Remarks by President McAleese to the Annual Conference of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors
Remarks by President McAleese to the Annual Conference of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors 3 March, 2000
A dhaoine uaisle, tá mé buíoch díbh as an chuireadh a thug sibh dom teacht anseo. Is onóir dom bheith i láthair inniú ag an ócáíd seo.
I am delighted to have been invited by your National Executive Committee to address your conference here today. Thank you all very much indeed for your warm welcome.
I know that occasions such as this fulfil an important role for your organisation. It gives you space to step back for a moment from day-to-day pressures and deadlines, to look at progress, at trends, current developments, new ideas and emerging problems. Here instead of struggling and juggling on your own, this conference offers time and opportunity to chew these critical issues over in the company of people whose professional wisdom and experience you respect. Each of you brings with you your own unique reservoir of insight, wisdom and experience, as well as your concerns and queries. The work you do is important and more than that it can be decisive in charting the future life’s course of those who look to you for credible, clearsighted advice. You will know better than anyone how draining the work is, how much it demands of you and how important a conference like this is at the human level, to renew old friendships, to strengthen the networks of support which help you work more efficiently and to freshen and renew your own vocation to this essential work.
Your conference theme of ‘Personal Empowerment for the New Millennium’ captures the moment for many of us are - quite naturally - using the start of this new era as a review point, to assess the priorities for the future. This is a moment in time when we have a unique consciousness of our power to shape the unscripted days that lie ahead. We have been witnesses to the radical transformation of Ireland and we know that a vital key to that transformation was unlocking the potential of our people, widening access to education, opening up the valves which allowed the freeflow of our own genius.
Our strength is in our people, our future success is in our people. Human capital, human equity these will drive our economy and our culture. The more people we help or guide to their fullest potential the more we contribute to the national human energy grid. The more people whose talents lie unlocked, whose lives are wasted in underachievement, the more the individual and society both are operating below par. So we need people who feel deeply and are deeply personally empowered.
The wide range of papers, workshops and seminars being presented at this conference will provide you with an excellent opportunity to explore this key issue from a variety of perspectives and experiences. And you are in a particularly strong and informed position from which to debate this theme because the individual person is the central focus of your day to day work, whether the focus is on the personal, social, educational or the career elements of Guidance and Counselling.
The fact that we live in a time of very rapid technological development is evident all around us and it has very specific implications for you as counsellors. The concept of a job for life is fast becoming a thing of the past – and more and more people expect to change careers at least once in their working lives. The traditional one-dimensional choices are being consigned to history; with such diverse courses and careers now on offer, your role in guiding and assisting young people is becoming more and more complicated. And our booming economy, while offering wonderful opportunities, also holds the danger of enticing students away from their studies too soon – I know that many schools are increasingly concerned about the rate of drop-out. This has worrying implications for the future and makes your job all the more challenging.
I am sure that our current prosperity, while presenting such new problems, has made life more interesting for you, with the strange phenomenon of employers banging down your doors to do workshops and mock interviews, to inform, attract and entice their potential workers. The range of aids available to you has expanded greatly in recent years, from intelligence and personality profiling to the Internet. These developments have changed your role substantially. But when it comes to making career decisions that have such a profound influence on a person’s life, you can’t beat the personal touch. There can be no substitute for the personal assistance and input of your profession in addressing not only career and work options but also the client’s personal needs and qualities. No amount of interactive paraphernalia will be capable of dealing with the basic issues of the self-worth and dignity of the individual, of allowing people to make independent, informed decisions, to achieve their potential, their own dreams, however, modest or ambitious. No two human beings travel exactly the same path through life and your work calls you to comprehend and respect that distinctiveness and to help that individual to his or her own empowerment.
This era of prosperity and rapid technological development brings new challenges for our society. It challenges us in particular to ensure that all of our people have equal access to those opportunities, so that social exclusion and marginalisation are consigned to history. All of you, as guidance counsellors, have an important part to play in this. You have the capacity to influence, encourage and support those who might otherwise leave school early because of difficult circumstances at home, or even still because nobody in their family or community has progressed to third level education. The mentoring role which you fulfil for such young people, the hope and self-confidence you engender, can transform young lives – and I know it has done so in many cases. Self-belief, self-confidence are crucial to self-empowerment and it is truly remarkable what one word of encouragement, one word of praise can do by way of fuelling that empowerment. Everyone of us knows from our own lives how easily disempowered we are by criticism, by cynicism or the bitter word and we also know how our hearts soared when someone we looked up to made time to tell us that we were worthwhile.
You too can influence the values which inform the decisions that young people make about their future careers helping them to believe in giving of themselves, contributing to their community, their country, helping them to understand that the kind of world they would like, will only be crafted by people like them committing themselves to creating it. This generation has been blessed with an Ireland now more affluent, self-confident, culturally dynamic and hopeful of peace than ever before. As that peace unfolds huge reservoirs of new energy will be released on this island, energies previously wasted or absorbed by the destructive demands of conflict. It will be an exciting place to be and it will need courageous people who can harness and harvest these new resources to create the egalitarian world we all desire.
Your work will place you close to life-changing, life-shaping decisions for individuals. It is a powerful place of influence. I wish you success in all you do and in particular in your deliberations here as you chart the journey to the future. I wish you all a most challenging and enjoyable conference and thank you once again for inviting me.
Go méadaí Dia bhur stór. Go raibh maith agaibh go leir.