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Conferring Address by Ms Mary McCarthy, Director, National Sculpture Factory, Cork, 10m, September 5th 2011
President, Graduates, staff,
It is a huge honour to be asked to address you here this morning, although once the honour of the invitation settled in, the challenge became a reality, as, to congratulate, encourage and inspire is not an easy task.

The first, to congratulate, being significantly easier than the encouraging and inspiring.
It is an honour for me as a proud graduate of UCC to be here this Autumn morning as I would have been in your precise (even in the A to Mc Category) place twenty one yeas ago graduating with one of those same Joint Honours degrees in English and Philosophy.
I heartily congratulate you, your family, your friends and supporters as well as your lecturers and tutors who all played a role in your personal graduation achievements.
It is an achievement; it is evidence of your intellectual and analytical ability, evidence of your commitment, interest, curiosity and responsibility. You have worked for this honour and you deserve your recognition.
Your Joint Honours BA Degree is a privilege, it is a qualification of value whether, it is an end in itself or a stepping stone to other post graduate courses, to work, travel or other life interests, it is an accreditation that you will have for life.
An accreditation that is a quality mark, evidence that you have certain skills and capabilities as well as interests and passions.
You have made choices, you have chosen subject areas, courses modules and papers and it is those choices that set you apart. Each BA Honours is unique and personally tailored and marks you as an individual. Individuality is important.
This Degree is not something that can be taken away from you, it cannot be actually stolen, repossessed, devalued or frozen like so many of the other possessions, assets and things you may acquire or own in future years. It is yours and you have earned it.
While reflecting on this invitation to address you, I was thinking off my own years in UCC and how those college years flew by. They had their own rhythms and patterns with the fun rhythms dominating in the Autumn and the exam/assessment rhythms dominating in the Spring, yet without fail my memories are happy and perhaps I am a little over nostalgic for those years, for  that time. I met many of my close friends and now colleagues here.
University College Cork, as I am sure you will have experienced and many of you may still be experiencing it, if you are embarking on further education here, is an outstanding university and an exceptionally beautiful campus. I still think so, and it has expanded beyond recognition since I was an undergraduate.
It is important where possible to be surrounded by good design and an aesthetically pleasing environment .It subliminally forms your taste and your attitudes.
UCC has some buildings of exceptionally high design from so many gifted craftspeople, architects and designers. It is a significant contributor to the cultural wealth of Cork and our county. Its is a tourist attraction in its own right and it has truly tried to merge ‘the town and gown’ with its open access policy, with its strategic and actual involvement the civic and cultural life of Cork and Ireland, with its open invitation to visit and attend so many high quality cultural events on campus, from talks and concerts to exhibitions and showcases as well as hosting royal and presidential visits.
Yet the poetic subliminal and emotional beauty, which I allude to, goes way beyond its particular physical buildings, and its landscape.
For me, its beauty is more its attitude, its complex mental state, its sense of history, and its sense of the contemporary.
It is timeless and it is of a rare quality.
UCC is a place where there is a continuity of learning, a place of enquiry, a place where people are debating ideas and furthering research.
A place of tolerance, a place where difference of opinion is respected and openly encouraged, and a place where consensus is not necessarily desired a place where difference may distinguish you.
These are precious places in our society and we must all be vigilant in these exceptional times of fear and change to ensure that these open places are supported and maintained.
We must as citizens insist that these places  of learning and enquiry remain functional, excellent, transparent and rigorous in their support of students and staff, we must advocate for the quality student learning experience, the quality staff experience and the continual  encouragement of curiosity, playfulness, experimentation  and fun.
A place such as UCC, both physically and mentally, is vital to Ireland’s recovery and Europe’s success and you as a graduate with your skills are a necessary part of the reconfiguration and re imagining process which we as citizens of the world are now urgently required to undertake.
I am excited about these moments as it is in these times that great ideas are formed and we can change the model.
Advocate for your university and your beliefs whether that is formally or informally. I am not active in any formal alumni grouping but despite having accreditations from two other Irish Universities I always say firstly that I am a graduate of UCC.
I am proud of that fact and know that it is a distinguishing quality.
Irish universities and UCC are recognised institutions and that is now to your advantage. Take that advantage, own it and be proud of it.
To encourage and inspire you, I say this with meaning and intent.
Be yourself, find your passions and determinedly follow them. If you are unsure what to do next, be curious, do something.
Do not let fear, talk of recession, get you down or cripple your enthusiasm your desires.
You are the hope, your energy, personal responsibility, integrity and commitment is necessary to any future healthy society.
All of you will play your part as future students, parents, partners, wives, husbands, thinkers, writers, commentators, researchers, educator, politicians, employee, employer etc
The skills and abilities you have applied to obtaining a degree will be applied to the world/place /people that you encounter. You will create your own niche.
I was fortunate to have excellent college lecturers many who are now retired who insisted on original thinking and encouraged rigorous self assessment and questioning. That coupled with supportive and encouraging family enabled me to follow a vague aspiration to work in the creative sector.
I passionately pursued that and it has taken me and still takes me to interesting places all over the world, from working in New York, Dublin, London and Berne to project work in Shanghai, Venice, Brussels, Stockholm and Melbourne to name a few.
I am fortunate to work in the creative economy, as it has become known; it used to be called the arts.
Arts and creativity are now globally recognised as key elements to any healthy open economy and UCC again is a leader in this field with its imaginative Glucksman Gallery, its inspiring School of Music , its architecture and Design courses as well as the presence of so many other art related experts and the more mercurial subjects of Sciences and engineering.
The Arts and creativity broadly have been widely recognised accredited as being key assets and part of Ireland’s future reputation building. Our artists our innovators and our creative sector are resilient and fearless. As a graduate of UCC working in the arts, I am privileged to work with many of Ireland’s creative artists and as a Board member of culture Ireland, Ireland’s state agency to promote Irish arts worldwide I witness this force of our sectors originality, their sheer resilience and their ability to create and deliver new ideas daily. This resilience is grounded in knowing yourself and trusting your instincts.
To this end I am going to quote a paragraph of Steve Jobs famous address he made at Stanford University 2005. This came to mind as it was discussed last Sunday on the radio, it being the week when he steps down as CEO of Apple. His advice goes ‘You’ve got to find what you love’ Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
So to conclude, you are already lucky in life, you are a graduate of University College Cork, and you have the tools to follow your heart and your intuition.
Take those values with you, share them with others and always keep your appetite and curiosity for life, keep and always remember those same curious qualities which brought you to UCC in the first place.
Have a wonderful day.
ENDS

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Conferring Address by Ms Fiona Ross, Director, National Library of Ireland, 12.30pm, September 5th 2011
President Murphy, Professor Fennell, University staff, guests, and most importantly of all, Graduates, good afternoon and thank you for inviting me.When I received this invitation, my first thought was: how do I give a conferring address that isn’t littered with clichés? You know the old chestnuts like “the only constant is change”, “the first day of the rest of your lives”, “the benefit of hindsight”, “and the wisdom of experience”. The list is practically endless. But, at least now, by getting a few of them out of the way at the very beginning of my speech, I might be able to avoid subjecting you to them later on. 
The other thought that struck me when I received the invitation was how vividly I recall my own graduation ceremony almost a quarter of a century ago in 1987. I can’t remember all that much about what was said on the day. But I do remember the sights, the sounds and most importantly the people I shared that day with – as if it happened only yesterday. And when I look back on how my life turned out and the quite wild changes in career direction that I have made, I am reminded of One Day, the current hit movie based on the best selling novel.
For those of you who haven’t read One Day, or seen the movie, or heard the reviews, it’s all about two characters, a young man (Dexter) and a young woman (Emma), and what they are doing, or not doing, and who they are romantically involved with, (or not involved with), on the anniversary of their graduation each year over a twenty-year period. Although it is fiction, both the book and the movie do manage to convey some notion of the unpredictability of life and that is my theme for today.
In lots of ways, you are today’s Dexter’s and Emma’s. You are graduating with degrees in arts, Celtic studies and social sciences. Many of you have career plans and dreams as Emma did, and I’m quite sure some of you still don’t know what you hope to do career wise as was the case with Dexter. In some ways, it doesn’t matter. None of us can really say what we will be doing, or who we will be, five or ten years down the road.
Let’s cast our minds forward five years from today to September 5^th, 2016. That’s not too far away at my age but it’s quarter of a lifetime for most of you. Where will you be? What will you be doing? What will this country look like? Will we have become the smart economy or will we still be struggling to emerge from recession? Or will we be celebrating the centenary of 1916 in a confident and celebratory mood, with full employment for our Graduates a reality once more?
And if you think predicting what our lives will be like in five years’ time is difficult, September 5^th 2021 is almost impossible to imagine. Most of you will have passed the milestone 30^th birthday by then. Many of you will be married, have children, have changed jobs and careers a few times, moved country more than once, been out of work for periods of time, made some really bad choices, had some great breaks.  Hopefully, all of you will have had a lot of fun along the way.
I certainly did. In fact, I’ve done all of the above and most of it not in any planned way.
Like you, I graduated in the middle of what can only be described as an awful recession. The 1980s was a grim decade. The IDA put a poster up in Dublin Airport with a picture of a few dozen graduates announcing that we were “the young Europeans”. An enterprising newspaper reporter followed up on the poster a year later and found that all but one of the graduates pictured had been forced to emigrate. I know that emigration is now on the cards for so many of you.
But don’t get me wrong. We weren’t the poor and huddled masses wrapped in shawls on Ellis Island or tramping the streets of London looking at signs saying “No Irish and No Dogs”. The difference back then was that we hadn’t experienced a boom or any period of prosperity before the 1980s. ALL that had happened was that things had gone from bad to worse.
There was no sense of loss because we had nothing to lose in the first place. Emigration was something we almost looked forward to. It was a given. It was never discussed. We all knew from about the time we did the Junior Cert (or the Inter Cert as it was known in the early 1980s) that emigration was on the agenda and, if I am to be quite honest about it, we were thrilled at the thought. Ireland was an unimaginably bleak place back in the 1980s and the bright lights of London and New York were infinitely more attractive than what was on offer here.
The difference between then and now is that back then the prospects of returning home to a permanent job were a lot slimmer than they are now. And not just because of a lack of job opportunities here in Ireland. The cost of travelling home was prohibitive. This was the pre-Ryanair days when the cheapest return flight to London was more than £200 – about €450 today.
Today, while we hear a lot of talk about the new wave of emigration, the reality this time around is a lot different. What we are talking about now is migration with a strong chance of return.
There are some amongst you for whom leaving is a nightmare but for many I know it is something you are intent on doing to get some experience to see the world.  Emigration served me and so many of my peers well so I say ‘go for it and enjoy it and get the best you can out of your time abroad’. If you want to return, you will find a way to make it work.
I have so many friends living abroad who have no regrets about having emigrated. And, while they may harbour dreams of retiring to a cottage in rural Ireland somewhere, they are making way too much money in wonderful climates and countries and are far too successful and too busy to worry too much about coming home.
That said, I did come home, and I am very happy that I did. But I would go again if the right opportunity presented itself.
During my twenty-year career, I have worked in the UK, Europe, Asia and the US.  Never for one minute did I think my degree in English and History would take me to so many different places.  My first job was in stock broking in the City of London and while I was in London, I gave up this great job to come back to Ireland to set up a fashion business with my sister.  I knew it was a risk but I wasn’t prepared for it to fail either. Which unfortunately it did. Luckily I had applied for a Masters Degree in Business which I completed while watching my dreams of being the new Dolce and Gabanna go up in smoke.  I ended up back in finance but in Hungary!
At 30 I got married which led to a move to Los Angeles where my wonderful CV and qualifications were absolutely meaningless. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to reply to a tiny ad in the LA Times where Rosemary from Dublin was the office manager I would have been miserable and unemployed. Instead, I ended up working in what until now was my favourite part of my career in the US.
At 35 I had three kids, 3 and under, and was working full-time – loving it but definitely struggling and juggling. At 40 I was back in Dublin, seemingly queen of all I surveyed, but inside unhappy to be working in financial services. I was sick of the excess and all the other Celtic Tiger nonsense, but afraid to jump off the gravy train. I did however jump and once again answered an ad in The Irish Times and was privileged at the age of 44 to be appointed Director of the National Library.
When I look back on all my “One Days” over the past 25 years, I can see many points of change. Many occasions when my life changed for the better through pure dumb luck. Other times when I had to make things happen myself.
What the book and film One Day tells us, and what I can personally attest to, is that life never works out the way you expect it to.  From my point of view at least, the ability to be flexible at all times, and in every way, was a critical success factor.
Be flexible and be prepared to compromise. There will be September 5ths in the future where you will find yourself in the wrong job, in the wrong country, in the wrong relationship and in the wrong career (but, hopefully, not all at the same time). So, one of my absolutely key messages to you today is ‘never be afraid to change, to take a step backwards or sideways’.
I’m not advising you to float aimlessly through life. You have to have some goals and dreams and a semblance of a life plan, however vague it may be. This life plan will give you the basic co-ordinates to guide your life.
At this stage, many of these co-ordinates will have come from your family, your school and from your time here in UCC. From today, however, your universe is widening, as you head off into a different world.  This inherent compass is critical. But remember, it is a pointer NOT an anchor. Something that brings you back to who you are when you need it.
Let the pendulum of life swing as it will, but know that there is a mid-point which will be the REAL YOU whenever it comes to rest.
The following is more or less what Steve Jobs of Apple fame said when he addressed a conferring ceremony in Stanford University back in 2005. At the time, he attributed much of his success to being fired from Apple at the age of 30.
“I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple . It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love.... And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.”
My message to you is: be flexible and resilient enough to take the hard knocks. Have the strength and the drive to pursue your goals and your hearts’ desires through it all. When I look back now, I can see a pattern in my life. As Steve Jobs said “You can connect the dots going backwards, but you can’t see them going forward.” I was a humanities graduate who managed to get a ‘great job’ as a stockbroker and I had a wonderful career. But, for a long time, I felt like a bit of a fraud. I think it’s called the Achilles syndrome – where you keep waiting for someone to unmask you as an imposter and throw you out of the dealing room.  It took me a long time to feel confident as a professional in financial services. Then after 20 years I came back to humanities with a bang, and once more, I realised just how little I knew and wished in my new role that I had stuck with English and History. But, in reality there’s one thing I can be pretty sure of. And it is this: I would not be Director of the National Library of Ireland if I had become a history teacher or a literary editor instead of all the other jobs I had - stock broking, public relations, banking, setting up a business and all the rest.
So to conclude go where life takes you.  But only if you think it’s going to take you where you want to be in the end.
ENDS

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Conferring Address by Ms Mary Hickson, Chief Executive, Cork Opera House, Cork, 3.30pm, September 5th 2011
President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, graduates.
I feel deeply honoured and privileged to address you on such an important day and I’d like to thank Dr Michael Murphy for the opportunity to do so.  A few years ago all of you had set goals; today we all celebrate your success.  You are all beaming with pride, energy and potential!  It is a marvellous achievement of which you should be very proud. Congratulations!
The road is now open to realise your potential and fulfil your dreams. To do so, you must believe in yourself, dare to trust your instinct and your passion and be prepared to take a risk and accept a challenge. 
I remember how I felt on this day 13 years ago, when I sat here ready to receive my BMus.  I felt on top of the world.   Today I stand before you expected to say something meaningful and memorable. Upon receiving the invitation, I wondered what my expectation of the speaker on that day, 13 years ago had been, what message had I expected to hear? Retrospect is a wonderful thing. 
I have chosen two experiences in my life that have had a deep effect on me and have helped to shape the person I am today.  I will share them with you in the hope that your self-belief, your personal integrity and honesty with yourself may guide you in life and shape your future.
Just over a year ago, I had become aware that the position of CEO was coming up at Cork Opera House. Part of me really wanted to apply for the job and part of me was saying ‘Mary, seriously they wouldn’t consider you for this in a month of Sundays, and ‘you are not who they are looking for’.  A few days passed and it was still niggling away at me so I decided to test the idea with two good friends of mine who also work in the arts.  Without hesitation, they both told me ‘Of course you should go for it, you could really turn that place around’.
I was flattered and encouraged by their positive reaction but my response was negative and I doubted, again, my courage to register my voice to be in the running, however deep down I knew I was ready for the challenge.  Now, here’s the turning point:
One of my friends said to me ‘Mary, we are part of the future of the arts in this country … all the big guns started somewhere and at some stage they were given their chance and they took their leap … maybe it’s your turn, why not?”
My instinct was telling me to apply but my confidence was about 10 steps behind.  Deep down a part of me knew that I was ready for this responsibility and was also ready, professionally, to take that job and meet the challenges it would set out before me. Yet, I needed that simple reality check to stop doubting myself and take my leap.
I submitted my application the following morning.
All of you sitting there today will have a particular role to play in the future.  Nobody knows which part yet.  When I think back to me as an undergraduate, the girl who worked in the bar of the Cork Opera House, I think of her fondly but she didn’t know, at the time, where she was going to end up BUT every move she made in her professional life was guided by her intuition and self belief.  So my message to you is to know when to jump, to know when to run to and run from things.  Learn to read your own signs, trust your intuition, be guided by your own self belief because these things will give you the best directions in life.  And, when success comes your way, you will be ready for it.
The other important moment I want to share with you is the most telling element and the one that brings all of what I have said here today together. It was the day I was offered the job as the CEO of Cork Opera House - less than a year ago now.  I distinctly remember sitting in front of the interviewing panel who were about to offer me the job.  My thoughts were strong and clear.
I made a pact with myself there and then that if I were to take the job I would have to promise to ALWAYS be myself.  To be the same Mary to every person I meet.  I felt, if I could not commit to that I could not take the job.  This simple message was a very important realisation in my life.  Prior to that in a number of work contexts I had made compromises attempting to be what other people wanted or expected of me. Yet, my greatest achievements have come about when I have been true to myself, my values and my own character.  So my message is: know yourself, be honest with yourself.  Know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and act on them and uphold your values.  If you are able to do this you’ll achieve what you want, and much more.
It is an intimidating time to be entering into the world of arts and culture.  The extraordinary economic reality we are faced with right now may seem impossible to break through  BUT it is also an oddity in the arts, that some of the most creative periods are those that coincide with this kind of economic difficulty.  And it is this fact that holds you in a unique position to excel and flourish.  There is something about adversity that makes people focus harder, makes people challenge themselves more, makes people and organisations communicate better and collaborate.  It is no secret that in order to succeed in the arts, we must be passionate about what we do.   Your passion will allow you to carve out your own unique place in life and work which in turn will give you value, both artistically and economically.  So my parting glass to you today is to know yourself, be yourself and believe in yourself. 
Congratulations again. Thank you.

ENDS

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