REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE TO THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, MARY McALEESE TO THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY, INTER-CONTINENTAL HOTEL, SYDNEY
A chairde. Tá an-áthas bheith i bhur measc inniu. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an fáilte.
It's wonderful to be back in Australia, almost five years after my first official visit. During my last visit, the city was in the throes of preparation for the Olympic Games. The fruits of everyone’s labour was certainly rewarded with the best Olympic Games ever – raising the bar for all future host countries, leaving this beautiful city with a magnificent legacy and sending out to the four corners of the world the sporting ambassadors who were privileged to be the recipients of Sydney’s hospitality. I met many of our returning Irish athletes and the story was the same from them all - Sydney embraced them on the last day with the same generosity and kindness that it offered them on the first. A remarkable story and one we are hoping to learn from as we too play host to our own Olympic Games this year.
The Special Olympics World Games will be held in Ireland in June, the first time they have ever been held outside of the USA. Already 30,000 volunteers are in training and Host towns and families from all over Ireland, North and South, are engaged in a magnificent all-Ireland effort which we are sure will allow us to say, with Sydney, ours were the best Olympic Games ever.
As you know the Irish love to celebrate which is why St. Patrick’s Day now lasts six days in Ireland - a wonderful showcase of the rich mix of Irish imagination, heritage and hospitality. No doubt there will be quite a few Aussie accents among those enjoying the Irish weather with its quaint lack of concern for consistency, for one of the great benefits our two countries are enjoying from our economic success and prosperity, is the two-way traffic in tourists which is growing exponentially. On my last visit to Australia in 1998, I was able to report a record 5 million visitors to Ireland. In 2002, that number had risen to 7.5 million, among them 150,000 visitors from Australia. You know how much hard labour goes into statistics like that. You know they do not happen by coincidence and I am grateful for this opportunity to thank you and congratulate you all on the astounding development and growth in tourism between Australia and Ireland that have helped create these impressive numbers. Without your combined efforts we would not be experiencing the success we are enjoying today.
Once upon a time Ireland’s biggest export was its people but today we have reversed the tide of history and as the economic success story of the European Union, we now experience net inward migration. Circumstances of history brought many of our people to Australia, making it the most Irish country outside Ireland itself and while for many life was a tough struggle we are a privileged generation to have inherited that web of connections which makes us so familiar to one another, so comfortable in each other’s company so intuitive about each other’s nature, so mutually compatible and so joyfully curious about one another. These are marketing tools you cannot buy. Nor are the magnificent God created landscapes both countries are blessed to own. Sydney has its magnificent harbour, Dublin has its legendary great Georgian heart. Australia has huge panoramic landscapes cast over vast terrain. Ireland has an amazing diversity of beautiful unspoilt landscapes distilled into a small and easily travelled island.
Throughout Ireland tradition and cultural heritage sit side by side with a vibrant contemporary lifestyle, one complementing and enhancing the other. There is sport in abundance for the Irish and Australians both have the same sports mad gene. We have more golf courses per head of population than anywhere else in the world and any amount of rivers, lakes, beaches, mountains, forests, all within a shout of each other. We have something else that is important to the visitor - a deep curiosity about each other that makes us interested in the stranger. Out of that comes our culture of hospitality, our way of making friends easily and creating the memories that bring people back again and again.
One of the things that gives me great pride is the advent of Tourism Ireland, a body, which for the first time represents the entire island of Ireland. It has a special resonance here in Australia where the tourism market to Northern Ireland is exceptionally strong. Tourism Ireland is one of many fine examples of the new mood of partnership, which the Peace Process has nurtured. When I first came here five years ago, the Good Friday Agreement had just been signed. It offered new hope of peace in Northern Ireland, of healthy new relationships between North and South and between Great Britain and Ireland. Those things are unfolding and blossoming quietly, subtly, without fanfare, with some days up and some days down but inexorably we are moving towards an unrecognisable landscape of tolerance and consensus utterly different from the past with its grievous hurts and its complex conflicts which tragically kept the North in turmoil even as the South entered an era of unprecedented prosperity.
So this is an especially interesting time to visit Ireland - to see the remarkable results of progress generated by the genius of the first generation which did not have to emigrate, to feel the new pulse of peace and the energy it is releasing, to see old and new mesh and meld into one of Europe’s most inspiring destinations, driven by the highest professional standards and the surest care for the visitor. We have been fortunate, thanks again to your hard work, to have consistently received impressive coverage of Ireland as a great holiday destination from the entire spectrum of electronic and script media. These things give us great reassurance that despite global economic trends and the ambient nervousness about war, the work you are doing is getting results.
You work in a competitive, volatile, demanding industry where unforeseen challenges can suddenly appear on the horizon. But your capacity to adapt has made you tough and intuitive under pressure. Your store of proven success has given you the confidence and the wisdom to keep the tourism sector buoyant and even more successful in the future. St. Patrick was one of Ireland’s first tourists on a working holiday visa. He liked the place a lot, even though the circumstances of his arrival were less than encouraging. This week his name will be celebrated form Seoul to Moscow, from New York to Sydney. Where two or more Irish or adopted Irish are gathered there his name will be and there will be the sparkling love of life which is the true hallmark of the Gael. May St. Patrick bless your work with great success and bring even greater prosperity to the shores of both Australia and Ireland.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.