ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE CARA (CLONDALKIN AREA RESPONSE TO ABSENTEEISM)
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE CARA (CLONDALKIN AREA RESPONSE TO ABSENTEEISM) EVALUATION REPORT
Cuireann sé an-áthas orm teacht i bhur láthair inniu chun an doiciméad atá curtha ar fáil ag CARA a sheoladh. Téama an tábhachtach atá faoi chaibidil, sé sin, conas is féidir srian a chur le luath-fhágail scoile agus is mór liom na hiarrachtaí atá á ndéanamh anseo i gCluain Dolcáin ar son aos óg an cheantair.
I am delighted to be with you here today to launch the Evaluation Report on the work of the CARA project. I would particularly like to thank Margaret Maher, Education and Youth Co-ordinator with the Clondalkin Partnership for the kind invitation and for providing me with the opportunity to acknowledge the tremendous work that is being done here in Clondalkin to combat early school leaving. I would also like to commend the author of the report Dr. Phyllis Murphy, on completing a comprehensive review of the work of this project which highlights the need for an integrated and area-based response to the needs of young people at risk of leaving school early.
For most children school helps develop self-esteem and self confidence – it nurtures and develops talents, provides skills and certificates which become passports to work, cements values to see them through a lifetime as colleagues, friends, parents. These are the success stories and every school has them. But there are those whose story is different, whose life experience is the paralysis of self-doubt, their childhood dreams hardened by cynicism – a life-sentence of under-achievement leading to a tragic legacy of loss and missed opportunity not just by the individual but also by society itself. I’m reminded of the beautifully poignant words of TS Eliot who captured this missed opportunity so well when he wrote:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage that we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden
Too many lives are only half-lived because of missed opportunity and all of us are the worse off if some of us are left behind. These are the people that benefit from the tremendous work done by CARA. Graham Greene once wrote “there is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in”. What you do and do so well is to guide children through that door. Your commitment and determination and energy are focussed on preventing the devastating fallout from failure, on stopping its wastefulness and ensuring that our young people seize the good opportunities that today’s world offers so that their truest and best potential is revealed and harvested in lives that are worthwhile and fulfilling. Education is the key that unlocks doors and releases talent. That released talent can transform a life and that life can transform the fortunes of family, community and country. Educational underachievement results in both a huge loss to the individual who never gets to know him or herself fully and it results in a huge loss to society of the talents and gifts of civically strong and engaged citizens. We can ill afford to lose that important human resource and its loss is not simply an unquantifiable absence for regrettably there is a measurable downstream set of consequences in terms of the catalogue of problems which are evident wherever there is dysfunction, disadvantage and social exclusion.
We have a vested interest in making our communities stronger, more caring and more resilient by ensuring that the people who make up those communities are also strong, resilient and caring. The basic building block of those communities is the child. “Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh siad” says the wise old sean-fhocal and the simplicity of its truth is as valid today as it ever was. Buried in its wisdom is an acknowledgment that the atmosphere and ambience in which our young people grow up can encourage them to blossom or it can do the very opposite. There are many contributors to that atmosphere and ambience as this report acknowledges.
When a youngster is persistently absent, when those critical schooldays are being misused, the problem is not solely one for the school to solve. On its own the school is unlikely to be able to effectively resolve it for this problem demands real cooperation between teachers, parents, the relevant agencies and Departments, Gardai, the community and emphatically, the pupils themselves. Only a sustained co-ordinated partnership approach has the possibility of successfully tackling absenteeism and preventing its baleful legacy of illiteracy, chronic underachievement, poor coping skills and social dysfunction which feed the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next.
Your report helps us to move beyond hand-wringing to hope. It helps chart a pathway to prevention and control of absenteeism. It refuses to accept the defeat that every early school leaver represents and offers the prospect of a harnessed community effort, responding intelligently and convincingly to the needs of its most vulnerable children. What you have done here is important, very important. It has the potential to dramatically reverse the course of lives, to take them out of inevitable cul-de-sacs and set them out on open highways with decent choices and remarkably enhanced life chances. I commend you and congratulate you as I am sure many, many children will have cause to do in the years ahead. Thank you.
Gura fada buan sibh agus go raibh maith agaibh.