Remarks by President McAleese at the Opening of the American Dental Society of Europe Annual Meeting
Dublin, Thursday, 23rd June, 2011
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am delighted that the American Dental Society of Europe has chosen Dublin for this gathering and that thanks to John Dermody I get the chance to offer each one of you the traditional Irish welcome ‘cead mile failte’ – a hundred thousand welcomes.
That famous American, Henry Ford, whose father came from Ireland, once said ‘Coming together is a beginning, Keeping together is progress, Working together is Success.’ That seems to be the story of The American Dental Society of Europe, a body which for over a century has been committed to advancing the dental profession in Europe and at the same time keeping faithful to its long roots in American dentistry.
You are meeting in the UNESCO city of Literature, a city closely associated with the legendary James Joyce. It is a lesser known fact that his relative Tom Joyce was a dentist and that the famous hero of Ulysses Leopold Bloom at one point gives himself the false identity of “Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon.” Given the obvious high esteem that dentists were held in by Joyce I decided to look for less engimatic literary or poetic musings on dentists to mark this occasion. I am afraid neither William Butler Yeats nor Seamus Heaney seemed to find the muse in dentistry so I looked to America and to the city of Baltimore Maryland where the world’s first dental school was founded back in 1834. Not surprisingly for the place which became a global leader in dentistry its most famous poetic son had indeed been inspired to write on the subject of dentistry. This extract is from “This is going to hurt just a little bit,” by Ogden Nash.
“Some tortures are physical/ and some are mental/ but the one that
is both/is dental”.
That kind of familiar cynicism probably owes something to the fact that the dental profession remained largely unregulated until the 20th century while there is evidence that as far back as the bronze age drills were being used to extract teeth and in some cases extraction of teeth was a form of criminal or judicial sanction which probably made dentists about as popular as Lord High executioners.
I should have prefaced all this by saying that none of it is personal. I took a distinctively dental theme for my presidency fourteen years ago- Building Bridges. I know a lot of dentists. Some of them are my best friends. I even married one of them, am a sister to one and a mother to a wannabe dentist. And I am glad they all work in a highly skilled, highly regulated and highly educated profession that is today a very long way from the fear inducing dread so elegantly if bluntly described by Nash.
Oral health care is now recognised as essential to general health and wellbeing. Thanks to Societies like yours, thanks to great dental schools, hospitals, researchers, practitioners and teachers, the patient and the public experience dentistry very differently today from even a generation ago. Education and intervention around oral disease prevention has moved high up the agenda and with great success. The range of treatments for disease and cosmetic issues offers benefits to patients that go very far beyond pain relief or disease eradication. There are men, women and children who can speak of the confidence that you have renewed in them, or indeed introduced them to for the first time, the psychological and emotional strength your work has renewed in them, the faith in the future that you have restored in them. For today’s dentists work in holistic environments, person centred, person sensitive. They work with the most advanced technologies, constantly updating themselves, their skills, their surgeries, their specialisms. They provide accessible services, close to home. They are major local employers and sources of local enterprise and revenue. Many are sole practitioners or work in small scale practices where the gravitational pull of isolation is strongly offset by professional associations such as yours. For networks are all important in progressing and developing this profession. As the saying goes - “There is no delight in owning anything unshared.” When you share your expertise, wisdom and insight you extend exponentially the reach and the challenge of best practice and coming possibilities. Your Society has been doing that for over a century, driven individually and collectively by a sense of duty to the public and responsibility for this profession. No generation has dropped that baton of care which is why you are in Dublin taking part in this Society’s one hundred and seventeenth plenary meeting since its foundation in 1873.
The array of expertise in this room is as formidable as it is reassuring. Equally impressive is the generosity of spirit that brought you here, the conscientious determination to sustain this Society and ensure it is a dynamic resource for the European dental profession and the public it serves.
This kind of work, these kind of meetings do not always register fully in the public consciousness but they make us indebted to each one of you and while you did not come here looking for or expecting public thanks I would like to congratulate you and thank you for what this Society has achieved over the course of its work in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The extensive scientific programme you are facing into over the next few days would addle the brains of those five American trained dentists who first founded this Society. Yet would they not be proud of the way in which you continue to reveal their vision for a first class dental profession drawing on the best of scholarly global insight especially from North America and Europe.
I would like to thank Peter Yerbury, Honorary Secretary of the Society, your President, William Davis, Vice-President, Gerard Cleary and all who have worked hard over the past year to organise this meeting. 'Sé mo ghuí go mbeidh rath ar an obair atá le déanamh agaibh – every good wish with your endeavours. Enjoy Dublin and I hope you will go home saying that this was the best meeting yet for the future of dentistry and for friendships.
Go fada buan sibh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir. Thank you very much.