Closing speech delivered by President of Malta Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca during the Domain Group graduation ceremony
Dear faculty members,
Distinguished guests,
Family and Friends of the Graduates,
and most especially, dear students.
It is my pleasure to contribute to this celebration, with some brief closing remarks, after you were presented with your hard-earned qualifications.
Let me also take this opportunity to commend the faculty, at Domain Group, for their great efforts, to provide quality educational services to a growing number of students.
Dear students, this is a most joyful day for you and your families, and I must congratulate you all.
Now that you have finished your studies, you have a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.
Graduation day is a moment in your lives that marks the end of one chapter in your journey.
You must also consider graduation day, as the beginning of a new and exciting chapter, in your lives.
You are at a moment when the experiences, skills, and qualities which you have developed over the past years can be put to effective use, to endeavour and achieve future and further opportunities.
I hope that you shall not only think and plan your individual successes, but also use this time of transformation to think about the people and communities around you, especially those groups who are living in situations of social exclusion, vulnerability, and precarity.
I would like, at this time, to pose a question, for you to reflect upon:
How can you utilise this gift of learning, and through your achievements, bring about a positive transformation in other people’s lives?
I would like to pose another question to you for further thought:
How can you engage within your respective communities, to impact society to develop a culture of positive peace and holistic wellbeing of all?
The single most important choice that any of us can make, both as individuals and as a society, is to pursue opportunities for the development of an inclusive society, whereby everyone is included as one community.
Let me therefore urge you to be courageous, and to be activists for equality and social justice, within your homes, your future professions, careers, and among your friends.
When you make the choice to be active ethical champions for the wellbeing of others, you shall feel empowered to confront the prejudices and discriminatory attitudes that often keep people isolated from one another.
Prejudice and discriminatory attitudes, and inequalities, create social tensions, which hold back progress and prosperity.
By being ethical professionals, by championing equality and social justice, you will be making a practical contribution towards the greater good of our society, and also putting into practice the democratic ideals which underpin our commitment to universal human rights and fundamental freedoms.
On concluding, let me encourage you, as you go out into the world as new graduates, to always remember that the pursuit of truth is the key to all knowledge. And this key to knowledge is accessed, in the most powerful way, when we make the choice to act, as ethical champions for equality and social justice.
I encourage you to go out into the world, by committing yourselves to promote human dignity, as a cornerstone of your lives.
Let this be the moment where you make a choice to be a force for inclusion within your communities, for the benefit of our society as a whole.
This should be the transformation that all of us we must work to achieve, in whatever ways, if we want to ensure that we will live in peace, and achieve prosperity.
This is the commitment we must make, throughout our lives, in the pursuit of positive peace, of meaningful justice, inclusive prosperity, and of holistic wellbeing.
Finally, I would like to reiterate my heartfelt congratulations, on your achievements during this graduation day, and augur you all my very best wishes for the future.
Thank you.