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"In dreams begin responsibility" - W.B. Yeats



----------
| Date: vrijdag 4 september 1998 22:44:00
| From: The White House
| To: [email protected]
| Subject: 1998-09-04 Remarks by President to Officials of Gateway Computers
|
|
|                             THE WHITE HOUSE
|
|                      Office of the Press Secretary
|                            (Dublin, Ireland)
| ________________________________________________________________________
| For Immediate Release                                  September 4, 1998
|
|
|
|                         REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
|                           TO BUSINESS LEADERS,
|             AND OFFICIALS AND EMPLOYEES OF GATEWAY COMPUTERS
|
|
|                    Gateway Computers European Facility
|                      Santry, County Dublin, Ireland
|
|
| 4:12 P.M. EDT
|
|
|   THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you for the wonderful welcome, the waving flag
| -- (applause) -- the terrific shirts -- I want one of those shirts
| before I leave -- (applause) -- at least shirts have not become virtual,
| you can actually have one of them.  (Laughter.)
|
|   I want to say to the Taoiseach how very grateful I am for his
| leadership and friendship.  But I must say that I was somewhat
| ambivalent when we were up here giving our virtual signatures.  Do you
| have any idea how much time I spend every day signing my name?  I'm
| going to feel utterly useless if I can't do that anymore.  (Laughter.)
| By the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all
| the decisions -- you just sign your name.  (Laughter.)  You may find you
| can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual
| everything.  Just stick a little card in and get the predicable
| response.
|
|   I want to congratulate Baltimore Technologies on making this possible
| as well.  And Ted Waitt, let me thank you for the tour of this wonderful
| facility.  As an American I have to do one little chauvinist thing.  I
| asked Ted -- I saw the Gateway -- do you see the Gateway boxes over
| there and the then the Gateway logo and I got a Gateway golf bag before
| I came in and it was black and white like this.  (Applause.)  So I said,
| where did this logo come from?  And he said, "It's spots on a cow."  He
| said, we started in South Dakota and Iowa and people said how can there
| be a computer company in the farmland of America?  And now there is one
| in the farmland of America that happens to be in Ireland.
|
|   But it's a wonderful story that shows the point I want to make later,
| which is that there is no monopoly on brain power anywhere.  There have
| always been intelligent people everywhere, in the most underinvested and
| poorest parts of the world.  Today on the streets of the poorest
| neighborhoods in the most crowded country in the world -- which is
| probably India, in the cities -- there are brilliant people who need a
| chance.
|
|       And technology, if we handle it right, will be one of the great
| liberating and equalizing forces in all of human history, because it
| proves that unlike previous economic waves you could be on a small farm
| in Iowa or South Dakota or you could be in a country like Ireland, long
| under-invested in by outsiders, and all of a sudden open the whole world
| up.  And you can prove that people you can find on any street corner can
| master the skills of tomorrow.  So this is a very happy day.
|
|       I want to thank the other officials from the Irish government,
| Minister Harney and Minister O'Rourke and others.  I thank my great
| Commerce Secretary, Bill Daley, for being here, and Jim Lyons, who heads
| my economic initiatives for Ireland, and Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith,
| who has done a magnificent job for us and will soon be going home after
| having played a major role in getting the peace process started, and we
| thank her.
|
|       I thank you all personally for the warm reception you gave George
| Mitchell, because you have no idea how much grief he gave me for giving
| him this job.  (Laughter and applause.)  You all voted for the agreement
| now, and everything is basically going in the right direction, but it
| was like pulling fingernails for three years -- everybody arguing over
| every word, every phrase, every semicolon, you know?  In the middle of
| that, George Mitchell was not all that happy that I had asked him to
| undertake this duty.
|
|       But when you stood up and you clapped for him today, for the first
| time since I named him, he looked at me and said thank you.  So thank
| you again, you made my day.  (Applause.)  Thank you.
|
|       I'd also like to thank your former Prime Minister and Taoiseach,
| John Bruton, who's here and who also worked with us on the peace
| process.  Thank you, John, for coming, it's delightful to see you.
| (Applause.)  And I would like you to know that there are a dozen members
| of the United States Congress here, from both parties -- showing that we
| have reached across our own divide to support peace and prosperity in
| Ireland.  And I thank all the members of Congress and I'd like to ask
| them to stand up, just so you'll see how many there are here.  Thank you
| very much.  (Applause.)
|
|       I know that none of the Irish here will be surprised when I tell
| you that a recent poll of American intellectuals decided that the best
| English language novel of the 20th century was a book set in Dublin,
| written by an Irishman, in Trieste and Zurich, and first published in
| New York and Paris -- a metaphor of the world in which we now live.
| James Joyce's "Ulysses" was the product of many cultures, but it remains
| a deeply Irish work.
|
|       Some of you will remember that near the beginning of the book,
| Joyce wrote, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
| Much of Irish history, of course, is rich and warm and wonderful, but we
| all know it has its nightmarish aspects.  They are the ones from which
| Ireland is now awakening, thanks to those who work for peace and thanks
| to those who bring prosperity.
|
|       Much of Ireland's new history, of course, will be shaped by the
| Good Friday Peace Agreement.  You all, from your response to Senator
| Mitchell, are knowledgeable of it and proud of it, and I thank you for
| voting for it in such overwhelming numbers in the Republic.
|
|       I think it's important that you know it's a step forward not only
| for Irish people but for all people divided everywhere who are seeking
| new ways to think about old problems, who want to believe that they
| don't forever have to be at the throats of those with whom they share a
| certain land, just because they are of a different faith or race or
| ethnic group or tribe.  The leaders and the people of Ireland and
| Northern Ireland, therefore, are helping the world to awaken from
| history's nightmares.
|
|       Today Ireland is quite an expansive place, with a positive outlook
| on the world.  The 1990s have changed this country in profound and
| positive ways.  Not too long ago, Ireland was a poor country by European
| standards, inward-looking, sometimes insular.
|
|       Today, as much as any country in Europe, Ireland is connected in
| countless ways to the rest of the world, as Ted showed me when we moved
| from desk to desk to desk downstairs with the people who were talking to
| France and the people who were talking to Germany and the people who
| were talking to Scandinavia, and on and on and on.
|
|       This country has strong trade relations with Britain and the
| United States, with countries of the European Union and beyond.  And
| Ireland, as we see here at this place, is fast becoming a technological
| capital of Europe.  Innovative information companies are literally
| transforming the way the Irish interact and communicate with other
| countries.  That is clear here -- perhaps clearer here than anywhere
| else -- at Gateway, a company speaking many languages and most of all
| the language of the future.  Gateway and other companies like Intel and
| Dell and Digital are strengthening Ireland's historic links to the
| United States and reaching out beyond.
|
|       I think it is very interesting, and I was not aware of this before
| I prepared for this trip, that Dublin is literally becoming a major
| telecommunications center for all of Europe.  More and more Europeans do
| business on more and more telephones, and more and more of their calls
| are routed through here.  You connect people and businesses in very
| combination:  a German housewife, a French computer company, a Czech
| businessman, a Swedish investor -- people all around Europe learning to
| do business on the Internet.
|
|       At the hub of this virtual commerce is Ireland, a natural gateway
| for the future also of such commerce between Europe and the United
| States.  In the 21st century, after years and years and years of being
| disadvantaged because of what was most important to the production of
| wealth, Ireland will have its day in the sun because the most important
| thing in the 21st century is the capacity of people to imagine, to
| innovate, to create, to exchange ideas and information.  By those
| standards, this is a very wealthy nation indeed.
|
|       Your growth has been phenomenal:  last year, 7.7 percent; prices
| rising at only 1.5 percent; unemployment at a 20-year low.  Ireland is
| second only to the United States in exporting software.  This year the
| Irish government may post a surplus of $1.7 billion.  The Celtic tiger
| is roaring and you should be very proud of it.  (Applause.)
|
|       It has been speculated, half seriously, that there are more
| foreigners here than at any time since the Vikings pillaged Ireland in
| the 9th century.  (Laughter.)  I guess I ought to warn you -- you know,
| whenever a delegation of Congressmen comes to Ireland they all claim to
| be Irish -- and in a certain way they all are -- but one of the members
| of the delegation here, Congressman Hoyer, who has been a great friend
| of the peace process, is in fact of Viking heritage, descent.
| (Laughter.)  Stand up, Steny.  (Applause.)
|
|       Now, all the rest of us come here and pander to you and tell you
| we love Ireland because there is so much Irish blood running in our
| veins.  He comes here and says he loves Ireland because there is so much
| of his blood running in your veins.  (Laughter and applause.)
|

|       Let me get back to what I was saying about the Internet -- because
| your position vis-a-vis telecommunication can be seen through that.
| When I came here just three years ago -- had one of the great days of my
| life, there was so much hope about the peace process then -- only 3
| million people worldwide were connected to the Internet, three years
| ago.  Today there are over 120 million people, a 40-fold increase in
| three years.  In the next decade sometime it will be over a billion.
| Already, if you travel, you can see the impact of this in Russia or in
| China or other far-flung places around the globe.
|
|       I had an incredible experience in one of these Internet cafes in
| Shanghai, where I met with young high school students in China working
| the Internet.  Even if they didn't have computers at home, they could
| come to the cafe, buy a cup of coffee, rent a little time and access the
| Internet.  This is going to change dramatically the way we work and
| live.  It is going to democratize opportunity in the world in a way that
| has never been the case in all of human history.  And if we are wise and
| decent about it, we can not only generate more wealth, we can reduce
| future wars and conflicts.
|
|       The agreement that we signed today does some important things.  It
| commits us to reduce unnecessary regulatory barriers, to refrain from
| imposing customs duties, to keep taxes to a minimum, to create a stable
| and predictable environment for doing business electronically.  It helps
| us, in other words, to create an architecture for one of the most
| important areas of business activity in the century ahead.
|
|       There are already 470 companies in Ireland that are American, and
| many of them are in the information sector.  The number is growing
| quickly.  So I say to you that I think this agreement we have signed
| today, and the way we have signed it, will not only be helpful in and of
| themselves, but will stand for what I hope will be the future direction
| of your economy and America's, the future direction of our relationship,
| and will open a massive amount of opportunity to ordinary people who
| never would have had it before.
|
|       A strong modern economy thrives on education, innovation, respect
| for the interests of workers and customers and a respect for the earth's
| environment.  An enlightened population is our best investment in a good
| future.  Prosperity reinforces peace as well.  The Irish have long
| championed prosperity, peace, and human decency, and for all that I am
| very grateful.
|
|       I would like to just say, because I can't leave Ireland without
| acknowledging this, that there are few nations that have contributed
| more than Ireland, even in times which were difficult for this country,
| to the cause of peace and human rights around the world.  You have given
| us now Mary Robinson to serve internationally in that cause.  But since
| peacekeeping began for the United Nations 40 years ago, 75 Irish
| soldiers have given their lives.
|
|       Today we work shoulder to shoulder in Bosnia and the Middle East.
| But I think you should know, that as nearly as I can determine, in the
| 40 years in which the world has been working together on peacekeeping,
| the only country in the world which has never taken a single, solitary
| day off from the cause of world peace to the United Nations peacekeeping
| operations is Ireland.  And I thank you.  (Applause.)
|
|       In 1914, on the verge of the First World War, which would change
| Europe and Ireland forever, William Butler Yeats wrote his famous line,
| "In dreams begin responsibility."  Ireland has moved from nightmares to
| dreams.  Ireland has assumed great responsibility.  As a result, you are
| moving toward permanent peace, remarkable prosperity, unparalleled
| influence, and a brighter tomorrow for your children.  May the
| nightmares stay gone, the dreams stay bright, and the responsibility
| wear easily on your shoulder, because the future is yours.
|
|       Thank you, and God bless you.
|
|             END                        4:28 P.M. (L)