Remarks by President McAleese

• The Ireland Funds acknowledged >

Remarks by President McAleese at the inaugural Ray Murphy Memorial Lecture,
University College, Cork, Friday 25th January 2008

Dia dhíbh a chairde. 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.

Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for your very warm welcome today here at UCC on the occasion of the first Ray Murphy Memorial Lecture in a venue appropriately strongly linked to the issue of philanthropy for without Lou and Loreta Glucksman’s generosity, this building might still be a dream.

I am very grateful to Philanthropy Ireland and its Chairman, Liam O’Dwyer, for the kind invitation to share in this occasion dedicated to the memory of Ray Murphy, whose passion for social equality and active citizenship as well as his extraordinary ability in the field of social finance and philanthropy made him a greatly respected figure both at home and abroad.

Ray’s early work included working with students with learning disabilities in a residential, vocational high school in Ireland, as a community development worker in Ireland and as a youth worker in Germany. He served for three years as deputy CEO of the National Council for the Blind. In his later years, from 2000, he served as director of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation’s Civil Society Programme and even while ill he continued to serve as senior adviser for that Programme. Ray will also be remembered for his sense of humour, his love of life and his generosity of spirit.

This evening provides a welcome opportunity to honour Ray’s memory not just in reflecting back on what he achieved but in casting our minds forward to where he would like us to get to as a community. That should bring us to reflect on the next steps we could take in developing more effectively and imaginatively our long-established culture of charitable open-handedness of which Ray was an exemplar. Today that legendary culture of generosity is for the first time in our history allied to the beginning of an era of equally legendary prosperity and a hard-earned peace, in which philanthropy has played an absolutely crucial, though too often overlooked, role. So with this confluence of peace and prosperity, now is exactly the right time to examine how we can metamorphose that generations-old culture of spontaneous, massive, personal generosity which we are so good at, so that it incorporates the kind of planned philanthropic giving which can be a powerhouse of lasting change.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Ray in his capacity as Chairperson (and a founding member) of Clann Credo, the Social Investment Fund, brainchild of Sr Magdalen Fogarty and a great project championed by the Presentation Sisters. Ray was a strong believer in our need for a vibrant civil society and his work in making finance available, through Clann Credo, to empower community-focused enterprises across Ireland continues to repay social dividends to communities all over Ireland. Two years ago I celebrated with Clann Credo their landmark 10th anniversary as they surveyed a landscape of remarkable achievement, each project an eloquent and enduring part of Ray’s legacy.

At the core of his vision was a philanthropic heart that had a deep sense of social responsibility particularly for the less well-off in society, but importantly it was a heart and not just a cheque book. Philanthropy in Ray’s mind was not simply an outreach of remote benefactors to strangers but rather the expression of care of one member of a clan for another. It was an expression of the connectedness of humanity, the responsibility we have for one another. Equally importantly, it was one of the ways in which we complete ourselves humanly by indulging not the selfish self but stretching, developing and refining the giving self.

Ray believed that the welfare of one is intimately connected to the welfare of all, that when one human being is weakened by exclusion, then we are all weaker. It’s a vision that sits well with our

Constitution, with our credentials as a republic of equals which has as its ambition the creation of a true social order, a place where the dignity and equality of every human being is a lived reality and not merely a vague and unreachable aspiration.

Giving, over and above what the law demands of us, giving from the heart, giving with a determination to improve our world, that kind of giving allows us to stretch our reach and more quickly bring about the kind of egalitarian world we aspire to. It infuses our world with goodness with a hint of the miraculous. It galvanises the very best that human beings are capable of and puts those things at the service of redressing the dire consequences of the worst that we are capable of, greed, intolerance, unfairness, neglect and violence.

The work of Clann Credo in providing a pathway for individuals and communities to their untapped strengths and potential is very much mirrored in the pathway to peace which philanthropy helped to build so successfully on this island.

People are born into many chaotic sets of circumstances not of their making. The struggle to overcome the more baleful legacies of history and geography has bedevilled many a people including the Irish. Out of our experience has come a distilled and uniquely Irish value system, wrought out of the injustice of colonisation, the deep crevices that followed plantation, the grim convulsion wrought by mass starvation and mass emigration, the catharsis provoked by conflict and civil war and grinding poverty.

Mixed through all of this there was a people strongly inclined on all sides to spiritual introspection and, inspired by the Christian faith with its emphasis on love, on generosity and on forgiveness, a people who no matter how poor or oppressed, could find money to help those worse-off, or to build a church whether at home or in Africa and to make common cause with others in similar situations all around the globe. Yet conflict pursued us from one generation to the next, dogging our steps to progress and prosperity and the elusive peace.

The British Officer to whom Eamonn de Valera surrendered later corresponded with him and in one of those letters de Valera said very simply and poignantly, ‘The Irish never liked to fight. We were glad when it was over.’ All through the recent troubles we saw over and over again how irrepressible was the impulse for peace, for reconciliation, for an honourable compromise that needed to draw from a well of forgiveness and needed too the insistent, focussed work of peace-builders to achieve this moment in our lives when we can say with a heart and a half that we are glad it is over. In telling the story of both the peace and the prosperity, philanthropy has already played a very noble part. It helped harness and give traction to the best of human instincts, the most uplifting of projects.

Our contemporary backdrop of an historic peace, a chance for true partnership, came about because of an overwhelming and unselfish giving, channelled, shaped, galvanised into a comprehensive force for change and for good, a giving that involved not only the people who share this island, but our neighbours in Britain, our Irish family around the world, and many of the nations of the world all of whom used both political and philanthropic vehicles side by side to finally transcend an ancient and once intractable set of problems.

The role of philanthropy in problem solving for peace cannot be underestimated. The Ireland Funds became a powerful global philanthropic initiative of our Irish clan and their friends around the world. Similarly, Cooperation Ireland uses its funds to provide opportunities for groups from to meet and learn about their different cultural backgrounds. The European Union weighed in with its peace and reconciliation monies. Many friendly nations around the world, spearheaded by the Irish and British Governments, combined to form the International Fund for Ireland.

Then too, there was the huge financial contribution made by individuals, corporations and philanthropic organisations, often quietly and privately. It was all these monies intelligently disbursed over a period of decades that painstakingly and slowly reconnected neighbour to neighbour, that showcased the power of partnership, that gave dignity to all and listening space to all. It was this new, structured form of philanthropy that helped the politics of peace to work and to succeed – where they had failed for generations – so philanthropy helped the peace and it helped our prosperity too - for the story of Ireland’s transformation into one of the world’s most successful economies is also a story that involves the world of philanthropy.

Education was a key to changing Ireland’s fortunes for our people’s brain power was and remains our very best national asset. Philanthropy played an important role in widening access and in building up our educational infrastructure. One only has to consider the contribution of Atlantic Philanthropies, particularly to the third level sector, to get an idea of the impact made by such funding.

It is only one story among many, for every team that took to a sporting field has relied on sponsors, every arts event, every local festival and every charity knows just how much it owes to its benefactors.

Developing the level of philanthropic giving and increasing the strategic element of that giving is a challenge that now sits right under our noses. The Forum on Philanthropy and Philanthropy Ireland are working to answer that challenge – in this era when Ireland is at last generating substantial wealth.

Andrew Carnegie, one of the best-known philanthropists in the world, so successful at wealth accumulation, turned his mind to what was, for him ‘the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution’. The time has come for us in Ireland to turn our minds to that very task. It is a good problem to have and one which this problem-solving generation will, I am sure, make the very best of, for philanthropy is a crucial part of any healthy and vibrant society. It reveals values of generosity, mutuality and care that refine and enhance the texture of our lives. It creates precious opportunities for new levels of achievement and inclusion in the community and voluntary sector, the arts, heritage, sports, in research and education.

Already the charitable sector in Ireland provides us with over €3 billion worth of services on a not-for-profit basis across every meaningful area of life and so it is little wonder that the Government has so strongly supported the establishment of the Philanthropy Forum in these times of strong economic performances and significant increases in individual and corporate wealth.

We are only at the start of Ireland’s potential, only at the very beginning of its status as a wealthy and wealth-generating country. Already at national level our Government’s aid to the developing world is increasing and set to increase even further, placing us per capita among the world’s most generous countries. Alongside that we have seen a much greater degree of sophistication and sharpness of focus in the delivery of aid, things like the development of Ireland Aid, the opening of the new Volunteers’ Centre on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, a wonderful showcase of our outreach and a constant invitation to our young people.

We have had the recent creation of a ready-to-go team of crisis experts and crucially we have seen the scholarly focussing of our aid on education, healthcare and good governance with clear targets, accountability and transparency. The Taoiseach’s recent visit to South Africa in the company of entrepreneur and philanthropist Niall Mellon showed the leverage achievable when partnerships develop between donor sector including the State

Cultural change can be notoriously difficult to achieve but contemporary Ireland has shown itself to be capable of absorbing and adapting quite easily to fairly major changes, from bans on smoking in public places and taxes on plastic bags, the swift move from the punt to the euro, the vast change in one generation from outward migration to net inward migration, from generations-old homogeneity to almost instant heterogeneity and crucially from ‘ceann faoi’ to can do. If ever the time was right in Ireland to raise this debate the time is now, for the underlying conditions could not be more favourable. If Ray were here he would be urging on the debate. But for as long as he is remembered his voice will never be silent and we know he is willing us on to complete the vision articulated best in the Proclamation, of cherishing the children of the nation equally and sharing that vision with the clan that is suffering humanity all around the world.

We have become better analysers of problems, better solvers of problems and now we are asked to take our long-embedded culture of giving and to ally it to an embedded culture of philanthropy, to make that mix of money and care work its magic in lighting up lives, opening up lives, ending exclusion and making of all who share this earth a clan, a richly diverse family, but one characterised by a sharing and caring that Ray Murphy would be proud of.

I am deeply moved to have been asked to honour Ray in this way and thank you most sincerely for the privilege.

• President McAleese Speeches Website >