REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE PRIZE-GIVING CEREMONY FOR THE ASIAN GAA
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE AT THE PRIZE-GIVING CEREMONY FOR THE ASIAN GAA GAMES PHUKET, THAILAND
Cháirde Gael agus a Dhaoine Uaisle, tá an-áthas orm, agus ar mo fhear chéile, Mairtín, bheith anseo libh chun na duaiseanna a bhronnadh ar na fóirne a raibh an bua acu um thrathnóna. Gabhaim comhghairdeachas le gach éinne a glach páirt i gComórtas Cumann Luthcleas Gael anseo i Phuket i rith na deireadh seachtaine.
As someone who has always held a great ghrá for Gaelic Games, I am delighted to have this opportunity to be here with you this evening for the prize-giving ceremony for this year’s Asian GAA games. Let me begin by warmly congratulating the winning teams and indeed everyone who participated in this wonderful event.
For fans of hurling and Gaelic football, the month of September is the true highlight of our sporting year. To have your county competing in the September finals, either hurling or football, or better still both, is every GAA lover’s dream. To have your country competing and to have no ticket for the match is everyone’s nightmare. I am in a different predicament - I have tickets for every game but my county, Down is in a quiet phase!
This has been a season of fantastic provincial and national finals. I saw people cry in their dozens at the Munster Hurling Final when Waterford broke through after nearly forty years. The hurling final was as near a perfect display of hurling as you can get and though Clare gave Kilkenny a determined and brave run I had sympathy with the despondent Clare fan who said, “you know it would take two teams to beat Kilkenny”. And just last Sunday, we saw Kerry and Armagh battle it out for the Sam Maguire Cup in another memorable, typically Irish sporting contest and one in which I personally found it hard to remain neutral. Today completes a hat-trick of GAA finals! There is a particular feeling of pride in having travelled so far across the world to a very different culture, to a place where the Irish are not found in huge numbers and yet to find here the passion for our native games translated into this remarkable competition. The fact that they are here tells me of men and women who have brought to far off places a profound love of their native culture, who have worked hard to make a space for it to grow and who have made of it a gift to their adopted homeland, bringing Ireland and her people deep into the heart of Thailand.
While Irish people everywhere revelled in the great performance of our soccer team in Japan and Korea this Summer and take great pride in other Irish sporting heroes, including Padraig Harrington, Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke representing Europe in the Ryder Cup this weekend, Gaelic Games I believe hold a very special place in Irish hearts and minds. They are a unique, tangible and truly magnificent expression of our Irishness. Few things in life at home generate more dedicated enthusiasm or more heated debate than hurling and football. Parish, county and provincial allegiances, which have been fostered over generations by the GAA and its army of volunteers at home and abroad, support and reinforce our national identity, creating a robust mesh that holds us together as a people with a stack of shared memories to be dipped into at will and added to every year.
Today, Ireland is a place where tradition and contemporary modernity meet and meld in a way few would have thought possible. Out of a population of five million on the entire island, one million attended live matches this year in the National Gaelic Football Championship alone. Croke Park itself is now the very epitome of that confident new Ireland, transformed into one of the finest sporting stadiums in the world and the very best in Ireland. To attend Croke Park, or a Munster Hurling Final or an Ulster Football Final, a session of Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann or a traditional dancing Feis, or to visit a Gaelscoil, is to discover a thoroughly confident, modern people enchanted by and faithful still to the best of our age-old traditions and yet in no way tempted to make a mausoleum of them or to make museum pieces of them. In fact the opposite. Today’s Ireland is characterised by a cultural exuberance which draws from ancient wells but floods new fields of endeavour. This generation does not need to be cajoled into adding its own layer of gifts and skills to that national resource that we call our culture.
Today’s dynamic Ireland is a far cry from the once third world country our forbears knew, loved but left in their thousands, driven by lack of opportunity and poverty. Today, when young people leave Ireland, they rarely do so from crude necessity, but rather to further their knowledge and experience and dreams. Many later return enriched with new skills and fresh perspectives which they put at the service of modern Ireland, an Ireland which for the first time in one hundred and fifty years now experiences net inward migration. I hope that many of you here today will make that choice in years to come.
The fact that the GAA has now come to Asia, and to Phuket, is a reflection of that transformed Ireland which today’s participants epitomise. The presence of small, professionally successful Irish communities in Asia is a relatively new, but very welcome, development. It mirrors the remarkable economic strides we have made in recent decades, made possible by the advantages of the European Single Market and our capacity to attract substantial volumes of inward investment.
The Government has devised an Asia Strategy to help deepen Ireland’s connections with the strengthening economies of this region. Exports to Asian markets have been growing steadily but, as you will know better than most, there are endless opportunities to be explored on this vast and populous continent. You are the people who are creating the network through which those opportunities are identified and used creatively. You are Ambassadors for Ireland. Through you, people who know little of Ireland or Irish people come to know what kind of people we are and respect grows for us as a place to do business with, a place to grow in friendship with.
A huge congratulations to the organisers of this weekend’s activities. It was a formidable undertaking but a hugely successful one. I got great pleasure from my visit to the Stadium earlier today. If Martin was a bit younger he might have lined out himself and I might have one of my embarrassing compulsions to give advice to the referee! It was marvellous to meet so many wonderful Irish people living in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Singapore and so many terrific friends of the game from far and wide - England, America, New Zealand and Australia to name a few.
Always behind such initiatives there are champions whose vision and hard work make it all happen. Michael Shannon, who is resident in Japan, and Peter Ryan from our Embassy in Seoul between them have done a fantastic job in promoting Gaelic Games in Asia.
A special word of thanks to the Governor and the local authorities in Phuket for making their excellent facilities available to the GAA and extending such a warm welcome to me, to my husband, Martin, and to our delegation on their beautiful island.
Go raibh maith agaibh.