"It will be my mission to nurture and celebrate commitment to community and to responsible citizenship and to encourage self-belief among the most marginalised." With this crisp summary of her objectives Mrs Mary McAleese yesterday accepted her inauguration as President in a spirited address at Dublin Castle.
She put them in the context of a successful and dynamic Ireland "with a rags to riches, conflict to peace story that I know inspires many in a troubled world".
These are central themes for a role she aptly described as "outside of politics but inside the lives of our people". They provide valuable benchmarks by which to judge our progress as a society and Mrs McAleese's success over the next seven years in raising awareness of the importance of community and citizenship. They are being eroded, as she said, by irresponsible individualism and a pervasive consumerism thrown up by new-found prosperity. She referred to associated social trends such as youth suicide, racism, binge-drinking, street crime and corruption which "hollow out our optimism".
Such negative features of Irish life today need to be identified and discussed publicly if their ill-effects are to be understood and tackled constructively. Mrs McAleese's remarks echo some of those made last week by the Ombudsman, Ms Emily O'Reilly, about "the vulgar fest that is modern Ireland", in an address to the Céifin conference in Ennis. She spoke of the "staggeringly swift creation of a society in which we are increasingly neutral in our judgment of all sorts of objectively bad behaviour". Ms O'Reilly defined the problem as "how to accept this newly secular society and inject it with a value system that takes the best of what we have jettisoned and rejects the worst". Her speech evoked a strongly sympathetic response demonstrating that we are in need of forthright debate on these issues. Regrettably the failure to have a presidential election campaign to air them thoroughly deprived us of an opportunity to discuss how a changing Ireland sees itself today.
President McAleese is constrained in what she can say about this in political terms. But this should not prevent her responding critically to how everyday life is affected. She has a mandate to help people make sense of these trends by emphasising such constructive features of Irish society as the extensive volunteering that gave us the Special Olympics and the countless examples of community spirit she has encountered in her extraordinarily energetic first term. She has much scope to harness active citizenship to community solidarity by publicising such activities. This can help create a new set of values for a changing Ireland and develop the ethical compass contained in the Constitution towards a new practical patriotism, as she put it in her address yesterday. Mrs McAleese should consider giving a progress report on these chosen themes to the Oireachtas, as did her predecessor, Mrs Mary Robinson. They can help shape a more mature and civilised Ireland.