ABSTRACT
“Thank you for returning for the last session of the conference and I’m sure you’ll all agree we have had three tremendous sessions this morning. I am delighted to introduce my colleague and long-standing friend, Lord John Alderdice. John and I go back many years. John is a man of many parts and there are two particular roles that John has performed over the years. One is as a very distinguished consultant psychiatrist in psychotherapy. My first memory of John was as a medical student. I was a medical student at Holywell and he was a registrar. Tom Freeman was the consultant, and that’s where John’s interest in psychotherapy burgeoned, from that particular point. John has been an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College, he has been awarded many distinctions around the world, is a Visiting Professor in Virginia, Lima in Peru, and also Chair of the International Dialogue Institute in Istanbul. John was the founder of the Centre for Psychotherapy in Belfast, which is one of the key organizers of this meeting. The Centre for Psychotherapy in Northern Ireland has a very distinguished role in assessment, treatment, and, in particular, training of staff across a range of disciplines and is a very important institute for Northern Ireland. As well as being very 170distinguished as a psychiatrist, John has had another life as a politician. John was leader of the Alliance Party for many years and John and I spent some years in the City Hall chamber together during some interesting times. John was also the inaugural speaker at the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998, once devolution was restored, and he managed a fantastic job of getting that fragile institution up and running. John also has been the President of Liberal International between 2005 and 2009 and, of course, he has a very active role in the House of Lords. There is nobody better placed to marry the principles of psychoanalysis and politics and social aspects. John, unusually for him, has written his presentation. One of the amazing things from the time when I was Chairman of the Alliance Party was the annual conference, in which the leader’s speech is viewed as extremely important. One year the TV journalists used the advance script of his speech to identify the highlights and so did not record the full forty-minute speech. The next year John turned up and I said to him, “Where’s the script for the journalists?” “No script, they’ll have to listen”, was his reply. He gave a forty-five-minute speech unscripted and it was the most coherent, constructed speech I’d heard in my life. No other politician I know has ever attempted to do this and no sensible politician should attempt to do it unless they are of John’s ability. Amazingly, today John does have a script, so I’ll leave you in the capable hands of John, Lord Alderdice.”
