REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE NEW K.A.R.E HEAD OFFICE AND DAY CARE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE OFFICIAL OPENING OF THE NEW K.A.R.E HEAD OFFICE AND DAY CARE SERVICE FOR ADULTS, NEWBRIDGE
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh inniu ar an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle bhuíochas as an chaoin-chuireadh.
I am grateful to have this opportunity to be with you today y to officially open the new K.A.R.E Head Office and Day Care Service for adults here in Newbridge. My thanks to Christy Lynch for inviting me to join you today and to each of you for that warm and generous welcome.
Today marks another great day, yet another success story, in the history of K.A.R.E. In the 37 years since K.A.R.E was founded you have created a remarkable litany of successes but this one I imagine is your pride and joy for the sheer excellence of the facilities it offers. You are entitled to be proud of this place and of all that K.A.R.E has accomplished.
This organisation has flourished thanks to the great determination and sheer hard work of men and women united in their belief that only the very best is good enough for our adults and children with an intellectual disability and their families. For the 380 citizens who use your services throughout County Kildare, East Offaly and West Wicklow, you bring an energy and a dimension to their lives which simply cannot be fully measured but which is tangible in their progress, their skills, their happiness, in their clear movement from mere existence to enjoyment. To their families you bring the hope, the support, the opportunity that makes life’s burdens more tolerable. You are the face, the hands and heart of a caring community which shares the worries and the work of those for whom life is particularly difficult and onerous. Without this organisation there would be a lot of loneliness, heartache, frustration, exhaustion, a lot of wasted talent and at times even despair.
Many wonderful, good, people have created and sustained this organisation over the years. Some are here today and many more sadly are not – people like Jimmy McMahon, Con Hayes and Peg O’Callaghan who have gone to their eternal reward after a lifetime of support for K.A.R.E. Others now walk the paths they created each helping to make Ireland a good place to live for those with intellectual disabilities and helping the wider society to realise how much we benefit from a fully inclusive society where each human being is helped to realise his or her fullest potential. Last June, the Special Olympics, gave us a unique insight into the kind of generous and joyful world we are capable of creating when we focus on revealing the truest ability of the human person.
Each and every one of us possesses our own special, unique, God-given talents. What makes a life fulfilled and contented is the discovery of those talents, the experience of watching them grow and blossom. They are our most wonderful natural resource and if they are wasted, the individual is destined to live a lost, tragic life and society generally is destined to be impoverished and diminished by the waste of that talent. If they are used well, the individual flourishes and we as a society grow stronger. The Special Olympics strengthened us as a people and I know K.A.R.E played a huge role in making those Games the enormous success they were both on and off the sports-fields. You were a big part of Team Ireland and to all of you and your nineteen competitors I want to say congratulations and a big thank you.
It is great to see K.A.R.E also making such a big success of the ‘Best Buddies’ programme first devised by Anthony Kennedy Shriver. Those friendships between people who have intellectual disabilities and those who do not have a huge capacity to enrich both lives enormously and to enrich our evolving culture, taking us closer to that fully integrated, inclusive society we dream of and work for.
As the European Year of People with Disabilities draws to a close in just a few days from now (on 24th January) we reflect with gratitude on what has been achieved and with determination to do all we have left to do to ensure that our special brothers and sisters live their lives to the full and not consigned to a twilight world of half-lived lives and chronic under-achievement. We still have some way to go before that fully inclusive equal opportunity society is the lived daily reality for every citizen but we are lucky to be living through times when we are closer to it than any generation gone past and when we have the benefit of much greater possibilities, much greater resources and much greater wisdom. We also have the benefit of a new culture of partnership in the delivery of services.
When we work together across disciplines and organisations, when we generously share insights and experience and humbly learn from the widest range of stakeholders we amass a broader base of knowledge and insight and create considerably greater synergies and opportunities than when we work alone. One of the most positive features of the disability services here in Ireland is the very strong partnership which now exists between all the stakeholders involved in the planning and delivery of services, a partnership that includes the Government, health boards, voluntary agencies, families and friends, and of course persons with disabilities themselves. As the old Irish saying rightly professes ní neart le chur le chéile – there is strength in partnership. Long may that partnership prosper and may the partnership that is the K.A.R.E organisation continue to flourish in the years ahead. This fine building gives us every reassurance that it will.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh agus gúim rath Dé air sa todhchaí. Go raibh maith agaibh.