SPEECH BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
SPEECH BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THURSDAY, 27TH MARCH, 2003
As a former member of Business in the Community in Northern Ireland and now as Patron of Business in the Community Ireland I take a particular delight in joining you today for this challenging and I think, hard-hitting conference. My thanks to the Chairman of Business in the Community Ireland, Mr. Stephen Costello for his kind invitation and congratulations to Chief Executive Tina Roche, the Board members and all those who are responsible for bringing us together today. I also extend a warm Irish welcome, ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’ to each of you but especially to our visitors and friends from overseas.
It has to be said that Dublin Castle is not the first place you might look to for inspiration on the subject of Corporate Social Responsibility but if you are looking for such inspiration in Dublin then just around the corner is one of Dublin’s best known redbrick buildings, the Iveagh Trust Housing. It was built over one hundred years ago thanks to the philanthropy of the Guinness family and it was targeted at providing homes for the poor and the destitute. If you lift the 2003 Dublin telephone directory you will see a front cover dominated by the Special Olympics World Games which Ireland is to host later this year and which is receiving massive community support and in particular huge support from the business community. In the century which separates Edwardian Dublin and today’s Dublin you will find plenty of evidence that Ireland is a place in which the ethic and practice of key elements of corporate social responsibility is already long since rooted.
Business in the Community however is about building on that tradition, giving it a focus and a coherence, you could say it is about joining up the dots so that corporate social responsibility moves from being a laudable form of altruism bolted on to the world of business and instead becomes a mainstreamed economic and social force, a leaven at the heart of business and at the heart of community. Every business has an ambition to be prosperous, successful and healthy. Every community has precisely the same ambition. Twinning those goals, creating effective and fluent synergies between the world of business and the communities they operate in has the potential to deliver and deliver well the ambitions of both business and the community.
The concept of CSR has a wide and a widening embrace from good practice in the workplace, to sensitivity to the environment, from community outreach of considerable diversity to customer care. It challenges commercial organisations to behave in ways which address a broader constituency of interests than simply their immediate and obvious direct stakeholders but of course that challenge is made in the belief that the benefits that flow from a more holistic and inclusive approach make sound and measurable economic sense as well as raising the bar in terms of civic strength. In a world where racism, sectarianism and gender bias make life miserable, the work place can be a witness to what happens when bias is transcended, each worker becoming an ambassador inside and outside the job, for the principles of equality and respect. In a world where the disabled have to shout twice as hard to be heard, the workplace can be their showcase to the world of the talent so often wasted through neglect or being overlooked. In a world where many still stand on the sidelines as spectators to the more fulfilled lives of others, business outreach in support of social inclusion is nudging us on towards a time when we will fly on two wings and not on one. Ireland has experienced the surging uplift of newly released talent over recent years as the embrace of education and equal opportunities widened the resource pool of talent, energy and creativity. It has been a good time for business and a much better time for people as our social partnership model provided evidence if evidence was needed of the increased velocity of achievement when business and community work in tandem.
From Irish enterprises which have forged success both at home and in export markets, to international companies with a proven track record of providing employment here in Ireland, many of you have already become exemplars of corporate social responsibility through an extensive network of endeavour some of it under the auspices of Business in the Community.
No set of annual accounts has a formula for measuring the enormous good that initiatives like these bring to individuals, to businesses and to our country. Yet the benefits are tangible, in mood, in self-confidence, in new energy released into civic society, in the cohesiveness and sense of common purpose they promote, in the deep pride they evoke, in the widened opportunities, the shared successes and shared memories they create which bridge the world of board room and street in a way no piece of engineering can.
There is a phrase in the preamble to the Irish Constitution which more often than not gets overlooked but is apt in the context of this conference and what it seeks to explore - that phrase is that we seek “ to promote the common good, with due observance of prudence, justice and charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured (and) true social order attained………”. There is manifestly something of that search for true social order at the heart of the concept of corporate social responsibility. The very idea of such a responsibility arises in the human heart, which is not satisfied with simply making widgets no matter how great the widgets. That heart wants the widget maker to be part of a community at work not just a drone in a workplace. It wants that workplace to be a critical part of a local community not just a building in a place inhabited by strangers. Simply put it cares about people and place. There is already plenty of evidence from our own past and from around the world of what happens when that heart turns to stone, when it cares only for profit and not at all for people.
Today you gather as owners of a new vision for business at work in the community and in the world. Each of you brings your own particular piece of the jigsaw of experience, insight and intuition, which will help guide us to the next milestone in this shared journey.
I want to thank you for your generosity in being here and for your willingness to share what you know and to listen to what others have to say. The phenomenal success of Irish business has given us cause to be intensely proud these past years but we are prouder still of its good heart. I wish you well in your efforts to keep that heart healthy for as this conference sets an agenda not just for Ireland but for Europe it is worth reminding ourselves of the power and the platform we have. This small island joined the European Union as its most impoverished member thirty years ago. Today it is Europe’s most remarkable success story and our business reach stretches to the four corners of the globe. Time and again the leaders of applicant countries and many others tell me that they look to Ireland as a source of inspiration and of hope. With our longstanding legacy of corporate social responsibility Ireland has at this time a unique opportunity to add leadership in corporate social responsibility to the list of things for which we are admired, respected and imitated. That we have such an opportunity is thanks to you and I congratulate you for what you have achieved and what you are set to achieve in the years ahead. May I again thank you all for your very warm welcome and now declare this Conference officially open. I wish you well in your deliberations.
Thank you.