President Michael D Higgins has called on student leaders and the wider public to work together to combat “pernicious racism and homophobia” which he said were wreaking havoc in the lives of many of the State's young people.
In an address to the Union of Students in Ireland annual congress today, Mr Higgins said the people of Ireland needed to look inwards and ask how problems such as racism, isolation and loneliness had managed to gain a foothold in society and become a reality in the lives of many.
“I have every confidence that we can, by facing these issues, and working together, combat these and other poisonous prejudices, and that a new Ireland will emerge from that solidarity, from our determination that hate and bigotry will not be tolerated, will not take hold, will not grow roots, will not win,” he told delegates at the Carlton Shearwater Hotel in Ballinasloe, Co Galway.
Mr Higgins acknowledged that students were facing uncertain and challenging times but said that it was from such scenarios that opportunity often presented itself.
He said there was a need to redefine the values underpinning Irish life and to seek ways to create a sustainable economy built on ethical rather than financial assumptions.
“A lack of tolerance for dissenting voices, critique or radical thinking served us poorly in recent times,” he said. “Ireland needs a strong independent student voice, not only as the voice of those currently in education but, in many ways, representative of the future.”
Mr Higgins said a more active and critical participation of young people was important “at this pivotal time of economic and social upheaval”.
He continued: “We need now, more than ever, a vibrant, imaginative and creative population to re-build our land, to build a real Republic. Each of you are creators and innovators and have it within you to shape the Ireland of tomorrow.”
Third level institutions would, he said, have opportunites to lead Ireland into a new engagement with our current circumstances and “students have a critical role to play in developing that new discourse”.
“The current paradigm in economics, I suggest, drawn from the fiction of rational markets, needs to be replaced by a scholarship that is genuinely emancipatory, genuinely original, that restores the unity between the sciences and culture, unleashing rather than squashing human curiosity, discovery and celebratory impulses,” he added.
“The exciting people, the genuinely original people, innovative people are those who are able to draw the different sources of knowledge and wonderment together.”
