REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE JOINT CONFERENCE OF THE BPS AND PSI
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE JOINT CONFERENCE OF THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY & THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY IRELAND
Good morning everybody and thank you so much for your warm welcome. Let me reciprocate by welcoming each of you to Dublin, especially those who are here for the first time and who have travelled some distance to be here. It really is a delight to open this Joint Conference of the British Psychological Society and the Psychological Society of Ireland, evidence perhaps of how far we have all travelled on the journey of reconciliation between the peoples of Ireland and Britain.
The British Psychological Society is clearly growing very fond of Dublin because of course just two months ago, for the first time in its history, the Society held its annual conference outside the United Kingdom. On that occasion its chosen venue was the Royal Dublin Society. Today we gather in the doyenne of Irish Universities in that idyllic interlude so beloved of academics everywhere when the students have departed, the exam results are posted and the summer vacation heralds the onslaught of the conference season.
Your conference is taking place at an unusual moment in Irish-British relationships and history. Not so much an interlude we hope, as a prelude to the embedding of a new culture of partnership and good neighbourliness in place of the generations-old wasteful culture of conflict. Today’s consolidating peace process, itself a work in progress, is the work of countless hands and hearts, across Ireland and Britain and even further afield. It is, in many ways, as much a reflection of the growing maturity of relations between Dublin and Westminster, as it is of the evolution of relations on this island.
As British-Irish political relationships became characterised over the past two decades by an increasingly warm and collegial spirit, they helped to generate a more widespread and very potent spirit of partnership and cooperation. That spirit is now developing and consolidating - helping to straighten out the skewed relationships that history distorted.
Within Northern Ireland the divided communities are now working together in a unique consensus-driven form of co-responsible government. Cross-border relationships, once so fraught are now growing healthily inside the robust structure of the Good Friday Agreement. Those of us who have lived through the very worst of these past decades know just how privileged a generation we are and how much we owe to the profound changes in attitudes and expectations; changes which allowed an honourable compromise to emerge and a new future to take hold.
In this process of catharsis, this process of changing minds and changing behaviour your profession comes into its own. These very human processes of prejudice and persuasion, of hatred and hope, of accumulated hurts and deep-rooted victimhood, of superiority and inferiority, of hot anger that erupts into blind violence, of cold anger that distils into paramilitarism, of profound loss that leads to spontaneous forgiveness or deepens bitterness, of adaptations to the complexities of living long-term inside highly localised violent conflict where distrust starts at your own street corner. This is a world tailor-made for psychologists as you help us to explore the accretion of attitudes, the consequences of behaviour and the scope for change.
The conflict which bedevilled Northern Ireland, in particular, in the latter part of the last century had its roots in centuries of poisoned relationships. What is in many ways astounding is the sheer shelf-life of the toxic seeds which were carried from one generation to the next and which so often had already poisoned the future even before its children were born.
Now, however, the best educated and most problem-solving generation Ireland has ever known has imagined a new way of existing, and through a process of conciliatory politics and courageous compromise has cleared the land of the last of that toxic harvest, those choking weeds.
Now we begin the reseeding of the landscape and what we sow now we shall of course reap - so it is utterly essential that we all of us plant well, that we set the scene for a much healthier and happier form of cooperative coexistence. Our mental health care, our attitudinal health, our personal and collective coping skills and strategies are all going to be part of the new reseeding.
If ever there was a time for a psychology profession to showcase what it is made of, the time is now and the place is here, for at the back of the difficult journey we have all made, your discipline, your science and your skill have been at work helping us to construct and internalise new ways of looking at ourselves, at others and at our shared future.
Looking more broadly at our respective societies we know how vital mental healthcare is for the individual, the family, the community and wider society. Here in Ireland the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy’s “Vision for Change” Report provides a valuable roadmap designed to take us away from a predominantly medical approach to mental health, to a more integrated, holistic and multi-disciplinary approach; an approach which acknowledges the tightly woven tapestry of biological, psychological, economic and social factors that can affect mental health and which champions the rights of those with mental health problems to full inclusion in every sphere of civic life.
The space opened up by this shift of direction should in time bring manifest changes but, of course, the nursing of those changes will be the life’s work of many of you. It is essential work where so often significant culture change is wrought, painstakingly, one person at a time, chipping away at a long embedded obstacle course of fossilised attitudes, poses, prejudices, stereotypes and inhibitions.
Back in 1745 Dean Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels and one of this College’s most distinguished graduates was so worried about the poor level of mental health care that he funded the founding of St Patrick’s Hospital, a mental health-care facility that flourishes today. Typical of Swift though there was a sting in the tail expressed in a satirical stanza which accompanied his bequest - a stanza that today would rightly get short shrift from the politically correct for its use of loaded and unsavoury language - a sign itself of how far we have travelled:
[Swift] left the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
Showing in one satiric touch
No nation needed it so much.
In truth every nation has need of good mental health care. We pay a price for its absence and over generations many have paid that price in lives half-lived, lives unfulfilled, lives overlooked, stereotyped out of the fullness of life, by the attitudinal baggage carried so poisonously in those awful words “fools and mad”.
We are lucky to be part of a generation that is planning and delivering a different kind of future, person centred, community centred, a place where no-one sits forgotten on the margins looking in as others enjoy the mainstream of life. In the Proclamation of 1916 the founders of today’s Ireland set out their vision for the future as a place where the children of the nation would be cherished equally.
We are not there yet but we are surely much nearer than we have ever been. We have innovative laws and exciting policies driving towards full social inclusion. We have a society that is much better educated around issues to do with disability than at any time in our history. But the client groups which use our psychiatric and psychological services are still the least likely to be understood by the public, they remain the most marginalised.
There is a lot still to do! Your discipline, your sciences have helped us scope new beginnings, helped us to heal ourselves and our communities. You know better than anyone just how very difficult that work is. You face formidable problems from the unloved and maltreated children, the lives shut down by alcohol and drug abuse, the relationships that have broken hearts and hopes, the human messes created knowingly and unknowingly, the individual lives pushed and shoved into cul-de-sacs, the inner torment, the dangerous silence of so many suffering individuals. Through your vocation of care, we are able to probe the vast and mystifying realm of human psychology more intelligently, more confidently.
It is a privilege to pay tribute to that vital work here this morning, to thank you for your kind invitation to join in this important coming-together of the two Societies, and to wish you every success for your discussion over the coming two days. I hope that here new ideas will form, new networks coalesce and the seed-corn of a new and better future will grow.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir. Thank you