Address by Mr. Tom Kitt, T.D., Minister for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, at the Presentation of Awards for the "Poems for Peace" Competition, at the Regency Hotel, Dublin, at 2:45 p.m. on Monday, 16th November, 1998.

I would like to say how pleased I am to be here today to present awards to the winners of the "Poems for Peace" competition. But before I do so, I would also like to congratulate all those who entered but who will not receive awards this afternoon. Each one of you, who put great effort into writing your poems, took time to think and to write about peace. I hope that you will continue to build on that thought and work, and will go on to contribute in your own way to building a lasting peace on this island.

This has been a truly remarkable year in the history of Ireland, North and South. At the start of the year few could have imagined that by April the parties in Northern Ireland, sitting around the table with each other, would have been able to reach the Agreement that was concluded on Good Friday. That was in itself a heroic and historic achievement.

And I believe that the Agreement they reached offers great hope for the future. Not just because it represents the common ground found after a great deal of effort, but because its sends out a clear message that our future must be built on partnership, equality and mutual respect. Such a future is not built in one day. Our politicians, North and South, are now working extremely hard to implement the Good Friday Agreement and to live up to the commitments it entails. In doing so they are working for all of us - implementing an Agreement that voters, throughout this island, endorsed in the referendums in May. We should take this opportunity to wish them well in their important work. They will have long and difficult days in the months ahead and will require the same courage, vision and leadership that allowed them to reach agreement on Good Friday. We should all do whatever we can to support and help them in their difficult journey.

But we must not leave them to travel that road on their own. However hard they work, they cannot ensure by themselves that a lasting peace will take hold in Ireland unless each one of us is prepared to do what we can to create a new society in which peace can grow. While we cannot undo our past or rewrite our history, working together we can shape and mould a different future.

And in building that future, we must learn to become friends not only with the people that we find easiest to understand, but with those who come from a different background, community or culture. Listening carefully to what they have to say. Striving to understand their point of view. We have experienced too much division, too much hate and too much destruction in our past. We need to grow together as a community and put the divisions of the past firmly behind us.

All of our people facing what will hopefully be a bright future, have the most to gain from a lasting peace. For in years to come, it will be our young people, from North and South, who will reap the harvest from the seeds of hope that are sown today.

It is up our young people to ensure that they are the last to experience the dreadful consequences of division and conflict. I hope that your legacy will be a new coming together in friendship and understanding of our two great traditions on this island. I hope that you will tend and nurture peace so that it can put down deeps roots, can grow and can thrive.

Many generations of Irish people longed for the opportunity that now presents itself - for the first time in many years we have a chance for a long, lasting peace built on real respect for each other. I hope that when you are older and looking back on your lives you will be able to say that you did all that you could to make that chance a reality.

The achievement of the Good Friday Agreement was, of course, recognised not only at home but also abroad by the international community. It was a source of great pride to us all that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to John Hume and David Trimble. In their award the Nobel Committee recognised the essential partnership that is at the heart of the Agreement.

John Hume has given all his political life to the pursuit of peace and to the building of a new society in Northern Ireland. David Trimble deserves great credit for the leadership he has given to the Unionist community in the negotiations and in the conclusion of the Agreement. Together with his Deputy First Minister, Seamus Mallon, he is entrusted with the responsibility for implementation of crucial parts of the Agreement. I hope that the Nobel Peace Prize will give everyone renewed courage to go forward.

Of course, the Nobel Peace Prize was not the only Nobel award to be given to an Irish person in recent years. Seamus Heaney, one of our greatest and most eminent poets, has also been awarded the Nobel prize for literature - a well deserved award to someone who has written movingly about the divisions on our island.

Today, as I am presenting awards for poems about peace, and who knows there may even be a new Nobel winner among their authors, I would like to quote Seamus Heaney who, in his poem, The Cure at Troy, anticipated so well the moment in which we all now find ourselves:

Thank you.