February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The President, in town as part of a week-long tour of the U.S. and Canada, met Mr. Gates at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation outside of Seattle, Washington.
The Gates Foundation has a 25 billion-dollar endowment and funds programs to combat HIV/AIDS, international healthcare needs, and education.
Later in the day, the president was informed of the horrific bus crash back in Ireland.
She held back tears as she spoke with reporters traveling with her about the deaths of the five teenage victims of Monday’s coach crash in Kentstown.
“The little girl Deidre had been to the Aras before, and I remember her playing the piano next to my office,” recalled President McAleese.
Deidre Scanlon, 17, died along with Amy McCabe, 15, Claire McCluskey, 18, and Lisa Callan, 15, and Sinead Ledwidge, 15 after a bus taking 51 children home from school in Navan, Co Meath overturned.
“Week in and week out there is a litany of deaths on our roads,” she said.
Although she did not discuss the circumstances of this particular accident, she said there should be an investigation into how “to reduce the harvest of disaster and desolation that is the result of road accidents.”
On Monday evening, President McAleese addressed over two hundred people gathered at the corporate centre of computer giant Microsoft where she tried to entice some young Irish high tech computer professionals back home.
She told the first meeting of the Irish Professionals Network, made up primarily of Irish university graduates who have found work in such Seattle based firms as Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia, that they “are a privileged generation.”
“It is a story which fascinates many people around the world, this story of rags to riches, of ‘ceann faoi’ to ‘can do,’ from beaten docket to the Celtic Tiger,” she said.
“I know that at the time many of you left Ireland, the prospects for our economy were not good and the old culture of emigration was still the option of choice even for the best educated,” she added.
But, she told the professionals, Ireland’s current impressive economic figures are stable and only seem to point to continued success.
In total, 29 Irish high tech and aeronautic companies accompanied President McAleese on her trip and expect to announce significant partnership deals at the end of the trade mission to the region.
McAleese is being accompanied on the trip by her husband, Dr. Martin McAleese, and Michael Ahern TD, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment.