REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF CORRYMEELA COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER HOUSE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF CORRYMEELA COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER HOUSE "COVENTRY" BALLYCASTLE, CO. ANTRIM
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to be here today for the opening of this magnificent new building alongside Denis Rooney, Chairman of the International Fund for Ireland.
No organisation appreciates the need to preserve our hard-won peace better than Corrymeela. Even during the bleakest times of our recent history, the Corrymeela Community was always to be found lighting a candle when others chose to curse or be consumed by the darkness. Over many long and frustrating years you gently but insistently offered a vision of a reconciliation that would bring communal peace and partnership. It was not an easy message for the weight of history was against it and the daily toll of death, injury and destruction kept shattering such fragile trust and hope as there was. Painstakingly you helped to turn estranged people towards one another and to understand that they held the future in their own hands and all those hands and hearts were needed to build the peace they longed for. Many of the seeds of the new and happier relationships now developing across communities on our island were sown in the challenging but welcoming space of Corrymeela.
These new relationships have been subjected to many tests and setbacks - for not everyone has joined the peacemakers. Three good men died violently last month in attacks by so-called dissident republicans. In the wave of grief and anger and fear that greeted those events one thing shone like a beacon of real hope and it was the unity of response from all sides of the community and from the elected leaders of all political persuasions. I myself, on behalf of the people who share this island with the people of Northern Ireland, and the Irish Government expressed our outrage in the strongest terms and our deepest sympathies to the bereaved, the injured and their families and friends.
There are those who prefer the darkness of conflict, who are not persuaded by the nobility and generosity of the agreement we call the Good Friday Agreement in which an overwhelming majority of the people of this island reached an historic compromise on the vexed constitutional status of Northern Ireland. We made a contract which said that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as that was the wish of the people of Northern Ireland and their desire for a United Ireland would be periodically tested by referendum. If they opted for a United Ireland then both the Irish and British Governments would facilitate that. The agreement brought to a humanly decent end a period of dreadful torment and, importantly, it gave real space to both very different political ambitions to grow and to persuade, respectfully and peacefully.
It gave to the people control over their own destiny. It created structures to support reconciliation within Northern Ireland, between North and South and between Great Britain and Ireland. Its success was not instantaneous but it was a plant that grew stronger and stronger thanks to the many people who put aside their hurt and their distrust and who began to stitch together one society from the fragments of history’s divisions. We have been witnesses to miracles as a result and so today whatever our faith or our politics, whether we live in Belfast, Dublin, Ballycastle or Ballyvaughan, we share a rock-solid determination to keep on consolidating and developing this fresh, exciting new culture of good neighbourliness, of partnership, of equality and justice.
We know, of course, that while more and more are joining the journey to reconciliation and friendship and discovering there a liberation of heart and mind that is reassuring, while many have taken extraordinary and courageous steps in order to move the peace forward, there are still others who remain trapped in old mindsets. Sectarian thinking is still a major obstacle to the growth of true reconciliation. Fear and scepticism, along with deep personal hurt, can keep people trapped in a victimhood that makes it very difficult to trust enough to believe in this peace. Corrymeela knows all these minds and hearts intimately though its work over many years and here there is no complacency about the work that is still needed if the future we hope for is to become fully real. If anyone thought the Good Friday Agreement spelt redundancy for Corrymeela they were badly mistaken. We are privileged to be part of a generation that is turning the tide of history and writing a new chapter, developing a new culture. The old ways still exert a strong gravitational pull and we who believe in the new ways have to pull hard and together to keep the momentum building towards healing and hope. We still need Corrymeela.
And now Corrymeela has this fine, newly-rebuilt volunteer house named after the city whose cathedral was all but destroyed in 1940 but whose Provost, speaking from its ruins on Christmas day of that year, promised to forgive those responsible and to seek reconciliation with them so that together they could build “a kinder, more Christ-like world". It was that moral and prophetic vision which led to Coventry Cathedral's development as a world centre for reconciliation which, over the years, has provided inspiration and support to many Christians addressing ongoing conflicts, including here in Ireland.
Corrymeela has been just such an inspiration here and, in providing financial assistance of £1 million towards this new development, the International Fund for Ireland has given important recognition to the work done by Corrymeela and the work that remains to be done through Corrymeela. The Fund too has been a highly successful instrument for peace and reconciliation on this island making an enormous difference to the lives of tens of thousands of people, North and South. Both Corrymeela and the Fund have needed champions, advocates, volunteers to be the hands of the work of peacemaking. They have both been blessed in the quality of the people who have committed to their work. The list of such champions is long and I will not recite them all but I would like to pay tribute to two great stalwarts of Corrymeela and servants of peace-making who passed away in recent months - Kathleen Davey, wife of the Reverend Ray Davey who led the Community from its foundation in 1965 for its first fifteen years, and the Reverend Dr. John Morrow also a founder member and leader of this Community from 1980 to 1994. May I also acknowledge the great work of my good friend, the Rt. Revd. Trevor Williams, who was leader of this Community for many years, as well as a courageous pastor of his parish in North Belfast until his recent appointment as Bishop of Limerick and Killaloe.
Millard Fuller, the founder and former president of Habitat for Humanity International, once said that “For a community to be whole and healthy it must be based on people’s love and concern for each other.” We have seen the damage, dysfunction and unhealthiness generated by hatred, suspicion and conflict. We have just begun to see the potential that can be revealed by partnership, reconciliation and peace. That we have come this far, to the start of a new chapter is in no small measure thanks to Corrymeela’s faithfulness to the commandment to love one another no matter what. I hope Coventry House will help that commandment to infuse this island and transform it so that it can be the best it has ever been for all whose beloved homeland it is.
I congratulate my old friend and colleague David Stevens, Kate Pettis, Jo Watson, Ronnie Millar and the Corrymeela team who keep on working to let the future in and to fill what John Hewitt has called “the centuries’ arrears”.
Thank you.