REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE VOICES WOMEN’S GROUP PROJECT TURF
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE VOICES WOMEN’S GROUP PROJECT TURF LODGE, BELFAST
It’s good to be back in Belfast and in particular to be back in Turf Lodge for this very special occasion of the launch of the Voices Women’s Project. I owe thanks to Marian O’Neill and everyone involved in the Voices Women’s Group for inviting me here and making me so welcome.
The people of Turf Lodge have not had things easy. I remember when the houses were first built and my friends moved in. A collection of houses, a random collection of human beings coping with being strangers to each other, coping with having left their communities in other parts of the city and facing the daunting prospect of having to build their own community from scratch. That’s a hard enough task to contemplate without the added problems of unemployment, poverty, social exclusion and violence which this community has had to face into. Yet face into these things you did, creating an active community life, a strong community solidarity with successes to be proud of, whether in the achievements of sports heroes and heroines like Damian Kelly and Theresa Duffy, or in the results of youth and environmental improvements projects.
The Voices Women’s Group Project is an important part of that community endeavour. Women make up half of the population of this place as they do more or less everywhere else, but it’s a statistic that tends to get lost when we look at how poorly they are represented in so many areas of life, especially public life.
Today we are beginning to recognise and value the huge role played by women as the backbone of home life and community life. We are beginning at last to understand how impoverished we are as a society when we do not let the gifts, the skills and the talents of women blossom to their fullest extent, when we corral them or ignore them. More and more people, and most importantly women themselves, are insisting that their voices must be heard.
Hillary Clinton pointed out in her address to a Conference in Belfast two years ago that at the back of the Peace Process were “women whose whispers of “enough” became a torrent of voices that could no longer be ignored.”
A little mentioned aspect of the Good Friday Agreement is that it undertakes ‘to empower the advancement of women in public life’. Women therefore, whatever their politics, whatever their background, have a shared and vested interest in the full flowering of that agreement, for it is a vital conduit from being voices that whisper, to voices that are strong, self-confident and influential.
It is very reassuring to see the links which the Women’s Voices have formed with women’s groups across the political divide – groups such as the very well established and thriving Shankill Women’s Centre, with whom it is starting a cross community “Steps to Excellence” course; and the umbrella women’s organisation, the Newtownabbey Women’s Support Project, which is also carrying out excellent work. Such contacts reinforce the awareness that women everywhere are facing common problems and have the same needs. I often tell the story of a group of scientists who were searching for a gene associated with a serious childhood illness. They were competing with research teams from all over the world to be the first to find the gene. Because they were in competition they hid from each other pieces of information they had discovered. Then the leader of the Irish team suggested that the teams collaborate instead of competing. They shared their information and suddenly information which was useless on its own found its match and in no time, they found the gene. That is what you also are finding - the more you share, the more powerful you become, not the reverse. So many people in this community believe that to collaborate, to reconcile, to work with each other, is to take something away. Yet the opposite is the case. Each of us faces huge challenges. Each of us has to shift heavy obstacles out of the pathway to peace, to prosperity, to equality, to justice, to a more humanly decent future. Two sets of hands pushing together will shift the obstacles quicker than one, and a lot quicker than two sets of hands pulling in opposite directions.
Here you know how essential it is to empower every voice and how much we have to gain when all those once quiet, or silent voices have their say. They will change how we look at the world. They will change how things are organised. They will, sooner I hope rather than later, give us a world balanced by the ideas, the genius, the creative energy of women flowing freely into the human energy grid. Your voices are giving us a lot to look forward to.
Guím rath agus séan ar bhur gcuid oibre. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.