Mary Robinson addressing the launch of the One Percent Difference Campaign
Wednesday 19th June 2013
I am actually delighted to speak briefly about the importance of philanthropy itself and to
commend Philanthropy Ireland for the thought leadership that they are giving here in Ireland
about the importance of philanthropy and we’ll hear quite a lot more about that. But to me I
think it’s an opportunity to think about how we need a new narrative about who we are as a
people in Ireland, to move away, as we have, from the failed Celtic Tiger era and have a more
positive sense of something that I think is part of our past that we can really build on – and that is
a true spirit of community in the widest sense. A community of people everywhere, of
organisations like many of you here doing good work at local level, and of corporations, of
everybody, joining with government at national and local level – a sense of citizenship that’s very
positive because we are engaged and active and we are doing things.
I thought I might reflect with you very briefly on the different perspectives that I have had an
opportunity to see of philanthropy from different sides. I, like you, remember the huge
philanthropy from outside Ireland to this country, particularly from the United States, people like
Andrew Carnegie who built so many libraries in this country, or Chuck Feeney who did such work
on education and health institutions. The experience that I’ve had of being involved in a
philanthropic body included chairing for about 8 years when I was based in the United States the
Global Fund for Human Rights and it was a fund that needed to be funded by others but we did
the due diligence of supporting human rights work and women’s groups work in countries of
conflict, in authoritarian countries around the world – and other organisations understood that
we could do the due diligence and therefore provided the money. That was a kind of interesting
example of philanthropy.
Another example was chairing the GAVI Alliance Board also during that period and for part of
while I was serving as High Commissioner for Human Rights. The GAVI Alliance is a huge
public/private partnership. It wouldn’t have come into existence without the firm commitment
of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the time, that we needed to increase vaccination of
children and particularly in poor developing countries, so it became foundation governments and
organisations, Unicef with lots of local partners and other organisations to make sure that the
children in developing countries had access to life saving vaccinations. Just earlier this month I
was in London for the Nutrition Summit and that was a little bit like that again – it was a huge
sense of a public/private partnership prioritising nutrition, not just food security but actually
quality of food and nutrition in order to prioritise the first 1000 days of a child’s life and also the
need to address the huge number of stunted children in our world. We know medically that a
stunted child will never reach his or her full physical or mental potential so it’s a terrible situation
that we have millions of children who are so under-nourished that they are stunted and will not
reach their full potential. That was a partnership between a number of governments, but also
again the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the CIFF the Children’s Fund, and also organisations
like Concern and others, many I think gathered here, who make sure that the food and nutrition
are available in countries where this is still a huge human rights problem. I’m actually going to
have to leave immediately as Aine has said, but for once it’s actually because there’s a foundation
that has come here that I’m on the Board of so I’ve been able to entice them to come, partly by
promising them the wonderful good weather they’d get if they came to Dublin. It’s the European
Climate Foundation which does a lot of work on addressing how to get the richer parts of the
world, particularly European countries, to do more to ensure that they take the responsibility to
mitigate the effects of the fossil fuel growth that we’ve had in European countries and I’m sure
that Minister Hogan will pick up this theme, but we do believe that Europe can and should do
more - all European countries including Ireland. My foundation, the Mary Robinson Foundation Climate Justice, comes to climate from a different perspective which is the impact it’s already
having on the poorest. They are the least responsible, they are feeling it, they have more climate
shocks over quite a number of years. Now we are beginning to talk about climate shocks in
Europe, Sandy and other climate shocks in the United States of America, but actually this has
been a huge problem over a decade in many developing countries, undermining development
and poverty issues.
Which brings me to the other side of philanthropy, which isn’t always about providing money or
resources to do things. It’s also about providing time, providing a personal commitment through
time and I think that that is a hugely important aspect. Let me recall when it was decided to have
a day to honour the man who is back in our consciousness because he’s very ill, or he’s
recovering from another outbreak of lung infection, Nelson Mandela. When it was decided that
the world should honour him on his birthday, the 19th of July, a month from today, he asked that
the honouring would be that everyone would give 67 minutes of their time on behalf of others,
on behalf of community to reflect the 67 years that he worked for freedom and for the future of
the people of South Africa and indeed, the people of the world in a much broader sense. So he
asked for 67 minutes as being the philanthropy that most interested him, working with local
communities and I’m one of the elders as you probably know – I keep emphasising, one of the
younger elders, but nonetheless one of the elders – and we try to promote that day as I’ll be
doing in the period leading up to the 19th of July.
I can even find a human rights reference in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for support
for philanthropy in this very broad sense. Article 29 of the Universal Declaration says, and I
quote, “everyone has duties to the community, in which alone the free and full development of
his or her personality is possible”. I think that’s very interesting – everyone owes duties to the
community so you should know that you have duties to the community, but unless you do
something about that, with and for your community, you yourself don’t get the full development
of your personality and I think for most of you here is in this room, that will make a lot of sense
when you reflect on it, because you’ve given to your community and you know that in giving you
are much more enriched. You feel, “yes – I’ve been working for the community but I feel I got
more than I gave” and I’ve often heard that said and I think many of you would know that too –
I’ve really got back more myself… I feel a different person…. I’m living in a different way…. I’m
engaged and it’s hard work but it’s actual something that is enhancing my sense of who I am.
So in conclusion, I’m really delighted to support Philanthropy Ireland in all its endeavours and as I
said, I think we need a 21st century way of capturing spirit of meithel – is Ar scáth a chéile a
mhairim na daoine.
G’raibh mile maith agaibh