REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE L.A.T.C.H. (LISTENING AND TALKING CAN HELP) CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE L.A.T.C.H. (LISTENING AND TALKING CAN HELP) CONFERENCE, GORTEEN HOUSE HOTEL, LIMAVADY
Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Is breá liom bheith anseo i bhur measc ag an ócáid speisialta seo, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin.
Thank you all for the very warm welcome you have extended to Martin and to me and a particular thank you to Niall Murphy for inviting me to this important conference and to have the honour of officially launching LATCH.
It is very reassuring to see such a keen interest among the professionals and the volunteer workers in the difficult subject matter of this conference, the mental health care of young people. We who are parents feel vulnerable and fearful when our children encounter serious health problems of any sort and mental health problems in particular. Our limitations and our strengths as primary carers become suddenly exposed, challenged and tested just as the coping skills of our young people are under serious pressure. In such periods of our lives and they are often just that, passing phases, we need secure, steady handrails to guide us. You are those handrails. Men and women of expertise, wisdom and experience in this field, people who are themselves not afraid at a conference like this to listen and learn from the experience of others and who are generous in sharing your own experience in the hope of finding deeper insights into this world of adolescent depression and self-doubt and better and more effective ways to gaining emotional strength and mental well-being. Conferences such as this are themselves good examples of the energy and focus that can come from simply listening and talking to one another.
LATCH takes that simple human truth a step further by offering a listening and talking service to young people - a place and space where fears and dreads can be articulated and aired openly instead of burrowing silently and dangerously into the self, robbing them of faith in themselves and sometimes of faith in life itself.
We would all wish to see our young people sail seamlessly through adolescence without a care in the world and a joyful appetite for the things that make them strong, healthy human-beings - problem solvers rather than problems. But the landscape of adolescence is for some a considerable obstacle course and if you are meeting those obstacles for the first time, with limited skills and experience it can be daunting and lonely. But LATCH sends out a vital message that this is a journey you do not have to go alone. Those obstacles can look very different when you have the help and support to develop healthy coping mechanisms, when your own personal resources have been up-skilled and reinforced and you feel a greater control over your own life. This process we call maturing. It takes time and it benefits enormously from being competently and consistently supported.
Youth suicide is the outward, wretched manifestation of the failure of that maturing process. The extent of it forces us to think very deeply about the gaps through which our young people can get lost. They are our future. I recall the poignant and so apt words of TS Eliot:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Our adult world has a profound responsibility to find effective ways of reaching out to these young people and helping shift the lost trajectories of their lives to find that rose-garden. At a time when health services are becoming the domain of increasingly sophisticated high-tech medical interventions for which we are deeply grateful, it is worth remembering that there are many much simpler interventions which can prove to be equally miraculous - the power of language, of laughter, a gentle touch, a word of praise, a word of forgiveness and of course of listening.
We each of us carry into the future the baggage of our childhood, the good and bad times, the pleasures and the pain. We take the lessons learned from our formative years and bring them with us into our adult lives. Sadly for some, those experiences are deeply traumatic. They impoverish their lives in so many ways especially when experienced in the home, a place that should be a crucible of care, of love, of understanding. In adulthood, we meet them, the walking wounded, often unable to cope with the expectations of society and so often wreaking havoc in their own lives, the lives of those they love and the lives of those who cross their paths. Every life lived in that lost world is a loss to the individual. Never to know yourself, or what you are capable of is a huge personal loss. It is also a loss to the family, to the community and to society for so often instead of adding to the huge national grid of human energy and genius, they drain it, their lives marooned on the edge of or in the middle of chaos.
We on this island are not blessed with an abundance of natural resources – but one of our greatest natural resources is the genius of our people. Our young people are our wealth and to the extent that they are strong we are strong. I wish LATCH well as it works to make them strong and I thank those remarkable volunteers for committing to this vital work of assisting our young people to blossom into happy and productive adults who can offer a great deal to society. Each of them will be all the stronger for having been seasoned by suffering and their stories of problems faced and transcended, will be the handrails to guide the next generation.
I know that arranging this conference took a great deal of hard work and co-operation on the part of a number of individuals and organisations including the Western Education Library Board Youth Service and the Western Investing for Health Partnership. None of us has all the answers, we have much to learn from each other and by being here you commit to finding the best way forward.
May I take this opportunity to congratulate you all for the tremendous work that you do and I especially commend everyone at L.A.T.C.H for your commitment to this special vocation of care for the mental well being of young people. I wish you even greater success in the years ahead.
Go maire sibh. Go raibh maith agaibh.