PRESIDENT McALEESE has sought a renewal of commitment and determination to counter the country’s present difficulties.
Speaking to a meeting to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Dublin University Law Society (DULS), she said: “We cannot allow ourselves the indulgence of sliding back under those high, banked clouds of resignation.”
She recalled that when the society was set up there was a major global recession and Ireland was in the throes of an economic war with Britain, with male unemployment of 35 per cent.
Trinity College, when DULS was founded, had employed the legendary Fran Moran as the first woman professor of law in the country, she noted.
“Two of her female successors as Reid Professor would become Presidents of Ireland, and Susan Denham, another Trinity graduate, would in 1993 become the first woman judge of the Supreme Court,” President McAleese said.
Throughout the 1930s there were rarely more than two women among the law students in any year, and under college by-laws they had to be off the premises by 6pm each evening.
She said that scrolling through a litany of names associated with DULS was like a social history of Ireland.
She recalled that when she started to work in the Law School at Trinity, Ireland was in the middle of a recession. When she left 12 years later to go to Queen’s University in Belfast, unemployment was 20 per cent and interest rates were 17 per cent.
“There are people who drop batons when the going gets tough and then there are people who don’t,” she said. “The going is getting tough and we need people like the members old and new of this now venerable society to have the self-belief, the commitment, the responsibility and the generosity that allows the centre to hold, that keeps us all together as a community, as a society.”