Irish have enduring strengths, says President

SOCIETY HAS much to be proud of despite the disappointment and economic retrenchment of this gloomy time, President Mary McAleese said last night.

Delivering the 2010 Newman Lecture at UCD, she said the era when we had a “roaring confidence about our national problem-solving capacity” may have passed but we had enduring strengths.

No other generation, she said, has had such success in “peace-building, in attracting high-quality foreign investment, in growing a strong entrepreneurial indigenous sector . . . in globalising Irish culture and in strategically harnessing the energy of the global Irish family”.

These things eluded other generations and they remain centres of strength, she said.

Speaking at Newman House, President McAleese said Irish universities must play a pivotal role as we move to reimagine ourselves and our society.

Newman’s words were a reminder, she said, that universities will have responsibility, not just for creating and disseminating new knowledge, but for “distilling the previous wisdom gained from both human failure and success into tools for the formation of tomorrow’s well-educated citizens”.

Ireland’s task, she said, is to build on all that was good in our success and to make our disappointments a springboard to reimagine ourselves and our society. “We cannot do it without fresh thinking, by which I mean something beyond the superficial or anecdotal which is always readily to hand with its morbid drumbeat but which may prove a false friend. We need the earnestness, the tried and trustedness of scholarship of the place dedicated to serious, forensic intellectual endeavour; the place Newman describes as ‘a seat of wisdom, a light of the world.’ ”

She added: “That place is the university . . . If our 21st century Irish universities can reimagine themselves as successfully as they have done to date, then Ireland itself will be more than reimagined, it will surely be reborn.”

The President said the Newman focus on an education that addresses the whole person, living fully and not just working in a complex universe remains a live issue. Our society is considerably more than an economy and our graduates much more than potential employees or employers, she said.

“Few institutions know more about the problem-solving skills of the individual and the team than universities, for universities are fuelled by the belief that for all the avoidable and unavoidable fragility of our world, the curious, probing, interrogative intellect is capable of producing the solutions that help us transcend our problems.”

If we are to effectively reimagine the university for the 21st century, our challenge, the President said, is to carry out a “creative and critical retrieval of those elements of Newman’s ideal that best align with our contemporary aspirations for economic stability, sustainable prosperity and social justice which is both local and global in its sensitivities”.