REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF HER VISIT TO LAOIS EDUCATION CENTRE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF HER VISIT TO LAOIS EDUCATION CENTRE, MONDAY, 27TH SEPTEMBER, 2004
Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Tá áthas orm bheith anseo inniu i Port Laoise chun bualadh le muintir an Ionad Oideachais na Laoise.
It’s good to be with you today, thanks to Tony Mahon for his kind invitation to visit Laois Education Centre. Presidential visits are nothing new to you of course for President Robinson was here in the days of the Centre’s humble prefabricated beginnings. What a change since then in the facilities on offer but what has really not changed here is the importance attached to education.
We have all come a long way since Padraic Colum’s Poor Scholar’s eyes were red and heavy “with bending o'er the smouldering peat”. In the period Colum wrote about, Portlaoise was not just relying on hedge schools. A decade or more before the famine, Portlaoise had almost a thousand children in a variety of convent, parish and national schools, something that probably should not surprise us for this place had been for centuries an important centre of commerce, with a Thursday market courtesy of Queen Elizabeth 1.
Today we meet in a splendid Centre, part of a 31 full-time and part-time strong network of education centres throughout the country dedicated to providing teachers with vital support in their formidably responsible role as educators of our children. How did we move from under the deadweight of a culture of resignation to a high achieving culture of motivation? Many commentators have asked that question and always in answering it the word “education” features prominently.
Access to good education has at last allowed us to harvest our natural talent base, to keep it at home, to watch it change the image and fortunes of modern Ireland. The pace of change has impacted dramatically on the teaching profession. There has hardly been time to draw breath and say thank you for the massive investment made by teachers in Ireland’s success for that very success has provoked more complexity, more challenges that teachers have had to respond to. Curricula have changed, laws have changed, attitudes of parents have changed, attitudes of children have changed, experiences of teachers have changed. These have been heady and exhilarating times in many ways but worrying too, for so often it has been our teachers who have been the first to observe those who were being left behind and who intuited the panic that sets in when every other boat is launched on the tide and yours is still where it was, beached. Teachers have been in the front line in terms of helping emigrants to Ireland integrate and settle, in putting inclusion and anti-racism on the school agenda. To keep a steady hand on the tiller of the ship Education has been far from easy.
Although, as teachers, you work surrounded by people, both pupils and other teachers, supported by parents and boards of management, essentially you face our children alone. Day in and day out their eyes are drawn to you, their ears listening to you, for you are a centre of gravity in their lives and the quality of the discourse you engender is vital. Centres, such as this one, I know, go a long way to mitigate some of the problems which that level of isolation can cause. Here is a place to be in the company of people whose insights and experiences you can draw on. Here is a place where your own distilled wisdom can be of value to someone else. This Centre offers humanly important validation, upskilling, and guidance through which our teachers grow stronger and our educational network in turn also grows stronger.
Using the Centre for art exhibitions and conferences, in addition to in-service training, draws together parents and the other partners in education, broadening the dialogue, reinforcing the connections through which our children’s education prospers. It is particularly heartening to see the Centre host the Special Education Support Service and to know that here pioneering work has been done in the development of programmes for teachers of children with Autism. Here is education pushing aside old boundaries and including “in” children who were previously never considered as an issue for mainstream teaching.
Enjoy your Centre and may its use more than vindicate those who have worked to create it especially the management committee and staff, both full-time and volunteer, and the Director of the Centre, Tony Mahon who bring it all together. On a day like this as you showcase the Centre at its very best and celebrate its achievements I hope you feel renewed and re-energised in your vocation to education. Without it, without you, Ireland’s story would be so different. Those “highbanked clouds of resignation “ to use Seamus Heaney’s words, would have taken much longer to scatter. Congratulations on what you have achieved up to now and what you will achieve in and through this centre in the future.
Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil libh arís as ucht an cuireadh a thug sibh dom bheith anseo libh inniu. Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh agus guím gach rath air san am atá le teacht. Go raibh maith agaibh.