REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF VISIT TO COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CENTRE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OCCASION OF VISIT TO COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CENTRE, CLIFTONVILLE ROAD, BELFAST
May I say what a great pleasure it is to be here with you today and thank Vivienne Anderson and her staff at the Community Development Centre for their kind invitation and for extending such a warm welcome to me. We meet in what is, without doubt, a most sensitive time in the peace process. Our politicians are grappling with serious and complex issues and, like all people of goodwill throughout the island, my hopes and prayers are with them as they carry out this difficult work. Too much time and energy has been invested by too many people to let such a real opportunity for lasting peace escape. We have come too far and we cannot go back.
Nobody knows better than the people of North Belfast the sheer corrosive pointlessness of violence, hatred and naked sectarian prejudice. The wasted years, the blighted lives. Within a short distance of this Centre, over 600 people were killed in the troubles - 600 people - each with a life, a family, a story. For each of them, how many more were injured? How many carry deep mental and emotional wounds that will never heal? For how many does the burnt- out door that symbolises this Centre resonate with bitter personal experience?
Looking back, all one can say is what a tragic, appalling, incomprehensible waste. What a sad commentary that the deep-rooted problems and divisions which fuelled the violence could not have been resolved by discussion and dialogue. Shouting and hectoring each other, attempting to force change through violence, these things harden hearts. We have learnt the hard, hard way that it is only when the ears are listening that the heart softens.
And yet even in the darkest days there were those who resolutely refused to despair. Those who realised that there could be, that there had to be, a better way. That each one of us would have to play a part in bringing it about. They had the vision and imagination to see that we could obliterate the win-lose ethic of the past and replace it with a new generous doctrine of trust, respect and reconciliation.
There were many people working away in places like this Centre. Working quietly but with a passion. Taking risks for peace and slowly chipping away at the wall of prejudice. Extending the hand of friendship and working to build up trust and confidence where none existed before. They brought people together, often one person at a time, helped them to come to know and to respect each other and, in doing so, gave us all the possibility of a future better than our past.
In its work over the past twenty-five years - during some of the toughest times in our history - this Centre has played a significant role in laying the foundations of peace and in nurturing and sustaining it through all of our difficulties.
The work of the Centre is by no means finished. It is a continuing task to replace fear and sectarianism with friendship and respect for differing traditions. Your work in this Centre is essential to providing a sound basis for the political process and to bolster it at community level.
It is a great privilege for me to be able to recognise and honour that contribution and to celebrate it here with you today. To celebrate twenty-five years during which the Centre has been a beacon of light to all of the people who have come here. During which you have demonstrated again and again the enormous power for good that ordinary people can have when they work together.
You have brought people together to participate in a remarkable range of activities and programmes reaching out to an enormously diverse range of individuals, groups and communities. Your work with immigrant groups is an excellent example of the breadth of your welcome and concern.
And as we once again face into difficult times, I look around at the enthusiasm, the buzz and the sense of purpose that characterises the Centre and I know that there will be nobody here resting on laurels. For you, the first twenty-five years are just a beginning.
Whatever happens in the days, months and years ahead and we all hope and pray the new political dispensation which gave us such hope and pride is simply taking a short detour and not facing derailment, I know that Vivienne and all of her colleagues and all of the people that work in, and use, the Centre, will continue to be a force for peace, reconciliation and, most of all, for hope.
I look forward to seeing this Centre continuing to grow and to thrive in a Belfast which has begun to come to terms with its past and to take ownership of its future. May you help this part of the city, person by person, to build a humanly decent place where every human being is seen not as a person who belongs to one side or the other side but as a person who belongs to God's common human family and whose birthright is equality and respect.