REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE INAUGURAL ALUMNI AWARDS DUBLIN CITY UNI
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE INAUGURAL ALUMNI AWARDS DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY MONDAY, 8TH MAY, 2006
President von Prondzynski, Ladies and Gentlemen
Cuireann sé áthas orm bheith anseo libh arís inniu. Tá mé buíoch díbh as an gcuireadh agus as an bhfáilte fíorchaoin a chur sibh romham.
Happy 25th birthday DCU and congratulations to the six Distinguished Access Alumni who are to be specially honoured on this day of celebration. As the story of each one is told and as they receive their Inaugural Alumni Medallions we can see in microcosm the enormous benefits that have followed the marriage between DCU’s pioneering educational opportunities and the many students who have taken those opportunities.
Dublin City University may be Ireland’s youngest university but its birth and early childhood have coincided with the single most exciting and hope-filled period in Irish history – a period that began with the introduction of free second-level education at the end of the 1960s. Seamus Heaney, writing of a similar though earlier time North of the border, describes an emancipation of the mind, as young people with what he calls “Intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars” broke lose of the shackles of endemic under-achievement. The first generation to benefit from the introduction of free second-level education here at the end of the 1960s grew rapidly hungry for third-level education and their voracious appetite drove a new flowering of creativity and imagination that would within a very short time reverse the fortunes of the Irish economy and radically transform Irish life. DCU was first an offspring and then a generator of that fresh imagination. Here in this university there was a profound understanding of the fact that Ireland’s greatest natural resource lay in the brainpower of her people, that education was the machine that harvested that resource and that every life excluded from the fullest access to the widest education was a life in danger of being consigned to be half–lived, talents unrevealed, skill and power wasted. So DCU set itself an ambitious agenda of social inclusion, to reach out to the widest possible range of potential students, especially from non-traditional areas and backgrounds, to draw them into education and to draw them out as confident, high-achieving human beings, opened up to themselves and to the world through education. This university knew that the investment in each student would bring not just individual rewards but civic rewards, making us stronger and more effective as a society and as an economy.
Like the bodybuilders who take to the gym to develop the full physical potential of their bodies, Irish men and women have taken to the schools, institutes and universities to develop their minds’ fullest potential and the evidence is all around us that education is a key factor in individual happiness, opportunity and fulfilment as well as a driving national force for social and economic good.
As Patron of NALA the National Adult Literacy Association I often encounter people who are living with serious literacy and numeracy problems. For the most part they left school early and for the most part they are poor or in low-paid, unskilled jobs. The word marginalized was invented for them, the mother who has never read a bedtime story to her children, the man who labours on a building site and has the name of being anti-social because he is afraid of eating his meals with his colleagues in case he will be asked to pick a horse from the newspaper’s racing columns or the woman who brought what she thought was yellow pack baked beans only to discover it was dog food. One woman told me that lack of education had consigned her to life inside a matchbox and another woman who through NALA had overcome her literacy problems and gone on to university with the help of an access programme, told me that neither she nor her family knew who she truly was until education opened up her talents and her self-confidence. That is what make access programmes the greatest adventure in education in Ireland today for they send a powerful message that knowledge is not a cake that gets smaller the more people it is divided among but a vital national resource that expands exponentially the more people who contribute to it. My parents, like so many of their generation, left school early because there was no other choice. They were conscious of the limits placed on their life chances by virtue of a limited education and they wanted their children to be free of such obstacles and so they preached to their children to make the most of the much greater educational opportunities that were open to the next generation. Today we have access programs, second-chance opportunities, lifelong learning and a myriad of initiatives designed to ensure that where there is exclusion today there will be inclusion tomorrow.
In homes which experienced grinding poverty for generations, and where the only hope came from emigration, there are now mantelpieces heaving under the graduation photographs of Bachelor, Masters and Doctorate degrees. A quarter of a century may be a very short period in history but the journey travelled by our citizens has been fast and has taken us far. And yet it is only the start for there are still too many spectators, too many early school-leavers, too many places where few go on to College. Now we need leaders, advocates and ambassadors for tomorrow’s Ireland, men and women who are on a mission to make Ireland better not just for some but for all, to make a lived reality of those great words in the Proclamation which makes it our national ambition to “cherish the children of the nation equally.” Our Medal recipients are such leaders, each one a powerful witness to the personal life-enrichment that comes from education and the communal life-enrichment that comes from having such people at work in the community, in business, in politics, in academe and in industry. Dublin City University is also such a leader. With the biggest access programme in the university sector this University is playing a hugely significant role in uplifting, broadening and deepening Irish life. For 25 remarkable years I say thank you to all staff and every student. For the 25 to come I wish you the greatest of continuing success. Thank you.
Go raibh fada buan sibh agus go raibh míle maith agaibh.