REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF SURGEONS OF GREAT BRITAIN
Tá gliondar orm bheith anseo libh inniu ag an ócáid speisialta seo. Tá mé buíoch díbh as an gcuireadh agus as an bhfáilte fhíorchaoin a chur sibh romham.
It is good to see this Annual Conference return to Dublin after a gap of some thirty-five years. To those of you who are visiting for the first time I offer a warm céad míle fáilte - to those returning, I thank you for the compliment you pay our city and to each of you I wish for the kind of successful and memorable conference that the organisers have worked so assiduously to produce. No-one has worked harder of course than Professor George Parks and I thank him for the invitation to address you today and to formally open the proceedings.
You may have noticed the lingering lamp-post evidence of last week’s general election to say nothing of the post-election analysis and you could be forgiven for thinking, this is a city populated entirely by politicians and pundits. In fact your arrival here has restored an historic balance to Dublin city. One hundred years ago this year one of Ireland’s best known surgeons, also a poet, playwright and wit, Oliver St. John Gogarty, was elected to our then new Parliament’s second chamber, the Senate. His biggest complaint about Dublin was that it had too many hospitals and as he remarked…"It must be a strange thing to come to a city where you see nothing but saints, doctors and cinemas". Certainly there has been a revival of cinemas, you have salvaged the multiplicity of doctors but the jury is still out on the saints….. I have to say that as a lawyer I take some comfort from the exclusion of my profession from Gogarty’s list and some mischievous delight in the fact that doctors and saints were evidently two mutually exclusive categories.
One of the bonuses that goes with the job of being President is the opportunity to meet many different professional groups at conferences like this and to find out the things that they get most exercised, most passionate about. With estate agents last year it was house prices, with dentists in Belfast last week, it was oral hygiene, with lawyers always and ever it is money and with surgeons it seems it is hospital chief executives and managers. The other bonus of being here for me as a lawyer is the privilege and novelty of being in the company of a profession which is held in high esteem, as you are, by the public.
The medical profession is respected trusted and admired because of the rigour of its training, its stringent, uncompromising professionalism, its scientific curiosity and its commitment to the well-being of humanity. You, who are the custodians of that trust, know only too well how hard earned it is, how much conscientious effort goes in, day in and day out, to sustaining it from generation to generation. That is why you have come to Dublin, to honour and fulfill that sacred trust by ensuring that there is always a fresh and imaginative dynamic at the heart of your profession's journey towards excellence.
We are privileged to live in a time when the extraordinary accomplishments of medical science have become so commonplace, that in the rising tide of expectations and demands we have almost lost our capacity for awe and maybe even for gratitude. Time and again you have broken through the miracle barriers to deliver services and choices which would have been outside our contemplation even a few short years ago. To that which was once hopeless you have brought hope so that today we routinely meet men and women, boys and girls living full, long and happy lives who owe their health to the work of your hands.
I recently heard one of our bishops quote an old Irish proverb which I confess I had not heard before but which is worth repeating – ‘those who drink the water should remember with gratitude those who dug the well’. Remembering with gratitude is, regrettably not the most distinguishing human characteristic and yet you are surely due our thanks for being the hope-bringers, the healers and for staying faithful to the relentless quest for more answers and better treatments.
Some years ago I visited the Burma Railway museum on the River Kwai in Thailand and saw in that very humble, modest little place, the photographs of those young men whose lives were a living nightmare. And yet the picture which I remember best, which stays with me over all the grim, stomach churning stories, is of an Australian surgeon standing knee-deep in water, his own flesh rotting, as he performed lifesaving surgery with the most rudimentary of equipment in that most hostile of environments. Sad to say around the world it is so often medical personnel who are called to mend the bodies broken by the power of human hatred, greed, stupidity and all the things made manifest by the dark side of our humanness. Time and again your professions gentle, uncompromising care for our brokenness stands as a witness to the transcendent power of human decency, of skills honed and put to good use, of a value system where the suffering of human person evokes compassion and not contempt.
Today, all those welcome medical advances bring their own unique and formidable challenges, for the public appetite is simply whetted exponentially by innovation and what was considered revolutionary yesterday is suddenly expected to be routine and readily available today. Your workplaces are complex places where a host of issues clamour for attention. Resources are finite, demands are infinite. You juggle competing priorities, deliberate on some of the most profound ethical questions of our era and still have to get the job done and done well. And when it is done you are obliged to keep asking how can it be done better? Add to those demands the intensity of the human interactions, the nervous and frightened patients and their families who need your steady effective, reassurance and the colleagues whose team work you rely on and who in turn rely on you. Science and technology are mighty things and they have brought wonderful benefits, to say nothing of the adventures they promise us for the future but for most of us they work best when reinforced with the warmth of a smile and genuine empathy. We expect a lot of you and you work hard to live up to those expectations.
Because of your endeavour our world is a better place and hopefully through the work done at this conference you will nudge us even further in the right direction. Here you have a chance to trade ideas, insights, experiences, problems and solutions. Here a piece of baffling information in one person’s head may suddenly make sense when it meets its match brought here by a stranger. New networks of common endeavour will grow up around the friendships and common interests revealed here. And we the public will be the beneficiaries as you pool all the reservoirs of talent, skill and experience this audience represents. You would not have come if you were not willing to share and willing to listen. And I thank you for the generosity and humility those disciplines of sharing and listening, demand.
I hope when you leave Dublin it will be with many happy memories, many intriguing and energising insights, with a strong sense of purpose and recommitment to your vocations as surgeons and with the firm view that this was the best conference ever. That would surely vindicate the work of the organisers and bring great reassurance to the public who rely so much on you and who place so much trust in you.
Go raibh maith agaibh.