REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY BURLINGTON HOTEL, DUBLIN 4
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY BURLINGTON HOTEL, DUBLIN 4 TUESDAY 8 MARCH 2011
Dia dhíbh a chairde and thank you for the welcome to this gathering. Thank you in particular to Mark Ryan for inviting me to this special centenary celebration of International Women’s Day.
On this day one hundred years ago there were thirty-three female doctors registered in Ireland, of the five thousand members of the legal profession there were a mere sixty female clerks, of the three thousand working in banking, seven were women and in the world of accountancy there were one hundred and eighteen female accountants.
A hundred years ago, university education was available only to a very privileged and mostly male elite. UCD was then the size of a modest second-level school with only 500 students. Those women who had salaried employment paid the same taxes as men but they had no vote. About this time one hundred years ago Irish suffragettes were organising a boycott of the national census planned for April 2nd in protest at their exclusion from the franchise. You won’t find a census return that year for Hannah Sheehy Skeffington but you will find that, thanks to her and others like her, the momentum for change was generated that would in time lead to full civic equality for women. I am here, you are here, not simply by virtue of our own efforts but because in past generations when the rights of women and opportunities for women were outrageously restricted, there were brave and inspirational people, both men and women who refused to accept such discrimination and who pitted themselves against the government, the establishment, the law, and the powerful cultural consensus which would, if it could, have kept women as second-class citizens. With the creation of an International Women’s day one hundred years ago, the focus on the negative impact, the injustice and wastefulness of gender-biased patriarchy began to impact on more and more countries and cultures, including our own.
We acknowledge with pride the considerable changes in attitudes, opportunities, experience and legislation which have resulted from the long battle for the emancipation and equality of women. We have women Presidents, politicians, chief executives, soldiers, police officers, entrepreneurs. Many professions that were once dominated by men have now become substantially feminised. Women can work and raise a family simultaneously if they choose to. They have maternity pay and leave rights today which would have been unthinkable a couple of generations ago. There is an understanding of and response to domestic violence that is growing more sophisticated and effective all the time. But if anyone in this audience thinks the work begun a century ago is over, you are not tuned into the real world.
In most parts of the world, women still continue to live in the kind of conditions and with the kind of restrictions that were familiar to Irish women in 1911. So there is the challenge to us of international solidarity with those women whose lives are still only half-lived for their education, health, life prospects, civic participation are all much lower than their male counterparts. In our own country we still face the wastefulness and the skewed outcomes that arise from the fact that women still earn less than men, and participate numerically way below their potential in the political, business, economic, spiritual and intellectual life of our country.
So while today we are right to celebrate with enthusiasm all that has been accomplished these one hundred years, today is also a day for committing to the work that lies ahead in the next century.
We have at our disposal much more help with the heavy lifting than was available to Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and her colleagues. We have the confidence and independence that each of us garnered from our education, experience and personal success but today we also have the support of our national legislation and our government and our political parties. We have an international architecture that underpins women’s rights and that is championed by the European Union, the United Nations and the Council of Europe. In the overseas development field, our country’s official overseas aid programme particularly targets women through a focus on maternal health and lists the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women as one of its main goals.
And on the home front there is a growing realisation that to the extent that we fail to fully harness the complete range of talents, input and potential of women, our country will fly on one wing instead of two. Their contribution is essential to economic growth, to the problem-solving capacity of our civic society and to the ethical and moral input into the spiritual and secular intellectual wells from which we draw our ideas and values.
Encouraging individual women to step up and develop their fullest potential is an imperative for our society for it is an essential element in developing our national potential. It is reassuring to see leading employers, among them Accenture, offering programmes specifically designed to encourage the advancement of female staff. None of us can fully measure the paralysing effects of centuries of biased attitudes to women, to their roles and their aptitudes. But we can be sure that those effects continue sometimes overtly and sometimes very subtly particularly as women struggle to be mothers, carers and home-makers as well as employees or employers. Our challenge is to keep on building a culture of good practice so that women share positions of influence with men across all key sectors, so that their voices are listened to carefully and sensitively and so that our society shifts from the lop-sidedness of inherited patriarchy to the organic balance of gender equality.
We as women but also as a society of men and women, owe a huge debt of gratitude to all those who helped change the landscape of opportunity for women, the religious orders and other schools which offered women education long before it was politic to do so and whose alumnae became the women with a new ambition for themselves and their country, the men who championed equality for women, the women who made the best of lives frustrated by rules they had no way of changing, women who were our mothers and grandmothers, described by WR Rodgers, as the “Watchers and the Wakeners” (from the poem Resurrection) and whose sacrifice paved the way for our opportunities, and the women who a century ago in this city, not far from here at 52 Pearse St, then Great Brunswick Street, without violence or the threat of it, used their imaginations to draw attention to the injustice that enslaved them.
As each of us leaves this celebration today, we take with us that same challenge of one hundred years ago of how can we as women, help women, help our country and our culture to become more family friendly, more sensitive to the things which inhibit women’s full civic participation and which reduce the fullness of our shared civic life.
Back in 1911, the idea behind International Women’s Day was “women helping women”. It is still a good idea. In fact it is still necessary and we are the hands of the work of the next century.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.