How Ireland has changed! A small and once impoverished island has come to symbolize the sort of economic success that everyone else wants to emulate. The country that up to the late 1960s offered the liberating key of education only to a very few has left the surging energy of its greatest natural resource - the genius of its own people - empowered through widened access to second and third-level education. The country that knwe only emigration is now a place of new inward migration. The genius of Irish women, once corralled into narrowly prescribed soheresm is moving inexorably if slowly toward a flood tide yet to come. The politics of peace are transforming the landscape of possibilities within Northern Ireland, between North and South and between Ireland and Britain. (McAleese ix) From introduction