SPEECH BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHONOLOGY, NEW YORK FRIDAY,7th MAY, 1999
SPEECH BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHONOLOGY, NEW YORK FRIDAY,7th MAY, 1999
Tá mé iontach sásta go bhfuil an chaoi agam a bheith anseo libh inniu i Rochester. Is mór liom an cuireadh agus go háirithe an onóir atá sibh i ndiadh a bhronnadh orm.
May I first thank President Simone for those very warm words of welcome. It was with great personal pleasure that I accepted the invitation from my good friends, Michael and Tricia Schwarz to come to Rochester and I deeply appreciate the honour which you have bestowed on me this afternoon.
I am particularly pleased to have had the opportunity of visiting today the National Technical Institute for the Deaf here at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I am very conscious of the fact that NTID is the world’s largest technological college for deaf students and it is perhaps fitting that it should be located here in Rochester which has the largest per capita deaf population in the United States. I was deeply impressed by the wonderful state-of-the-art educational facilities which I saw at NTID.
But most of all I was struck by two things about the Institute. Firstly, the combination of fieldwork as well as classroom training which is embodied in RIT’s co-operative educational programme and which provides such valuable hands-on experience of working for a company in your field while still a student. This, no doubt, is part of the reason why some 95% of NTID graduates entering the workforce have found employment in their particular fields of study. Secondly, NTID is but one component of the wider Rochester Institute of Technology, and its 1100 students can attend college on a campus with 11,000 hearing students. Thus the entire student body here has the widest possible opportunity to make new friends with people from a variety of national and international backgrounds, and to learn that difference – whether in nationality, creed, colour, or disability - is to be celebrated and not shunned.
Though my time here has been brief I am aware of the extent to which RIT has promoted that philosophy, that knowledge that we are all God’s children, each of us created as unique individuals, and each of us equal in his eyes. We need to learn, not least in Ireland, that difference is to be embraced, approached with joyful curiosity, for it is what makes this world a place of endless opportunity and growth.
Sadly, this has not traditionally been the experience of disabled people. But this is starting to change, and it is people with disabilities who are leading the way. Today, the majority of disabled people see acceptance, integration and freedom to participate fully with their able-bodied counterparts as a right, not an aspiration. A by-product of their struggle to achieve these rights has been the increase in self-esteem which all of you who have a disability experience both as individuals and as group members. For you are doing this yourselves, for yourselves, not as passive recipients of whatever crumbs society throws you. You can justifiably take pride in all you have achieved.
Much progress has been made. But we should not become complacent. There frequently remains a failure on the part of society to recognise that people with disabilities have equal or superior, qualifications and skills to their able-bodied counterparts. This position is aggravated in times of economic recession when people with disabilities, like other minorities, are often counselled to wait until the 'time is right'. Of course the right time is now.
We in Ireland have benefited much from observing and emulating the advances made here in the United States in supporting the full integration of people with disabilities within society. Our citizens with disabilities are aware of the advantages gained by their counterparts in America by acting in concert, rather than each organisation focusing narrowly on the needs and concerns of its own constituents. As a lawyer, I am particularly aware of the value of legislation as a powerful instrument for change. It is clear that legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), has had a significant impact in stimulating and supporting these advances.
However, we all know that the enactment of legislation is only part of the answer. For change to be meaningful it must take place in the hearts and minds of people, in their attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, assumptions. That is a far more difficult task, and one which will take far longer to achieve.
Along with many people in this audience, I have a particular interest in people with hearing impairments. This is because of my own family experience, as one of my brothers, John, is deaf. I know at first hand how easy it is for the needs of the deaf to be forgotten, for theirs is not a visible disability. There is no wheelchair or white cane, no obvious reminder which forces society to take account of their needs. And so they are easier to confine to the margins, easier to disregard, and it is easier too, to ignore the pain of isolation that so many deaf people experience.
Growing up as I did in a family of nine children, you might expect that having so many brothers and sisters would mitigate for John the loneliness which so often is the experience of deaf people. The truth is that the world organises itself and its affairs around the strong and able-bodied. The other eight children in my family similarly organised their lives around the fact that they had the ability to hear and to speak. Because of this, John was left constantly tugging at my elbow, constantly having to remind the others to remember him and the fact that he could not hear, that he could not fully participate unless we made an effort to include him.
That has been the experience of so many deaf people in society as a whole – constantly having to lobby for recognition of their needs, for the right to participate, to be included. We are still a long way from achieving a world in which their needs are automatically taken into account in policy-making, decision-making, in social activities, education – in every sphere of life that those of us who are able-bodied take for granted.
That exclusion for all too long, fed into the psyche of people with disabilities. They were deprived of the type of education that would give them not only the skills but also, crucially, the self-confidence and self-esteem to make the most of their talents. That is why your work here in Rochester is so important. For education is the key that unlocks the talents of people who are deaf or have a hearing impairment, freeing them from the cultural and social straitjackets of mainstream attitudes and prejudices in which they were trapped for so long. Education gives people the confidence and self-respect to break free of those constraints, to demonstrate that they have talents and gifts equal, indeed sometimes superior, to the rest of society.
The straitjacketing of those talents is not only a personal tragedy, it is an immense loss to society as a whole. How much energy and genius has this world lost by failing to those who do not measure up to the standards of perfection that society so spuriously imposes, the support to develop their gifts? How many dreams have gone unrealised, how many lives have been only half-lived?
Until we as a world wake up to the fact that genius is not the preserve of a particular creed, colour, or social class, that it is not confined to those who can see or hear, or to those who are able-bodied – until we realise that, our world will be the poorer for it.
Disability is not always physical. Those who are disadvantaged through poverty, prejudice or social exclusion have an equally high barrier to climb to claim their rights. For them, also, education can open up new worlds, new opportunities which their parents did not dare to dream, far less expect. I have seen this for myself within Northern Ireland, where education has been the key which opened up those new vistas for a whole generation of young people. Our Nobel Laureate for Literature, Seamus Heaney, has described those young people in his poem, ‘Canton of Expectations’, their ‘intelligences brightened and unmannerly as crowbars’ by the new opportunities they found. It is that first generation and those that have followed, now grown to adulthood, in whose hands the opportunity for peace in Northern Ireland now lies. I wonder would that opportunity have ever been given the chance to breathe had it not been for the opening up of minds, of new possibilities, that education provided?
That capacity of education to unlock new opportunities, new potential, has changed the face of Ireland as a whole in so many ways, releasing an extraordinary level of energy and enthusiasm in every sphere of life – economic, social and cultural. From the starting point in the 1960s when free second-level education was provided for all, we have witnessed a phenomenon – ‘a revolution of rising expectations’, to borrow a phrase from John Kenneth Galbraith. It has been a quiet revolution, but remarkable in its power, not least in the case of women, whose talents were for so long confined to the important but narrow sphere of home and family. The last generation has seen the talents of women blossom - and how they have blossomed. Indeed I would argue that the extraordinary economic and cultural success that Ireland is currently experiencing, owes much to the fact that Irish women have been given the opportunity to take their place at the heart of the business, legal, social and cultural life of Ireland, and they have grasped that opportunity with both hands. Just as a bird cannot fly on one wing, a nation which allows the talents of only half its people to blossom, can expect to reap only half the benefits.
We are proud of our achievements. But we still have a long way to go before all members of our society have the education and support to participate as equals in Irish life. There are many still locked within the misery of poverty and exclusion, many for whom that gift of education remains too far out of sight.
For people with disabilities, we are only at the start of that journey in comparison to the United States. The schooling of deaf children, despite many advances, has been plagued by a sterile debate about the most effective teaching methodology – oralism or sign language. Access to and participation in third level education by deaf students is particularly problematic. It will be a very long time before we can offer our students the extraordinary facilities and opportunities that you provide at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester.
But you offer us the hope that our journey has a destination, at which all people, deaf and hearing, can have the educational opportunities to develop their gifts and potential to the full. I know that your achievements have taken many years and much effort – not least in making sure that those who can hear, also listen. That decision-makers listen to the needs and rights of deaf people and take action.
I would like to finish by warmly commending you on your work, and wishing all of you within this Institute, teachers and students alike, the very best of success in the future. I am deeply honoured to be associated with Rochester through the bestowal of this honorary degree.
Mo bhuíochas libh arís as ucht an onóir seo a bhronnadh orm. Guím rath agus séan ar bhur gcuid oibre san am atá le teacht.