REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER ADMISSION AS AN HONORARY FELLOW OF THE FACULTY OF NURSING
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER ADMISSION AS AN HONORARY FELLOW OF THE FACULTY OF NURSING, ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS
Tá gliondar orm bheith anseo i bhur measc inniu. Is cúis mhór áthais agus bróid dom an onóir seo agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh go léir.
It is indeed a pleasure and an honour to be with you today. I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland for admitting me as an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Nursing. To be included in the company of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nan McGuinness and Patricia Ashworth is a great privilege, and I will cherish this honour.
As children, my three sisters and I went to a convent school in Belfast wedged into a tiny space between the Mater hospital and the Nurses’ Home. One of the most familiar sights was of the nurses in their swirling blue capes and starched uniforms going to and from the hospital. The uniform terrified me because I had some idea of the work involved in the starching but the construction of the edifice that was the nurse’s hat was beyond my engineering skills. Two other buildings dominated the immediate environment – one, the courthouse and the other, the famous Crumlin Road jail. My sisters chose careers in nursing - I chose a career in law - if I was going to have to dress up then a wig and gown, despite its eccentricity, looked by far the more maintenance free option!
However it is a source of great pride to me that long before I was President of Ireland I was Honorary President of the Newry and Mourne branch of the Royal College of Midwives - a distinction which may have had something to do with the fact that as one of sixty children produced by my mother and her siblings, my family had single-handedly kept several generations of midwives fully employed!
I have reason to know the value of the nursing profession. I have reason to be proud of the history of Irish nursing.
This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Faculty of Nursing, but here in ‘Surgeons’ the story of nursing education extends back to 1893. From that date onwards, an unbroken record of training continued until 1969, when the Dublin Hospitals set up independent Schools of Nursing. It might have seemed as if the College's role in the education and training of nurses was at an end. But it was recognised, with great vision and insight, that the increasingly complex and evolving nature of health care gave rise to a need for post-graduate training for nurses. And so this Faculty of Nursing, the first of its kind in Ireland and Great Britain, was established in 1974 under the guidance of Mary Frances Crowley. I know that each of the six Deans who have headed the Faculty since that time, including the present incumbent, Augusta Fitzsimons, have contributed enormously to the development of the Faculty and helped to shape it into the vibrant source of nursing education that it is today.
Nursing has undergone a dizzying degree of change over the past 25 years. The most significant, of course, has been the transition from the traditional 'apprenticeship' or ‘on the job training’ approach, to the new University-affiliated Programme.
Such profound changes do not always come easily or comfortably. They make considerable demands on people as the tyranny of new technology and new practices renders things redundant with increasing rapidity. But however awesome and sophisticated the technology - and this age of medical miracles is indeed awesome -nonetheless there are some critical aspects of our nurses’ work which have an integrity, an intrinsic value and an unchanging nature. The extraordinary spirit of caring and compassion, the dedication, warmth and humanity that Irish nurses have demonstrated, day in, day out, in every hospital and nursing home in the country: these are things no technology can buy, no computer can generate. They start in the human heart, in the seed of an idea in a young boy’s or girl’s mind when he or she first contemplates nursing as a career.
To patients and their families, in the unfamiliar setting of a hospital, often frightened and confused in the face of illness, even death, the nurse has been and has to keep on being, an unfailing friend and carer. It is in the look, the touch, the glance, the words, the smile, the time given to soothe, to explain, to console, to show interest in another human being - that is where you will find the ethos of nursing. Ally that to a formidable training, an impeccable professionalism and you have a nursing profession second to none.
Cardinal Newman, that great giant of education, once said that “to be human is to change - to be perfect is to have changed often.” Few fields have changed as much, as often, as dramatically as the field of medicine. The public has come to accept as normal things which were unimaginable a decade or two ago. I remember Christian Barnard’s mind-boggling heart surgery - how it captivated the globe, held us in thrall. Today the words ‘quadruple by-pass’ trip off our tongues as casually as if we were talking about breakfast cereals.
That constant pursuit of perfection, all that stunning progress means we need our nurses to be able to access the kind of training which ensures they remain at the heart of our health care services, combining the values that have served us so well in the past, with an even greater depth of knowledge and skills. Today the young man or woman who decides on nursing enters an exciting, demanding world of lifelong learning. We pray that as they grow strong, confident and proficient in that complex world of medical knowledge they will grow strong, confident and proficient in the simpler world of decent human relationships. We pray that they will find deep personal and professional fulfilment in their vocation and that with all its ups and downs, it will never lose the special place it holds, the special place it has earned over generations in the hearts of the people.
This Faculty has an invaluable role to play in securing the dynamic future of nursing. The excellent reputation of the programmes of education you provide here, is due to the outstanding work of so many people, both within the Faculty itself and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland as a whole. I would like to pay particular tribute to the College President, Professor Barry O'Donnell, the Registrar, Professor Kevin O'Malley, along with Augusta Fitzsimons, Nora Cummins and all of their colleagues within the Faculty.
I wish you every success in all your future plans, not least the development of a Masters Degree in Nursing, under the direction of Professor Seamus Cowman.
Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh go léir arís as ucht an onóir seo a bhronnadh orm. Guím rath agus séan oraibh sa todhchaí.