Mary White (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am privileged to have been appointed by Deputy Micheál Martin to the Taoiseach's commemoration committee for 2016. Because of illness, I was unable to attend many of the committee's meetings last year. However, I am now reinvigorated. We had a meeting last week, and last night our programme was officially launched at the site of the Easter Rising of 1916. This was an emotional event at which the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, stressed that inclusivity would be a central principle of the commemoration programme and that she was keen to look forward and evaluate how far we had come as a nation. A former Senator, Maurice Manning, said in a recent report in the Irish Independent that it was disappointing that the 50-year celebration in 1966 was not inclusive of all the different strands of opinion on the island. He said the commemoration had been a celebration of the mainstream nationalist tradition, with no place for those who did not belong. This time there has been a huge change, and inclusivity has become a major aspect. My experience from meetings all over the country is that, as on so many issues, the people are ahead of the politicians. People whose relatives fought and died in the Great War can now hold their heads high and no longer be embarrassed that those relatives fought on the side of the British. Inclusivity is the core of this issue.
I would like to take this opportunity to spell out what is said in the Proclamation. It states:

The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally...

The vision is of working together to remember, reconcile and imagine our future in the next 100 years and celebrating it all in 2016.