President pays tribute to civil rights movement

The President today honoured the North’s civil rights movement for sparking a worldwide citizens’ crusade for equality and dignity.

Mrs McAleese said activists such as John Hume and Austin Currie had helped banish anti-Catholic sectarianism and praised their courage for campaigning for equal voting rights and an end to jobs and housing discrimination during the 1960s and 70s.

Leading figures of the movement such as Ivan Fallon attended today’s reception in Aras an Uachtarain alongside other guests such as SDLP MP Alasdair McDonnell, Sinn Féin MLA Francie Brolly and Dublin artist Robert Ballagh.

Ms McAleese said: “It is right that we should remember those... who knew intuitively the inhumanity of sectarianism, who saw the wastefulness and the dangers of systemic oppression.”

“You dreamt of a country which would cherish its citizens equally, you worked for it long and hard and you faced down, at considerable personal cost, the many obstacles between the widespread injustice of 40 years ago and the widespread hope of today.”

Mrs McAleese said the civil rights movement, which marked its 40th anniversary last year, had created the conditions for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and equality legislation and had inspired similar campaigns in other countries such as the US.

She added: “Thank you for making us and keeping us part of a worldwide impulse for the full liberation of humanity that is still transforming the mixed fortunes of life on this planet.”

Speaking of the murders by dissident republicans of two soldiers and one policeman in recent days, Mrs McAleese said: “It is an attack on the civil liberties of everyone who shares this island and we need champions like you to keep us firmly on the path beyond the paralysis of history and the ghastly futility of violence.”