It’s great to be here tonight, an honour to be here and in such a beautiful place – and a greater honour to be here with all of you – fellows and friends. Some of the most interesting, the most intelligent and the most decent people I have met.

When I asked the fellows for some advice on what to say – they gave me two jobs: be and bring my full self, and make you laugh.

I count myself lucky to be able to do the first and we’ll see how the second goes.

Bringing your full self isn’t always easy. I’ve been helped by years of coaching, but now I’m grateful to know who I am and how I show up in this room and in the world out there.

And sometimes when we’re in rooms like these – it can be hard to know what to do – but I really believe we don’t get invited into rooms that we don’t belong in – so have a look around, let’s own this space, this moment. We belong here.

A new start

It’s hard to believe it’s only seven months since many of us met up there in Stormont for the first time.

We’ve traveled to Oxford and Dublin, we’ve spent a day being interrogated in both a police station and a radio station, we’ve learnt from the incredible businesses in FinTru, Allstate, Ulster Carpets and Fujitsu.

But when I reflect on this fellowship, I get a feeling like I had back when I started university and those first few months.

The excitement and nervousness of it all, and this new start opening up to a world of new possibilities. And I think for many of us on the
fellowship –

It has been a new start.

So, I don’t find it surprising that when I asked the fellows for a word to describe this journey – ‘destabilizing’ came up time and time again.

As if our lives and jobs and all the heaviness of the last few years had put the stabilizers back on, and what we were doing here as fellows was to take those stabilizers back off again and learn to get going again.

Onto new and exciting paths.

The disruptiveness of this fellowship is at the core of why this fellowship works.

And it’s in the vulnerability of that disruptive process that all of us have grown, discovered our true selves that bit more, and shown up as who we are that bit better.

Some of us have made some big new starts – already helped by this fellowship in many cases.

A move into politics or a move away from politics.

A new job or thinking about one in the pipeline.

A new perspective to think about the big challenges of life and work.

A new network to help us make more impact in the work we do.

Tonight is a chance to celebrate those new starts, to wish each other well and to encourage those thinking about the next new start.

Giant Ambition

But all new starts naturally come to an end.

And as we close out this fellowship, I want to reflect on where we go next.

Throughout this fellowship – we heard a lot about the spirit of possibility.

And as we’ve traveled this road together, I’ve seen that spirit of possibility turn into the spirit of giant opportunity.

And we make that jump by doing all the practical things that we learnt here together in these last seven months – the negotiation skills, the comms skills, the new perspectives on everything from cyber security to medieval feminism, my personal favorite, we had gender equality 10,000 years ago, it has been done before, it can be done again, higher education in the North West to entrepreneurship and fintech.

The ball is in our court now – to go out there and show the leadership that each of us showed each other in the safety and confidence of this fellowship, behind closed doors, to the world out there.

To stand up and be counted – embracing the complexity and messiness of this corner of the world.

Will it be easy – of course not. Will it be worth trying, of course it will.

Gratitude and thanks

I know I speak on behalf of all the fellows – when I say we are incredibly grateful to everyone who made this fellowship happen.

To the Centre for Democracy and Peacebuilding for having the vision to see that something like this was really needed in Northern Ireland. Eva, Karise, Zac, John and all the team – thank you.

To the sponsors who invested in the programme and in us, thank you for your trust and leadership in taking a bet on us, to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Northern Ireland Office – and for all you do to make Northern Ireland move from peace to prosperity.

To all those who supported the programme, to Ally for the coaching, Brown O’Connor for the comms and everyone who helped in any way.

We say a massive thank you.

But as we’ve heard time and again during this fellowship, showing gratitude rather than just talking about it, is the real mark of a leader. And our gratitude we hope will be shown in what we do to move this place – our homeplace – forward.

So that it can live up to its giant potential. And where it becomes the best to live, to grow up in, to bring up a family, or to start a business. Embracing the diversity of all our communities, all our cultures, and all our identities here.

That’s the new start that this place needs and it’s one I’m really excited to work with all of you to kickstart!

Thank you

Nuala Murphy