EFFORTS TO maintain and consolidate the peace enjoyed during the past decade are essential, President McAleese has told a Belfast audience.
Delivering the chancellor’s lecture at the University of Ulster on the subject of The Island of Ireland – the next Decade, Mrs McAleese said it would be “a dangerous mistake” to switch off the engine that got Ireland to this point.
Pointing to what she said was enormous progress at political and societal level, she said there had been “no disappearance of the fault lines along which difference manifests itself, whether political, religious or societal”.
The transformation of policing in the North, she said, was key to challenging “the wreckers and those who would damage the peace”. It was important to underscore the message “that this process is unstoppable, enjoys overwhelming cross-community civic support and is the only viable way to a fair and just society”.
Addressing an audience including University of Ulster vice-chancellor Prof Richard Barnett, Mrs McAleese referred to the completion of a single electricity market on the island of Ireland and said it illustrated the type of co-operation that could benefit people everywhere.
“It makes sense on an island this size and this peripheral to have joint approaches to marketing tourism, to managing our shared waterways and lakes, to guaranteeing food safety, promoting research and encouraging cross-Border trade and investment,” she said.
Pointing to fiscal pressures on both sides of the Border she asked: “Why replicate certain health services in separate catchments on both sides of the Border if you can provide it more effectively and cost-effectively in a shared and joined-up way?”