PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS:THERE IS "a huge maelstrom of grief" in Ireland at the moment, President Mary McAleese has said.
“The millstone of the Ryan and Murphy reports will be carried for a long time on the way ahead, just as the millstone of the massive fiscal mistakes will similarly have to be carried for some time to come into the future. There is a long road ahead to redemption on both accounts . . .” she said.
She was speaking in Malahide, Co Dublin, on Saturday at the 50th anniversary conference of Cori (Conference of Religious of Ireland). However, she continued, “I don’t want you or our country to be defined by these failures, but by how we transcend them.” Grief “has to be distilled into wiser, humbler action. This is the moment when we need people of faith to have faith in themselves and in our country’s ability to dig deep, heal its wounded and with their help, walk the way ahead together, to a better time and a better Ireland,” she said.
She referred to Northern Ireland. “Think back 10, 20 years ago when it would have been utterly, absolutely inconceivable that Sinn Féin and the DUP would be in government together.” Then, anyone suggesting such a thing would have been thought to be “in serious need of medical or psychiatric help”. Yet people, “batty people”, dreamt it. “they stuck to it, stayed with it”.
She continued: “The peace process is not perfect. It is not always an object of great beauty. Reconciliation is not always dressed up in lace,” but relations between North and South, Britain and Ireland were now “light years away from the past”. It proved “change is possible. Even that the impossible is possible.” Noting that Cori represented almost 140 religious congregations and some 9,000 religious in Ireland, she said that “between them they represent an unequalled and unrivalled investment in Ireland, her education, health and social welfare and the physical, pastoral and spiritual enrichment of her people”.
The Cori story had “many good even great chapters, for you and your predecessors created and sustained, and on a not-for-profit-basis, much of the founding infrastructure of today’s education and healthcare systems and outreaches to the poor and marginalised.” But, “the story, as the Ryan and Murphy reports reveal, also has some dreadful chapters as the rigid hierarchicalism and powerful clericalism which characterised the pre-conciliar era created vacuums of vulnerability and unaccountability where children in particular suffered outrageously”.
Those “who lived good lives and who invested generously and unselfishly in the lives of others – in other words – the vast majority of Cori’s members, have been heart scalded by the now clearly documented depravity of those who dishonoured their vocation by abusing children and the denial and inaction which allowed that depravity to continue with virtual impunity. They are also heart scalded by the righteous rage of those who were abused.”
They had pledged “to do their best to put as much right as can be put right and I am glad to see that there is serious engagement on the level of reparations to be made”, the President added.