REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY MCALEESE AT ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY MCALEESE AT ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK THURSDAY, 3 MAY, 2007
Father President, Vice President Shea-Byrnes, Chairman Kelleher, staff, students, ladies and gentlemen
Tá mé iontach sásta bheith anseo libh inniu. Go raibh maith agaibh as an fáilte sin.
What a wonderfully warm and generous welcome. Thank you so much. As someone who spent much of my working life in universities, I wish that I was as warmly received every time I walked into a lecture theatre! Suffice to say that having spent so many years on the academic staff of both the Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin I feel very much among friends. It is also a great pleasure for me to be invited to address such a distinguished gathering.
I am indebted to St. John’s University for the award of an Honorary Doctorate of Laws and want to say a special thank you to your President, Fr Harrington, Vice President, Pamela Shea-Byrnes and, of course, to our good Kerryman, Denis Kelleher, the distinguished Chairman of the Board of Trustees. I treasure this honour and count myself blessed to be an honorary alumnus of a place which is rooted in living that great, that stunning commandment, to love one another.
The Vincentian charism which underpins this university is very familiar territory to me. The Vincentians are current chaplains to the Irish President – in other words, to me - and from my early teenage years I have been a disciple of Saint Vincent de Paul and Blessed Frederic Ozanam. The Saint Vincent de Paul Society I founded in my High School in Belfast over forty years ago is still going strong I am proud to say and, like the students of St. John’s, I can say I have been shaped and challenged by the Vincentian value system. I know, without ever being told, that in this place the service of those in need is a priority and a vocation. So it is no surprise to see those Vincentian values in the University’s mission to “provide excellent education for all people, especially those lacking economic, physical, or social advantages.” They are not just lofty words, they are lived words, for this university has distinguished itself through the years by providing scholarships to thousands of students each year who would otherwise be unable to afford the cost of a University education. They are your prime ambassadors, their success your badge of honour and their success, an important vindication of the principle and practice of social inclusion. Without you as their champion and their opportunity, so many talents might otherwise have been wasted or overlooked.
In Ireland we share your view that tackling educational disadvantage is a critically important step in eliminating poverty and exclusion from full participation in society. The successful, high-achieving Ireland of today is a far cry from the under-achieving nation of even 20 years ago. We had a history of chronic poverty, crippling debt, high unemployment and the relentless haemorrhaging through emigration of our young people. It was a very bleak picture indeed and I am often asked to explain how we went from that to the Celtic Tiger. In truth there is a complex mix of factors in the answer to that question; membership of the European Union, considerable foreign direct investment, social partnership and an attractive corporate tax regime, but there is one thing on which everything else rests and that is our investment in education.
In the late 1960s free second-level education was made available to everyone and in the 1990s free university education was introduced. Suddenly, instead of educating only an elite and so realising only a small part of our potential, we began to extensively harvest and harness our greatest natural resource, the brain power of our people. Their unleashed genius cascaded through and transformed Ireland. Today almost 40% of our workforce has been educated at third level and this dynamic generation has given us a story to be proud of. Emigration out of Ireland has ended. Our population is growing for the first time in a century and a half. Ten per cent of our workforce now comprises recently arrived emigrants from throughout Europe, as well as Asia and Africa. We have become a place of real opportunity, cosmopolitan and multicultural. As a first world country with a recent third world memory we are a sign of hope to many other struggling nations. We have strong communities and a strong volunteering ethic that underpins a culture of active, responsible citizenship – these are values I know that you strongly espouse and live by here in St. John’s.
Here education is not only about producing well-qualified graduates with good job prospects but well-qualified citizens with the moral insight and the strength of character to be problem-solving rather than problem citizens, the kind of people who build up civil society and infuse it with humanly decent values. Confident in themselves they bring a studied resilience to their families and communities. They are the kind of citizens every country needs and they prove over and over again the formidable value of widening access to high quality education.
We in Ireland have an ambition to produce more and more of precisely that kind of valuable citizen and we know that, to do that, we need to keep our focus, as you have, on the fullest empowerment of each and every individual. We know there are still too many on the margins excluded by disability, poverty, by inhibiting attitudes and historic baggage of all sorts. We know that our country will only reveal its absolute best when there is no waste of anyone’s potential. We know the best is yet to come and it is closer today than at any time in our history.
Our people, your ancestors many of them, emigrated from an Ireland where the vast majority were overlooked, despised, regarded as second class by a ruling class who believed in exclusion and exclusivity. Here in the land of the free they improved themselves and proved themselves to be people of great genius. They helped create this remarkable country and their deep understanding of the iniquity and injustice of exclusion helped sustain the democratic value system which flourishes here in America and in St. John’s.
We who believe in democracy, in human rights, in the equality of all God’s creation, have reason to be very grateful to those who gave us our love of liberty and our profound reverence for the dignity of the human person. Our world is tragically blighted by so many places in which human beings are pitifully demoralised and abused. It is important to them that there are places like St. John’s where the dignity of the human person is upheld and championed, places that work relentlessly to ensure that the charism of St. Vincent de Paul will inspire the children of the 21st century to make this the century of liberation, the century that brings everyone into the mainstream and leaves the margins empty. I am proud to be an alumnus of such a place and thank you again for your kindness to me and to Ireland.
I wish each of you the very best for the future.
Thank you.