REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE NORTHERN IRELAND CHIEF EXECUTIVES SENIOR WOMEN’S NETWORK
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE NORTHERN IRELAND CHIEF EXECUTIVES SENIOR WOMEN’S NETWORK CONFERENCE
I am delighted to be here and I thank Nuala O’Loan, Patricia Gordon, and the members of the Northern Ireland Chief Executives Senior Women’s Network for inviting me to address you this afternoon.
As I look around this room, I am encouraged and inspired by the presence of so many women who occupy senior positions, positions of considerable influence and responsibility, across a wide range of public sector organisations. I speak from the heart when I congratulate you on the work you do and thank you for the contribution you are making to society here in Northern Ireland. Some of that contribution is measurable and visible, more of it is not, for there is the subtle but effective power of your witness and your success in empowering the next generation of young women and in challenging deep-rooted antipathetic mindsets which for so long have placed false restraints on the roads travelled by women.
Those mindsets have been deeply rooted in both genders. Later this evening I will be speaking at a dinner at the Rossa Gaelic Football Club in West Belfast. It is named after a famous Irish Fenian (and here I use the word in its accurate historical sense – a rare phenomenon in Belfast), whose wife Mary was like her husband, a revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century. While she supported women’s suffrage, nonetheless she was adamant that “women must be absolutely under obedience to authorised men and willing to take guidance from them.” She would she said “ give men a despotism over them (women) and ban whoever murmured”. Eighty five years later across the world many women could describe their lives in just such terms but happily not here, though the journey is at its beginning rather than its destination.
If we occasionally wonder why our world is more than a bit lop-sided perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we keep on flying on one tired wing when we could be using two. The extent of the true genius of women has long been the most ignored natural resource in most global societies including Irish society. For generations, women’s influence and activity was largely, and with very few exceptions, concentrated in areas far removed from centres of power. Their experience, knowledge, insight and expertise was often overlooked when it came to the design and implementation of policy. And we have all been the poorer for that.
Your presence here today is testimony to changing times. Thanks to the relentless advocates, both men and women who forced the changes, things are possible for us that would have been out of the question for our mothers and unthinkable for our grandmothers. There have been significant improvements in the social, economic and political status of women. Equality of opportunity and real access to that opportunity is being progressed. There is a growing understanding among strategic planners and policy makers that legislative equality must be underpinned by the development of the kind of supports women need in order to be able to participate fully in public life. And everywhere around us we see the effects. More and more women are participating in areas which have traditionally been the preserve of men.
And in welcoming these opportunities, we can see that they are an integral part of a wider new beginning which prevails in Northern Ireland at this time. The Good Friday Agreement recognises ‘the right of women to full and equal…participation’. It makes a commitment also to ‘the advancement of women in public life’. The Northern Ireland Programme for Government also shows a strong commitment to gender equality. As the political temper improves and a fresh sense of optimism takes hold, it is worth reminding ourselves that we have never known what it is to live in a place where the full giftedness of every human being is put to work for the self and for the community.
We have never known the power of partnership between North and South, between women and men, working in harmony and respect towards a shared prosperity. We have never known our own strength. You could say we have never truly known ourselves. And now a new generation is poised to dispense with all those “nevers” and to write a new history of remarkable achievement. When that history is written it will be impossible to overlook the role of women, impossible to ignore their voices because their names, your names are already part of the new script.
The face of public service in Northern Ireland is changing. The faces delivering public service are changing as the embrace widens to better reflect the composition and the needs of all the communities in Northern Ireland. And in this context I welcome the fact that the New Police Service of Northern Ireland is actively seeking to recruit among traditionally under-represented sectors of the community, and to attract women, nationalists and ethnic minorities to serve the community in genuine, respectful working partnership with the majority sectors.
In the letter I received from Nuala O’ Loan, inviting me to speak at today’s conference, she spoke of the importance of role models for women. The young women of Northern Ireland have a powerful role model in Mrs. O’Loan herself and I commend her for the sensitive and courageous way in which she goes about her work as Northern Ireland’s first Police Ombudsman. It is one of the toughest jobs around and Nuala is demonstrating that women are well up to the toughest of jobs.
The recent election of three women M.P’s is a huge improvement on no women M.P’s but it is, as Lady Sylvia Hermon M.P. has said, “a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs” and that women are “ grossly under-represented in political life in Northern Ireland”.
The New Centre for the Advancement of Women in Politics recently opened at Queen’s is evidence of a new, assertive mood among the women of Northern Ireland and a determination to have their say in decision making at every level. On the day I was privileged to open that Centre just a few weeks ago the stark reminders of the distance still to travel was there for all to see on the magnificent newly refurbished walls of the Great Hall. Row after row of portraits of Queen’s great and good confirmed the predictable total absence of women as if in its 150 years they had been absent, silent, missing. I know the Vice Chancellor Sir George Bain looks forward like me to a day soon, when a different story will be told.
I have a set of books grandly entitled The Great Ideas. They are published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and purport to be a history of the greatest ideas to affect humankind from Plato to Bono. There are about 60 books. Not until book 56 is even one woman mentioned, the late 19th century writer Willa Cather, not a name familiar to me when first I read it. Hard to believe that for centuries, for millennia women hadn’t an idea between them, hadn’t a thought worth noting, hadn’t a voice worth listening to. Hard to believe, impossible to accept and essential to redeem.
The next 60 volumes have to be filled with the ideas of women and you are among the generation of women whose genius has the chance to go where it pleases and not alone to do its very best but to have that best acknowledged, vindicated, recorded, spoken of. The time for unheard voices is over.
Women throughout the island of Ireland are facing into these new opportunities and challenges. They bring their rewards but they also promise a journey that can at times be lonely, threatening, misunderstood and difficult. There are not always well-trodden paths to follow. Sometimes there are no handrails and all you have is your own inner strength and determination. That is why the support of organisations such as your own is so vital. Instead of one woman journeying alone, you are a network, a community of care and support for one another. There is an old Irish saying - two shortens the road. As we on this island move forward with determination into a new era of peace and stability, the quickest way to fast forward to the realisation of that era is to ensure we are flying on two wings, using the full genius of men and women, harnessing their collective power for the common good.
Thank You.