REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE AMERICAN IRELAND FUND WOMEN’S LUNCHEON, SAN FRANCISCO
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE AMERICAN IRELAND FUND WOMEN’S LUNCHEON, SAN FRANCISCO, THURSDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2008
Thank you for your warm welcome. And congratulations to the Chairs of today’s lunch, Michele Driscoll Alioto, Janet Reilly and Suzi Tinsley as well as Marjorie Muldowney for hosting such a wonderful event.
As President of Ireland, I have had the distinct honour to meet with Irish communities throughout the world and I cannot tell you how great a pleasure it is to travel halfway across the world and find myself here so rapidly and genuinely among friends. For, time and again, on my travels around Ireland and the United States I have had cause to see what good friends the Irish people have in the members of the American Ireland Fund.
Your connectedness to Ireland is strong, significant and it is important to Ireland. It has helped effect changes in this generation that have defeated centuries of effort. Your quiet work of encouraging reconciliation between Northern Ireland’s divided communities and between North and South in Ireland has distilled into a stable and encouraging peace. It was through your projects that people, long estranged from one another and very distrusting of each other, began to work together on projects that brought benefits to both sides. You allowed them to create a store of shared memories to replace the awful, wasteful store of resentments that were the legacy of history. You helped build the confidence that was needed so that people could change and compromise enough to “let the future in”. You fundraised and planned, visited and encouraged, stuck with us through some dreadful times when it would have been so easy to just walk away. No law ordered you to befriend us and care for us and yet you did it out of that remarkable human solidarity that has been a feature of the Irish family wherever its members have travelled.
Now, Ireland, for the first time in its history, knows peace and prosperity and the United States can claim a part of the story of prosperity too, for US investment has been central to the transformation in Ireland’s story over the past generation. Today, Irish investment in the United States has created 82,000 jobs here and so our futures are laced together in so many ways of the head, heart and hand. In these times of economic turbulence which affect all of us we look to that formidable Irish character which thrives in adversity and which sustained so many emigrants as they built new lives in strange lands. We have faced tough times before but we face into these with the confidence that comes from our recent economic successes, our well-educated and innovative people, and the partnerships we have built with so many friends here in the United States.
In a global economy, in a more connected world, Ireland’s large global family is a unique resource. It is complex and diverse and stretches around the world but a fascinating indissoluble thread of mutual affinity runs through it that constantly nudges us towards one another, which keeps us in each other’s orbit, insists that we remain community to one another.
Occasions such as this gathering here demonstrate the vitality of this great resource and the potential it offers to each one of us as members of a clan that shares ideas and wisdom, pulls together through difficult patches, looks out for one another and invests in each others well-being. These are the markers of the Irish DNA and they do not diminish from generation to generation but rather through work like yours, they keep the imprint of goodness and friendship Irish-style alive in the world and thriving.
Thank you.