Speeches
Remarks by President McAleese at the Inaugural Madeleine Sophie Barat Lecture at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Mount Anville, Dublin, 29th March 2010
Dia dhíbh go léir a chairde. Is mór an onóir agus pléisúir dom bheith anseo inniu. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.Good morning and thank you very much for your very warm welcome and kind invitation from my old school friend Maighréad Uí Mháirtín, on behalf of the Network of Sacred Heart schools and the Sacred Heart Education Trust, to give this inaugural lecture dedicated to the name of Madeleine Sophie. It really is an honour to be involved in the first of what I hope will become an important and thought provoking annual event. The theme of Social Concern sets a clear agenda and one that has long been embedded in the charism of the Sacred Heart Order for it was that very concern for social justice and equality that drew the order into the field of education and in particular the education of young women.
It was Yeats who told us that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire and yet in his day the lighting of that fire was routinely denied to women. It is easy to forget today that many of the Western world's most influential educators and intellectuals right up to the middle of the twentieth century saw little value in educating women, a shockingly wasteful and embedded cultural view which is still prevalent in many parts of the world but thankfully not here. Today our young women outnumber men in colleges and universities. They can and do follow whatever career paths they themselves choose and though they are still substantially under-represented in the upper echelons of politics, religion and business the momentum created by their ability and ambition is unstoppable and will in time bring greater balance and coherence to decision making and to discovery in our world.
How did we get from those days of overlooking the talents of women to these times of encouraging and nurturing them? The story of Madeleine Sophie Barat gives us part of the answer for the changes that brought freedom and opportunity to today's generation. It did not happen by coincidence but by concerted and courageous effort. The Society of the Sacred Heart, which she founded 210 years ago, developed an educational project which quickly spread throughout Europe and the Americas.
Although she faced many difficulties and challenges, during a time of revolutionary change in France, Madeleine Sophie Barat was a pioneer in providing for the education of girls and had an impact on society that hugely exceeded her own expectations and extended far beyond her lifetime and her country. During the last two centuries, many likeminded, dedicated women were inspired by the example of Madeleine Sophie. They dedicated their lives not just to the Society of the Sacred Heart but to the task of helping generations of young women to achieve their full potential through nurturing new levels of confidence, achievement and ambition. Today we can look back across the centuries and see the steady linear progression. But the journey from then to now was far from easy or seamless for many obstacles were put in the path to the full liberation of women and some of them still remain. The work of the next generation is to remove these obstacles across the five continents and 45 countries where the Sacred Heart schools have changed and are continually changing the lives of thousands for the better.
Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat was propelled to act not just out of a random sense of social justice but out of a view of the Christian gospel which she saw as a radical call to action wherever circumstances conspired to reduce the dignity of the human person. Endemic poverty and disease, gender biased cultural norms and practices, conflict and violence continue in many parts of the world to rob countless millions of hope and of opportunity to flourish. The impact is adverse for men and even more adverse for women. Yet wherever those problems exist, you will find Irish men and women at work as missionaries or as members of NGOs inspired by a vision of social concern and a personal responsibility for action.
Ireland's long history of poverty, colonial oppression, conflict and famine has given us as a people a memory with a very long shelf life of the suffering endured by our forebears. That has distilled into a sense of social concern and social justice which is matched by few other countries in the world. Our Government's development aid programme, which is dedicated to helping the world's poorest people to get education, health care and good government, is on a per capita basis one of the top ten official aid programmes in the world. Besides that work funded by our taxpayers, our citizens reach deep into their pockets to fund a legion of charities around the world and here at home - all of which are about the business of making life better for strangers whom we see as our brothers and sisters and our responsibility.
Solidarity with those who suffer is part of our national DNA but it is an empathy that is taught and learnt. It is a baton of care handed from one generation to the next and it is essential that no generation becomes so self-obsessed and selfish that it drops the baton - for that would be to make our homes, communities, country and world a much colder and intolerable place. Social concern that is expressed in action, a smile, a helping hand, a continuum of voluntary care through literally millions of acts of generosity, a championing of just causes and an insistence on improving our world for all and not for the few. These are the things which have characterised our people at home and abroad for centuries.
We have benefitted from considerable progress, prosperity and success in Ireland in recent decades but now the climb has suddenly become steeper as we face a global recession and a national as well as an international financial crisis. There is unhappiness, stress and worry in people's lives due to job loss and debt. There is indignation that so much of what appeared to be credible enterprise was high-risk speculation that has jeopardised economic wellbeing and reduced opportunity for so many, especially our young people. How do we get from here to where we want to be? The answer is the same way that Madeleine Sophie did - by seeing each other as family, as brothers and sisters as people who have a responsibility to and for each other and by working together unselfishly for the benefit of all.
In time and with a great deal of effort and commitment, our country will return to prosperity, with the vast majority of our people back at work and with the public finances restored to good health. But underpinning the coming times we have this chance to learn from the mistakes, to be chastened by the ravages of selfish individualism and to put a fresh new communal concern at the heart of our country. In the meantime, we need to help each other to manage, cope with and get through this difficult – but temporary – period in our history.
Despite our difficult circumstances, there are still so many generous people who engage in the care of those excluded from the mainstream - the homeless, the poor, those with disability, the carers, the addicts, the offenders, the chronically ill, the dying, the jobless, the mentally ill. Those who are struggling or are in crisis need these courageous champions and able advocates to promote their welfare and defend their interests in a noisy world of competing voices. The vision of a kind of just, equitable, sustainable society will not appear by doing nothing. We are the hands of that work and our future will be the work of our hands. We may not appear to do big things but small things done well accumulate over time to become big things, to represent significant change. They say that you make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give and those already involved in the community and voluntary sectors know fully the truth of this saying. St Francis of Assisi's prayer says that it is in giving that we receive. It was in giving that Madeleine Sophie and her sisters allowed the light of education to shine in lives that would otherwise have been lived in the darkness of ignorance and under-achievement.
She was Superior General of the Sacred Heart community at the age of 26 - a powerful woman in an era when little was expected of women. Thanks to her and many like her we now are beginning to see what the world could look like when the talents of all humanity are encouraged to blossom. It is still a steep climb though. Ask yourselves what things make you angry, frustrated, dismayed and then ask yourselves what you are prepared to do to fix them. That is where social concern starts in seeing the things that are wrong. But the test of our social concern is what we are prepared to do to make things better? The proclamation of our republic set us an ambition to create a nation which would cherish all its children equally. We are closer to that ambition today than we were a century ago but we are still far from its achievement.
There is work to be done and hands needed for the work. Do we have the heart? Do we have a heart like Madeleine Sophie whose motto was: 'to suffer myself and not to make others suffer' Such generosity of spirit, such a personal focus on social concern changed the trajectory of history. It still can.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
