Remarks by President McAleese at the presentation of a City & Guilds Fellowship honoris causa
Remarks by President McAleese at the presentation of a City & Guilds Fellowship honoris causa Westbury Hotel, Dublin
Thank you very much for your generous invitation and for the honour of admitting me to an honorary fellowship. I don’t remember when I first heard the name City & Guilds but I cannot remember a time when I did not know of its legendary work in educating and training people throughout Ireland. In the Belfast parish where I grew up, many, in those days, were early school-leavers; not through choice but through necessity and it was access to on-going vocational training offered by City & Guilds that was their hope for progression and promotion in the workplace and for social mobility. My own very large clan kept City & Guilds busy north of the border and I am thrilled today to bring home one of the 20,000 certificates that you issue each year though in the case of the other 19,999 a process of rigorous training and testing preceded their award.
City & Guilds is an all-island organisation and through your work men and women in a massive variety of disciplines have achieved formal qualifications which attest to their skill and also their determination. At my last encounter with City & Guilds, I was presenting Medals of Excellence and “highly commended” certificates to students from both North and South in a Joint all-Ireland Medal ceremony. There it was clear to see the benefits your training offers to the individual, to their workplaces, to the economies north and south and to the island as a whole, for in this complex global economy education and training are absolutely crucial to our future competitiveness and success. They empower the individual, help him or her to widen their skills and ambitions, encourage them to blossom more fully, more confidently.
In Ireland we have a hunger for education and it has served us well for since the advent of free second level education the story of Ireland has been utterly transformed from a story of endemic under-achievement to a story of highly acclaimed success. It is still a story that has only just begun. There are many, many more chapters yet to be written and your efforts to align the City & Guilds awards with the Irish Framework and to pilot here the use of UK quality assurance will be an important part in the writing of the next chapter of this new Ireland that will emerge from the confluence of peace, prosperity and partnership.
However the price we pay for our transformation into one of the world’s leading knowledge economies is the relentless pressure on all levels of society - as an economy, as firms and as individuals - to continue learning. In lifelong learning, therefore, lies the key to our continued success. This is reflected in the National Skills Strategy which aims to have advanced an additional 500,000 persons at least one level up on the National Framework of Qualifications by 2020. The release of talent and the surge of new skills will alter life for the better for all those individuals and for us as a society. There are challenging targets ahead for our training providers and indeed for all of us now that we live our lives right in the very forefront of the heady - at times, giddy - global economy.
I thank City & Guilds for accompanying so many people on the journey through life-long learning and I thank you again for the lovely honour you have conferred upon me.
Thank you.