REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER VISIT TO THE JUVENILE DETENTION CENTRES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER VISIT TO THE JUVENILE DETENTION CENTRES OBERSTOWN, LUSK, CO. DUBLIN TUESDAY
- Cuireann sé áthas ar mo chroí bheith anseo libh inniu. Míle bhuíochas as bhur bhfáilte chaoin.
- I am delighted to be here on my first visit as President of Ireland though not my first visit for I have been here quite a few times in my past life.
I can’t think of anything I would rather do than be here in Trinity House School today and in your company. I know you have gone to an awful lot of trouble to prepare for this visit and I want you to know that I appreciate all the efforts made by the students, staff and directors to make me feel welcome both here in Trinity House and earlier at the Oberstown Education Centre.
- I would like to warmly thank the Chairperson of the Board of Management, Teri Dungan, for inviting me. Teri was a pupil of mine many years ago at a different Trinity – Trinity College Dublin.
- One of the reasons that I am here today is to open the newly refurbished Unit 3. It is looking terrific and of course the fact that it is looking so well is because a lot of people did a lot of work. I am very grateful to Jamie and to Wayne for the expert way in which they and the Unit Manager here, Mark Yalloway, guided me around. It was obvious that you take pride in the new Unit and you are entitled to do so because it is a credit to everyone who did the work whether their job was big or small, whether it was making the tea or making fun, between you all, you got the job done and a fine job you did. Congratulations.
- I have quite a few things in common with some of the students here. First I arrived here accompanied by the police. Secondly if I tried to leave here on my own they’d be down the road after me like a shot! But I came because I wanted to meet the young people whose lives will hopefully be helped and changed by this place and the people whose lives are dedicated to helping them. So opening the new Unit was really just the excuse I was waiting for to meet you all at these three centres. And I want to tell you how genuinely impressed I have been by your friendliness, and by the justified pride you have take in the things you have achieved since arriving here in the Centre.
- I haven’t lived your lives. I haven’t walked in your shoes so no I don’t know what it feels like to have done the things, thought the thoughts, travelled the road that brought you here. I know that none of you chose to come here but things happened in your lives or were made to happen which took you away from you homes, your friends, your streets, your community. Some of you may even believe you have been taken away from your lives.
- If I had a blank sheet of paper and on it I could write a new life for you and I would write a very different story from the one already written. I know that locked inside your heads and hearts are hardships, losses, bereavements, cruelties, criticisms, bad decisions, misunderstandings, angers, doubts, none of which I or anyone else would have wished for you. But they are there and while we cannot rewrite the past, the future is ours to change - for it is a blank sheet of paper - it has not yet been written on. It does not have to look the same, be the same as the past. It doesn’t change by accident or by doing nothing. You can change it and you can change it dramatically for the better with a bit of help - you do not have to do it all alone.
- There is a line from a poem by Yeats which says ‘too long a suffering can make a stone of the heart’. But hearts which have been hardened by suffering, by hopelessness, by a feeling that the world doesn’t care, can be softened and made whole again by discovering that there are people who do care, who want to help, to restore hope and optimism.
- You are fortunate to have so many people like that here in these Centres, among your teachers and carers. There may be times when they irritate you, annoy you, drive you mad – and I am sure the feeling is mutual – but it is obvious that they really do care. A good teacher or carer is like a diamond cutter. He gets a lump of ugly rock, the kind of rock you and I might throw in the bin or kick out of the road. But the diamond cutter sees through to the beauty, the sparkle which lies undiscovered beneath the surface and only he with his delicate cutting skills can reveal the true beauty of the diamond - make it sparkle, make people gasp at its loveliness. You could say he introduces the stone to the diamond inside itself and that is what a good teacher or carer can do too. If you let them they will take you on a journey inside yourselves and they will introduce you to talents, skills, abilities, hopes, dreams you never knew you were capable of but which they believed were there all along.
- When life is hard on us we often build walls around ourselves to protect ourselves from hurt. Like the rough stone, our true selves lie under layers and layers that get in the way of living the kind of lives we would be proud to live and the kind of lives that make others proud. A good teacher, like the good diamond cutter sees that potential and helps to bring it out through encouragement, praise and slow, painstaking hard work. Changing lives around is a process. It needs time, space and a good environment.
- Sometimes we do not give the teachers and carers the thanks they deserve, so today I would like you all to join me in giving a warm round of applause to all of the teachers and staff here
- Of course, teachers can do only so much. They want the best for you. They can offer you the opportunities to learn and to grow – but it is an invitation not a command. You have to decide do you want the future to be a repetition of the past or do you want to use these days well so that they become your special roadway to a different kind of future? There are opportunities here and of course anywhere there are opportunities, there are choices. It is always up to you to decide. I hope with all my heart that you do.
- During the week I read the story of a wealthy doctor’s daughter who lived in Ireland in the middle of the 18th century. You probably have all heard about the big famine a hundred and fifty years ago but this woman Letitia Pilkington lived a hundred years before that and people died in their hundreds of thousands on the side of the road from hunger and disease and neglect. Children died young - as did her older brother and she herself was always ill. Her mother was unbelievably cruel thumping her every day because her hands were blue from the cold. Because she was a woman she was not allowed to learn to read but she learnt secretly and lived in dread of anyone finding out because she would have been beaten savagely. Her mother arranged for her to marry a man, a minister who treated her badly too and she died young at the age of thirty eight. We now know that this woman had great talents but life made it very difficult for those talents to blossom. Yet she struggled with whatever bits and pieces of help she could get to make the most of her life, the most of her talents when she could so easily have given up and lost hope.
- There are too many people in our society whose lives have been only half-lived, who never had the opportunity to change, or who chose not to. Too many communities have been scarred by the loss of that talent, by what might have been, by potential wasted or warped, channelled to harm rather than help. You have been given an opportunity to reshape your lives, now, while you are still young enough to change direction. That takes courage, it takes hard work and it requires you to be willing to take a risk. But it is worth it. Because if you are determined enough, the only limits on what you can achieve are those you set for yourself. I know that you have already probably surprised yourselves in what you have accomplished here. Keep on surprising yourselves.
- In the parish I cam from in Belfast most people were poor. My own parents left school at a young age but they knew education was the best means of changing our lives. They were right. Often when I was studying for exams in a houseful of screeching children - among them the yappiest one of your teachers here - I wanted to give up, run away, forget the whole thing. My grandmother’s words were often helpful - you don’t have to like it she would say, you just have to do it. But it was one teacher’s faith in me that kept me at it. I look back now with gratitude that she cared enough to give me a little word of praise, a gentle word of encouragement, enough to give me the confidence to believe that I could put my own shape on the future. I hope that will be your future, that you will grasp the educational opportunities you have here and that you will take the lessons you have learned both inside and outside the classroom, with you when you go back to your families and communities. People who change their lives around are very special people in their homes, their streets, for they tell others who may be suffering in silence, who may be about to make mistakes or about to give up on themselves that where there is life, there really is hope. You just have to do it. I know you can, I have seen what you have done here and I know you can. Enjoy writing a new script for you lives. I hope I will always be as proud of you as I am today. My very best wishes go with you on that journey.
- I have greatly enjoyed my visit here, and I would like to warmly thank the Board of Management, the Directors of the three Centres, all of the wonderful staff and the amazing students for making my visit such a memorable one. I wish all of you, and in particular the boys here, a hope-filled and very bright future.
- Nár laga Dia sibh. Go raibh maith agaibh.