REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE, ON FORMALLY OPENING THE MAINSTREAMING EQUALITY CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE, ON FORMALLY OPENING THE MAINSTREAMING EQUALITY CONFERENCE: MODELS FOR STATUTORY DUTY
Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur measc anseo ar an ócáid speisialta seo. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
Thank you for that warm reception and the kind invitation to be part of this important Conference with its focus on Mainstreaming Equality. One of the very heartening aspects of this conference is the partnership it embraces between equality and human rights bodies from both Britain and Ireland, North and South. I extend a big Céad Míle Fáilte, a hundred thousand welcomes to each of you and a special welcome to those who have travelled from abroad even from as far away as Norway to contribute to this debate which without overdramatising, has the capacity to radically alter the lives of so many people for whom the concept of equality is still not a lived, an experienced reality.
I am proud of the fact that Ireland has one of the most modern and comprehensive equality codes in Europe. We have a written Constitution which begins with an assertion that the people of our country seek to promote the common good so that “the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured and true social order attained”. The section on personal rights begins by saying “All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law.” We have an impressive raft of legislation designed to promote and vindicate the equality of the individual in many spheres of everyday life. Many of the places where prejudice festers have been outed and a new regime is in place to punish and to prevent discrimination on grounds of gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religious belief, age, disability, race and membership of the Traveller community.
But if you want to find a simple yet graphic picture of the landscape we aspire to then it would be hard to beat the wording of the Proclamation of 1916 which states “The republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally…..” That last phrase “cherishing all the children of the nation equally” is probably one of the best known, most used phrases when the issue of equality is up for discussion. That is the landscape we have to get to.
Every piece of equality legislation, every vindication in the courts or tribunals, every organisation or individual switched on to thinking “Equality” is another stepping stone in the causeway that takes us to that landscape. But there are other stones that are much more problematic, awkward stones, that have to be shifted out of the way if the journey to a decent and true social order is to be completed. They are the hearts of stone that continue to beat out of time with the equality agenda, the hearts that harbour and hand on a huge legacy of attitudes and behaviours which are the breeding ground of blinkered thinking, of bias and of exclusion. Legislation can take us or drag us to the waters of equality, it can even force the reluctant to drink those waters but it can’t completely stop the poison, the contamination that leaches out of the human heart into the family, the street, the workplace and the community. That poison kills off opportunity, kills of self-confidence. It can make a traveller feel small, it can keep a disabled youngster from daring to dream of the best career possible, it can keep women out of board rooms and politics, it can isolate a gay man, it can make an old woman feel overwhelmingly lonely and vulnerable, it can make a coloured family terrified even in their own home, it can make a carer feel no one else gives two hoots. And every time that poison does its worst it robs not only the individual of his or her birthright as a human being, it robs our society of the flood of talent, joy, fulfillment, creativity, and peace of mind that comes from the fullest empowerment of the human person. The poison of contempt, of bigotry, of careless bias, of simple overlooking of the otherness of others, of failure to notice the humanity of the other and the potential of the other, is utterly wasteful of the greatest natural resource we have on this island and on this earth, human beings, in all their uniqueness and all their difference.
The antidote to that poison is to soften the hardened hearts, to help make them think differently, act differently, to have a more sophisticated understanding of equality issues, to waken up in the morning with a self-critical consciousness of the need to make space for equality in our thinking, to be capable of understanding our own blind spots, to have the principle of equality for others as deeply ingrained in our consciousness as the insistence on equality for ourselves. Essentially the mainstreaming of equality is about mainstreaming change, opening up fresh space in thinking processes, broadening the input into decision making processes, ensuring that silent voices and absent perspectives are not ignored or forgotten, ensuring that subtle prejudices, unacknowledged biases are not allowed to consciously or subconsciously subvert the fairness of outcomes. It is about making equality a habit.
Some years ago a rather well known institution was replacing a valuable, antique hand made carpet which had been damaged to the point of ruin. A committee set about deciding on the replacement. There were experts of all sorts to give advice and the new carpet when it was laid was magnificent in all respects except one and that was the light colour. Within weeks since it was in an area of very heavy traffic and in the days before Scots guarding, it had ugly visible stains. A group of us were commenting on the lack of practicality of the colour when one of the cleaning ladies went past – she stopped and said “a pity no one thought to ask us our opinion.” It could be a metaphor for the concept of mainstreaming for so often failure to address important issues with a skilled, trained eye on the consequences for the equality of all citizens, results in a lopsided world. Build inclusion and equality in from the beginning and get an outcome that is not skewed. Fail to do so and skewed outcomes become millstones around our necks.
Ireland has embraced an astonishing level of change in recent years. There is an appetite and capacity for change that must give great reassurance to those who have been banging the equality drum for a long time. The drum is unlikely to be silent for quite a while to come but it is important to acknowledge that the work of our Equality Authority is taking place in a context that would have been almost unimaginable even a couple of decades ago. Looking back at those decades we can see that the relentless dedication of those committed to the equality agenda has been rewarded with manifest, steady progress which has given renewed hope to those who have to live the fact that we do not yet appear to cherish all the children of the nation equally. How close are we to that landscape which has inspired us for generations? What can we do in this most blessed and privileged of generations, to bridge the gap between aspiration and reality?
A few years ago I met a youngster from a traveller family who told me with dancing eyes and deep conviction that her ambition was to be a doctor. I want to live in an Ireland where your heart doesn’t nearly break when you think of all the obstacles, not of her making, that will stand in her way and make her life journey very, very hard. I am glad to live in an Ireland where that day is getting nearer and nearer but I am impatient, like you for the Ireland with its “true social order” and its children all cherished equally. That impatience is what brings you here to share, to test and to distil your experience and wisdom and insight, and out of that process to quarry the next official stepping stones towards a truly equal world.
I wish you well in that endeavour and I hope that when you leave this conference it will be with a renewed passion for your work, a recommitment to the equality vocation, with many new ideas and many friendships to sustain you on the next phase of this long but life-enhancing journey.
Go raibh maith agaibh.