REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS HOUSE PEARSE STREET
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS HOUSE PEARSE STREET, DUBLIN 2
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur measc anseo ar an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle buíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom. I would particularly like to thank Tom Fitzpatrick, President of Chartered Accountants Ireland for the invitation to perform the opening of Chartered Accountants House today.
Most of us will be glad to see the back of 2009 for the unwelcome changes that it wrought. Your profession has been far from immune from those changes but at this event we are celebrating change, not lamenting it. Today you have a new name and a new home. Chartered Accountants Ireland starts its life in this state-of-the-art new headquarters and training centre. If you were to choose the most propitious moment for a new name and new headquarters there is an argument that says this moment is not it and yet there is an equally cogent argument the other way - for right now we need the hope and the momentum that comes from a determination to meet the future with a fresh vision born of a chastened wisdom and the highest of humanly decent values.
With roots that go back to 1888 you are not just the oldest but also the largest accountancy body in Ireland. What is more through the end of Empire, civil wars, partition and the troubles you have been and remain an all-island body since long before the concept of the “all-island economy” became a familiar phrase. You set the same high standards both North and South of the border and you are of course part of an international and highly globalised collegial profession with members working across 90 countries worldwide. Your work places you deep in the world of business, commerce, enterprise, finance and investment, a world subject to episodic highs and lows but less often to the kind of convulsive, epoch altering devastation which has rocked the world’s financial and economic order with dire consequences for Ireland among many others. We can measure the damage in terms of jobs lost, trade lost, income lost and increased social welfare payments but the damage to confidence and to trust while difficult to measure are both manifest and tangible and very real in their consequences. Trusted institutions have been revealed to be riddled with not just mere human frailty and stupidity but a crass grasping selfishness which is at times almost breathtaking in its lack of care for others. Now as we attempt to rebuild our economic strength and viability we need also to rebuild that trust, not on the quicksand of the past but on much surer ground.
Your members have not been immune from any of this. They have faced redundancies, fewer job opportunities, reduced client bases, increased competition and scaled-back fees. Yet we the public demand that your profession does much more than merely transcend its own internal commercial problems. We demand and expect that you shoulder part of the responsibility for restoring trust by ensuring that this most difficult moment is not an excuse for diminished vigilance but a radical call to the very opposite.
This profession has always stood for a solidity, an adherence to high principles which would not trim itself to the prevailing winds. In a world full of fear, anxiety and uncertainties, you have always been seen as a bastion of certainty and today and tomorrow you are vital to the building of more accountable, sustainable and sensible businesses for the future.
This building is your statement of intent. Here Chartered Accountants Ireland will introduce newcomers to the profession and those involved in continuous professional education to not just your practices and procedures, our laws and systems but to your values. This is a place not just of education but formation. You have the most amazing technology for streaming training right to the desktop of your members.
That training which upskills the individual also upskills our workforce and makes us much more resilient in the face of all the challenges which we need to tackle to restore a sound prosperity. The work you do day in and day out is intimately connected with corporate governance which in turn is intimately connected with Ireland’s reputation among investors and the world of the global capital market-place. Consistently high forensically accurate standards of financial reporting are vital to credible corporate governance. Your role as trustworthy, incorruptible, careful gatekeepers of this process is indispensible. We have all had to adapt quickly to a humbler reality than the greatest decade of prosperity prepared us for. Much of what was achieved during those heady years remains just that - achieved and a tangible success story which propelled Ireland two giant steps forward. Now we have taken one very painful step and yet the memory remains of the surging confidence that came from virtually full employment, of high quality inward investment, local entrepreneurial growth and simply having the money to pay bills. The recent memory of all that has to be a source of our collective insistence that we can and will triumph over these days that have inflicted so much worry and stress. There is a life beyond all this as your profession knows. It has been an active player in the many faces of Ireland which have manifested themselves since 1888. So where would you rather be - at the opening of this new house and the creation of Chartered Accountants Ireland or back there in 1888 still waiting for the vote, women’s rights still a long way off, two world wars waiting to claim the lives of millions of mostly young men, a colonised Ireland still far from taking its place among the nations of the world, a world unaccustomed to words like equality and inclusion, a world where gender bias, homophobia, racism, cronyism, clientilism and elitism were supreme. The things we do not like about our lives and times we have the opportunity and freedom to change. May your profession through the good use of this building be an incubator of the good change and good practice that will help us, between us, create the best Ireland yet.
I would like to wish each of your members a very happy and peaceful Christmas and to wish Charted Accountants Ireland every success in this new high-tech home. It now gives me great pleasure to declare Chartered Accountants House formally open. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.