Remarks by President McAleese at the Official Opening of the Mayo Education Centre Castlebar
Remarks by President McAleese at the Official Opening of the Mayo Education Centre Castlebar, Tuesday, 26th April, 2005.
A Dhaoine Uaisle go léir. Is cúis áthas dom bheith anseo inniu i Mhaigh Eo chun bualadh le muintir an Ionad Oideachais na Mhaigh Eo.
It’s good to be back in Mayo and to be welcomed even after a certain match on Sunday and a defeat at the hands of men from Ulster. In my defence I can only say they were from Armagh and they never had much pity for my county team in the neighbouring County Down!!! I am delighted to open this marvellous new home and chapter in the story of the Mayo Education Centre. My thanks to you all for that warm welcome and a special thanks to your chairperson, Padraic McKeon for inviting me to witness the great work being done to improve the educational facilities here in this part of the west.
The distance from Chapel Street to Westport Road may not seem great but the Centre has moved far in a lot of other ways since 1991 when the story began as the Castlebar Teachers Centre. In that relatively short time, Ireland has been transformed and education has been at the very core of that transformation. It was Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese philosopher-poet who said of parents and teachers “ you are the bows from which children as living arrows are sent forth.” We want to send our children on the right path, straight and true, confident and poised for all that lies ahead. The choices we make of schools and colleges, the teachers our children encounter there, these things are a crucial part of getting the arrow lined up right.
There has hardly been time to draw breath in these heady, high achieving times and say thank you for the massive investment made by teachers in Ireland’s success for that very success has provoked more complexity, more challenges that teachers have had to respond to. Curricula have changed, laws have changed, attitudes of parents have changed, attitudes of children have changed, experiences of teachers have changed, expectations and outcomes have changed.
They are exhilarating days in many ways but worrying too, for so often it has been our teachers who have been the first to observe those who were being left behind and who intuited the panic that sets in when every other boat is launched on the tide and yours is still where it was, beached. Teachers have been in the front line in terms of helping emigrants to Ireland integrate and settle, in putting inclusion and anti-racism on the school agenda. Teachers have been the first to notice the child with learning difficulties, the child with relationship problems, the neglected or abused child. Teachers have to keep a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of education and yet be a friend and guide to children who bring the chaos and caprice of life from the home or the street into the classroom. And they also have to find the uniqueness in each child, the gifts and talents, the potential that is utterly different from child to child, to harness and release it, to give it a sure voice.
You, our teachers are a centre of gravity in our young people’s lives. It is a huge responsibility you carry and at least made a little easier by Centres like this which ensure the burden is shared. Here you can trade insights and experiences, wisdom and worries. This Centre offers humanly important validation, upskilling and guidance through which our teachers grow stronger and our educational network in turn also grows stronger. This splendid Centre forms part of a network of full-time and part-time education centres throughout the country dedicated to providing teachers with vital support in their formidably onerous role as educators. I hope my presence here today and in other education centres I have visited, for example in Laois and Monaghan, serves to underline the importance I place, we all place, on what you do here and in similar centres countrywide. It is reassuring to see such a modern, comfortable, learning environment available to the teachers of Mayo.
There was a film years ago called ‘A Man for All Seasons’ about the life of Thomas Moore. When Moore said to a young man ‘Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one’. The young man asked ‘If I was, who would know it? Moore replied ‘You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that’. I would like to add my voice to that ‘public’.
I congratulate everyone who made this new centre happen. It took much work on the part of many people to bring it all together and we commend you and thank you on behalf of everyone who will benefit from it in the years ahead – and in particular the more than seventeen hundred teachers in the one hundred and eighty eight primary schools and twenty-nine post-primary schools in the catchment area. The children too will be real beneficiaries and ultimately our country. I would like to mention the Management Committee, Director and staff and wish them well in their future endeavours. Your dedication and commitment to the centre, and the educational distinction which it encourages, will serve both teachers and students well for many years to come.
It is with great pleasure that I now declare the Mayo Education Centre officially open.
Comhghairdeas libh arís inniu agus go raibh míle, míle maith agaibh.