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
honor 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 charisma 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 honor,
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 1960’s free second-level education was made
available to everyone and in the 1990’s free university education
was introduced. Suddenly, instead of educating only an elite and so
realizing 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 percent 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 multi-cultural. 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 at 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 that 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 at 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
charisma 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.