REMARKS BY President McAleese on the occasion of the Women’s Irish Network Lunch Hyde Park Hotel
REMARKS BY President McAleese on the occasion of the Women’s Irish Network Lunch Hyde Park Hotel, Knightsbridge 21 April 1999
I would firstly like to thank Mary Clancy and the rest of the committee for inviting me to this lunch today. I am personally very pleased that an organisation such as the Women's Irish Network has come into being, I understand your inaugural breakfast in January was a resounding success and that Polly Devlin was then, as indeed she was today, a very entertaining speaker. I would also like to thank John Kilty for his kind introduction.
The Women's Irish Network is a timely development. Certainly it is an opportune moment for Irish women in Britain to be forging links with each other and seeking to develop a purposeful business network which will be of particular benefit to younger Irish women seeking to establish their careers here in Britain.
In a recent address to members of the Mexican Senate on Ireland’s recent economic, social and cultural success, I felt it necessary to emphasise again the centrality of the role of women in forging the successful modern nations of today, and in particular to emphasise the huge dividends Ireland has enjoyed as a result of the recent engagement of significant numbers of women in a broad range of public and professional roles.
It may seem almost too obvious to point out that economic boom, of the type being experienced in Ireland today, is only sustainable and has largely come about because of the phenomenal change in the scale of the participation of women in public and professional spheres in recent times. And while I have specifically mentioned the economic dividends that have resulted from this greater participation of women, this is simply because it is such a tangible and visible consequence and it is not to overlook other less easily measurable dividends. However, I think you will agree that Ireland would not be seen by so many as a vibrant modern nation in social and cultural fields if it were only running on half-power. For too many generations, we like the rest of the world corralled and wasted the full talents and wisdom of women. Today in Ireland the walls which kept those talents locked into narrow spaces are being dismantled and a radical transformation is proving the integrity of the process of full political, social and economic inclusion of women.
Many of us Irish women gathered in this room today are to some extent a product of this new phenomenon. However, that is not to say that we are passive products of our time. That would be to gloss over the myriad examples of personal achievement and vision which have ensured such success for so many Irish women both in Ireland and abroad.
The establishment of the Women’s Irish Network here in Britain is a natural and timely offspring of the experience of Irish women at home and it is truly refreshing to see so many Irish women enjoying their success in Britain while simultaneously - and unashamedly - celebrating their links with Ireland.
The Women’s Irish Network is intended to act as a reservoir to pool the knowledge and contacts of its members. This is an important role, and one which is often overlooked by fledgling organisations; the positive effects of an experienced campaigner "mentoring" or "championing" a succeeding generation have long been implicitly recognised in certain (frequently male) circles. I am certain the Network can selectively use these examples in a progressive way to assist its members and others in their professional and personal lives. The road to self-fulfillment can be doubly difficult and lonely for women. So often they are forging new paths, going places where women have not been before. The Network is an essential form of scaffolding and support.
I would like to applaud the Network for its other core objective of raising funds for the Irish Youth Foundation, an organisation I met up with during my first visit to London in September last year and which I have great pleasure in being associated with again here today. I am delighted that the establishment of the Women’s Irish Network will help the Irish Youth Foundation continue its important work aimed at improving the quality of life of disadvantaged young Irish people in Britain and Ireland. The tradition of outreach to each other of one Irish person making space for and welcoming another is a critical part of our makeup. When we had nothing, we shared what little we had. Wherever we went in the world we made sure to create a place, a club or society for the next wave of immigrants, so that they would not experience the same loneliness and lostness. It is great to see that ethic still so dominant in the work of the Irish Youth Foundation.
Over four hundred years ago, an Irish woman from the farthest reaches of western Connacht famously came to London to represent her native people before the reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth I. Granuaile (or Grace O'Malley) received an historic and ultimately positive hearing from Elizabeth. Contemporary accounts tell us each woman was favourably impressed by the demeanour and ability displayed by the other.
Events such as that have become less than common in the intervening four centuries: Irish women coming to Britain have not typically been arriving to negotiate or even meet with the Head of State. Rather the Irishwoman immigrant in the nineteenth century was usually destined for a life of desperate, grim struggle in the swirl of industrialising Britain. The rapid growth of cities such as Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool was, as we know, partly fuelled by the availability of cheap labour in the form of immigrants. The world they came to was only marginally less awful than the one they left – so often the difference was just between starvation and hunger.
I am reminded of a poem by the contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland simply called ‘The Emigrant Irish’ in which she describes how Ireland once was forced to treat its emigrants:
‘like oil lamps we put them out the back
of our houses, of our minds’
This harsh picture of near abandonment is reminiscent of a time when the call to emigrate was more of an imperative than a choice for those who left, and of a time when similarly the stoical acceptance of emigration as an inevitability was as much an imperative as a choice for those left behind.
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that to understand Irish women’s emigration, we have to look beyond simple economic factors. Indeed Irish women have a very distinctive history of emigration - unlike the women from many other European traditions, Irish women usually emigrated alone without husbands or fathers, many seeking not only economic independence but personal and social independence also. Since the famine more women than men have consistently left Ireland.
Here in Britain the vast majority found employment in various aspects of the service industry such as domestic service and waitressing, whilst nursing was traditionally the only profession open to emigrant Irish women. This position has only begun to change in the relatively recent past. As Clare Barrington points out in her work ‘Irish Women in England’
‘An analysis of occupational change for Irish women in London between 1951 and 1981 found that despite substantially higher formal qualifications the social mobility of Irish women was lower than that of either Irish men or the population as a whole’
As generation succeeded generation, the patterns appeared and indeed are only now beginning to shift significantly. With this in mind, it could be argued that the female Irish economic and social emigrants of the nineteen fifties had a lot more in common with their compatriots of a century earlier that with the more recent influx of Irish women in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Again returning to the Women’s Irish Network, I would hope that it will become, to a certain extent, a forum in which the gap between those who emigrated in the fifties and before and those who have emigrated in more recent times, can be bridged. The lives of those who endured hard times at home and here but who believed in better times to come, hoped for them, prayed for them – those lives are indicated in your success today. They would be proud of your accomplishments, as I am proud of them.
To conclude, I would like to return to that poem of Eavan Boland ‘The Emigrant Irish’ which I believe has a powerful and timely message for us all and specifically for those of us who are here today to celebrate our Irishness. As Boland writes of the Irish emigrant:
‘By their lights now it is time to imagine how they stood there,
what they stood with, that their possessions may become our power’
May the experience of all those Irish women who have come to Britain, both in the more distant and more recent pasts, ‘become your power and your inspiration’ as this generation of Irish women in Britain gather in joyful celebration of their abilities, their success and in impatient contemplation of what they can achieve together in the future.
Thank you.