REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE EUROPEAN OF THE YEAR AWARD
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF THE EUROPEAN OF THE YEAR AWARD BERKELEY COURT HOTEL
A Dhaoine Uaisle, tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith anseo libh tráthnóna ar ócaid speisialta seo. Míle buíochas libh as an chaoin-chuireadh.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be here with you for this important annual event. I congratulate the European Movement Ireland for its organisation of the award, and on its continuing work to promote the European ideal, to foster debate and to disseminate information on Europe throughout Ireland. Great credit is due to the European Movement’s Chairman Alan Gillis, its Chief Executive Patricia Lawler, and its hardworking staff, members and supporters. I am also very glad to see that Aer Rianta, under its Chairman Noel Hanlon, has continued its valuable sponsorship of this event.
What makes this annual award so important is that it reminds us how central to the story of the European Union is the individual human story. It reminds us too that the Union draws together hundreds of millions of human beings who experience life very differently but who live inside a great human adventure in shared citizenship that is not a mere abstraction or a jumble of treaties and complex institutions but is about making Europe a better, safer, freer, happier, more equitable and prosperous place than at any time in its long, tangled history.
Despite its immense achievements and its noble ambitions the Union can seem remote from those it serves. The vitality and energy its founders would wish to see in the heart of each citizen is sapped by a perception that the centre is colourless, bureaucratic and distant. Pity the pressures on any network that is supporting fifteen independent sovereign states in a working partnership and balancing the needs of four hundred million feisty and demanding people. Yet without the confidence, trust and passion of the individual citizen the dream of the Union would soon turn to vapour.
Many have commented on the growing sense that more has to be done to make the Union accessible and intelligible, to renew and reenergize the individual and communal sense of ownership of European citizenship. That perception came through very powerfully during the Nice Treaty referendum campaign, and I understand it has also been a consistent theme of the public sessions held throughout Ireland by the National Forum on Europe.
The leaders of the Union have themselves acknowledged the challenge involved in reconnecting the Union to the people so there is an emerging unity of focus which will surely drive the Future of Europe debate and the Convention that is due to start at the end of this month. It is important that the Convention tries to address issues from the perspective of the perplexed citizen, not of the comfortable insider already familiar with all of the jargon.
In Ireland, too, there is a job to be done in bridging the communication gap and it is a job which demands coherence from those charged with the job of briefing the public as much as it also demands sustained curiosity from the public about these essential things which shape our lives. Political leadership imposes duties and responsibilities which are easily identified but so too does citizenship and the bridge across the communication gap will be easier to fill if it is being worked on from both sides.
The almost seamless conversion to the Euro is a formidable example of what Ireland can achieve when people, politicians, institutions, business and industry are all pushing in the same direction. We were at the very forefront of the twelve Eurozone countries in the speed and smoothness of our adaptation. It did not happen by accident. We were well prepared by the effective and painstaking preparations of many people over several years, and an outstanding job was done in communicating the facts to the public. This stunning achievement was spear‑headed by the Euro Changeover Board of Ireland and its dedicated staff.
A strong, successful and confident Ireland and a thriving Union are best guaranteed by the spirit of civic leadership and determined pursuit of excellence exemplified by our five short-listed candidates. Soccer is of course a universal language, not just a European one: Roy Keane, as captain of Manchester United and of the Republic of Ireland, speaks it better than almost anybody else and has won huge admiration throughout Europe for his skill and his indomitable spirit. I wish Roy and his teammates the very best in the Far East this summer where we know they will be first-class ambassadors for Ireland.
Professor Brigid Laffan, as Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Institute at University College Dublin, is a formidable champion of the Union. Her enthusiasm is underpinned by rigorous scholarship and among her many talents is an ability to communicate easily and effectively to all audiences. Hers is a voice which refuses to speak only to the academic world but insists on doing well that very thing the institutions are accused of neglecting, informing the public, debating the issues, insisting that fact and not myth underpin perception.
Another champion of Ireland in Europe and superb communicator is of course Pat Cox. Having been privileged to be a colleague of Pat’s many years ago, I can testify to his huge talent for communication. His faith in the European Parliament, and his determination to enhance the Parliament’s role and public profile in the Union, were justly rewarded by his election as President last month. That unique achievement is a source of great pride and hope to all of us in Ireland and a deep reassurance to the smaller nations in the Union and those which aspire to membership.
Through the exceptional contribution we all know he will make over the next thirty months we will see over and over again the centrality of the human person and the invitation that exists for each citizen to make a contribution to his or her history on a landscape far beyond Ireland’s shores.
The final nominee is known to every television viewer and radio listener in Ireland as a consummate communicator. For twelve years, he conveyed with crisp authority, and with an instinct for the politically dramatic, what was happening in the EU ‑ both on stage and behind the scenes. He did an outstanding job in translating the complex into the intelligible, and in winning people’s trust and interest. He has been nominated for this award several times and last autumn, he transferred from Brussels to Belfast – to guide us all through the consolidation of Northern Ireland’s new political dispensation, another great adventure in advanced consensus based politics which could simply never have happened without the prior existence of the European Union, without its inspirational witness and without the recalibration of relationships between these two islands which it greatly helped to facilitate.
Last month Tommie very courageously shared his own painful but uplifting personal story and through it highlighted a little‑known benefit of EU membership. It was a singularly hard thing to do particularly after the trauma, worry and pain he had already endured but in that act of generosity Tommie Gorman surely typifies the New European, proudly Irish, comfortably European, filled with faith in this Union which promises to a continent once blighted by the forces of hatred that tomorrow will be made peaceful and prosperous by the forces of fairness and partnership. We already know how easy it is for the forces of evil to rally people to their cause and we should be under no illusion that galvanising and sustaining the forces of democracy and partnership is an infinitely more difficult task.
That is why events like this are so essential in affirming, encouraging and rewarding the best and the noblest things in human nature especially when they are put at the service of our common European homeland. We are fortunate to have such a galaxy of admirable nominees and from among them I am delighted to announce that the choice for European of the Year for 2001 is Tommie Gorman.
Go maire tú é, a Thomáis.
I am also delighted to say that a special award and a much deserved one is being made to its Chairperson of the Euro Changeover Board, Philip Hamell for his excellent work on the changeover project.