opportunities for mutual benefits to flow from such collaborations are abundant.
There is an old Irish saying which roughly goes “if you are going to be small, you better be clever”. We are, in the global scale of things, small and yet as Professor Michael Porter has said “enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things - knowledge, relationships and motivation - that distant rivals cannot match”. Our strengths on this island are precisely in that space – knowledge, technology, innovation, new ideas, highly educated people, and a scale which is manageable and enables us to be nimble, agile and adaptable. That is also why the Irish Government is putting a key focus on the smart economy, and I know that the Northern Ireland Administration is doing the same, but as Newman once said knowledge is one thing, virtue is another and we have paid a high price for an unacceptable level of disconnect between the two.
Now as we start to put the fragmented bits and pieces of the future together we need organisations like yours to help embed and mainstream corporate governance virtues and values, practices and safeguards which will encourage sensible entrepreneurialism, grow jobs and build a local and global financial system that is robust and serves the advancement of all of humanity.
I began by praising the role of the Institutes in earlier times in cultivating healthy cross-border relationships. That was and is a job well done. Now, on both parts of the island, as well indeed as in our wider world other problems have scaled up exponentially. A lot of people are scared for their jobs, homes, families and futures. In this room and in these two institutes there are people of great experience, wisdom, insight and intuition. We will need it all and more to get back to prosperity. If two heads are better than one, then two Institutes of many heads working together will surely shorten the journey out of the gloom and back into the light of shared success. No other generation has ever known a time of peace such as we have. No other generation has the educational advantages we have. None have ever seen the results of an island of Ireland whose peoples worked with each other as this generation is now doing. We are still only at the start. The best is yet to come but we have to make it happen and with your help I have no doubt we will. I wish you well. Go n-eirí an bothar libh go léir.
Thank you.