MARY McALEESE (1951 +)

Mary McAleese was inaugurated as the eighth on 11th November 1997. She was re-elected for a second term which she completed in 2011. She is a and former Professor of Law. Born on June 27th 1951 in , she is the first President to come from . She is married, since 1976, to Dr. Martin McAleese, an accountant and dentist. They have three children, Emma, born 1982 and twins Justin and Sara Mai, born 1985.

The eldest of nine children, President McAleese grew up in Northern Ireland through the violent times that have come to be known as ''. Her family was one of many adversely affected by the conflict. She graduated in Law from the Queen's University of Belfast in 1973 and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1974. In 1975, she was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and at Trinity College and in 1987, she returned to her Alma Mater, Queen's, to become Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In 1994, she became the first female Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Queen's University of Belfast.

President McAleese is an experienced broadcaster, having worked as a current affairs and presenter in radio and television with Radio Telefís Éireann. She has a longstanding interest in many issues concerned with justice, equality, social inclusion, anti- and reconciliation. The theme of her Presidency is 'Building Bridges'.

Among the other appointments she has held are:

Director of Television. Director, Northern Ireland Electricity. Director, Royal Group of Hospitals Trust. Delegate to the 1995 Conference on Trade and Investment in Ireland and to the follow up Pittsburg Conference in 1996. Member of the Catholic Church delegation in 1996 to the North Commission on Contentious Parades. Founder member of the Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas.

Her book entitled Reconciled Being: Love in Chaos, contains her lectures given at the Seminar. The following is an extract and gives a glimpse into her faith and the basis for her inaugural address as President of the .

She is presently completing her Licentiate in and is the author of Quo Vadis? Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law, 2014.

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LOVE IS INDIVISIBLE1

The nearest I have come to a comprehension of the mathematical mystery that is God's love is in a story that comes from my experience as a mother. When my first daughter Emma was born, I approached the new role of motherhood with the jaundiced eye of older sister to five brothers and three sisters. I had had babies up to my tonsils throughout my teenage life.

My mother and her siblings had taken to heart the gospel call to increase multiply and fill the earth, except that they had to do it single-handedly. Between them they had sixty children most of them younger than me. If the truth be told I had a relatively under-whelmed attitude to babies generally.

I was surprised therefore to find myself so completely overwhelmed and totally smitten by my own daughter. I loved her to bits. Consequently when I discovered some two years later that I was expecting twins I hit an unexpected crisis. These twins were badly wanted but for nine awful months I struggled to comprehend how I was going to divide this wonderful river of love for Emma between two more children. I was heartbroken for her. She was now to have two thirds of her normal allotment of love withdrawn and distributed among her rival siblings. I thought it a shameful thing to do to a child, but what else was there to do?

How little I knew. When the twins were born I passed through that knowledge and experience barrier that books are incapable of explaining. I knew how rudimentary, simplistic and pathetic my comprehension of love was. There was no need to share what Emma had. Here were two new babies, each one with their unique river of grace and love. Not only did I not have to share Emmas's love, it was now enhanced and even more vibrant, touched as it was by these two new lives. You cannot divide love. Its nature is to multiply, to embrace openly and widely, to draw in, not to exclude to make each feel part of the group, to make each feel completely at home, to reconcile.

Exclusivity is not in the nature of God. He made each one of us, called us by our name, knew us before we were born, and has the very hairs on each head counted. God has no favourites. Captor and captive are his cherished children. Calvary is his gift to all. The Resurrection is his promise. The Second Coming is his invitation. It is an invitation to experience his loving presence, to share it and to bring the world out of chaos into reconciliation with Him.

1 Mary McAleese, Reconciled Being: Love in Chaos, Hertfordhire, Medio Media/Arthur James, 1997, 25-6.

Perfect environment in which to seek that loving presence are hard to find. Our environment in Northern Ireland with its sectarian hatred, its savage murders, even with a cease-fire, its verbal violence, its strutting machismo, this is where we who live there, have to pitch our tent and start the journey to centred calmness and reconciliation. There is no guarantee that any place else is better (as Brian Keenan found out to his cost).

If there is not much that is edifying from time to time in the place we inhabit it is worth recollecting that there was nothing much edifying about the circumstances of Christ’s capture and death. The Northern Presbyterian poet W.R. Rodgers captured it brilliantly in his poem “Resurrection”.

This was a rough death, there was nothing tidy about it, No sweetness, nothing noble. Still that is how things always happen, lousily, But later on the heart edits them out lovingly, Abstracts the jeers and jags, imports a plan Into the pain, and calls it history. We always go back to gloss over some roughness, To make the past happen properly as we want it to happen But this was a hard death.2

As Christians looking at the Cross two thousand years down the road it is easy to see ourselves as sympathetic and heartbroken, innocent spectators at Christ’s death. Before asking what if any role we might play in the hatreds and fractures and fissures in our own country and communities perhaps we might ask had we been Romans in Jerusalem 2000 years ago where would we have been on Good Friday - and doing what? Had we been Islamic fundamentalists in Beirut in 1986, had we been German prison guards in 1944, where would we have been - and doing what?

Each of our lives is lived out in some place, with its own history and its own context. The complexity of that context, the intractable nature of its hurts and hates may make us feel helpless but wherever that place may be and however long our stay in it, it is in some sense our own his Gethsemane. It is the place and the time, when we have been scheduled to watch and pray with Christ. To wait, watch and pray can be a work of reconciliation as well as acting, doing, marching or speaking out. Each place has its own chaos, its own fractures and fault lines, its own unreconciled balance sheet. It also has a chorus of voices of those who still hope that there is truth, that there can be justice, that there will be peace. Christians should have no difficulty identifying the source of that hope. As Leonardo Boff says:

As attested by all the cultures and civilizations the world the world has known there is a principle of hope at work wherever people lived that generates great excitement and utopian visions in spite of the fact that of the 3,400 years of recorded human history 3,166 were years of war and the remaining were years of preparing for war”3

2 W.R. Rodgers,,Poems,,Gallery Books, 1993. 3 L. Boff, Teologica del cautivero y de la liberacion, Madrid Ediciones Paulinas, 1978. So many human hearts have lived and died in the chaos fuelled by hate. In our era, the era of liberation movements all over the world, the fuel of hope has been the possibility of change, leading to changed hearts, changed souls, changed politics and changed practices.

Christ’s mission in relation to the salvation of Creation is, we have to believe, still unfolding. We are playing a role whether holding it back or nudging it forward. To the extent that we keep watch through the long nights of the soul that are our own personal Gethsemane and keep our focus on Christ, we are changed. The watching and waiting with Christ, the sharing in his suffering, these things change us as individuals. Without change there is no growth. In the three years of public ministry Christ convulsed and transformed the lives of his apostles. They changed so much that as they emerged from the terror of their self-imposed imprisonment in the Upper Room they might have said the words that Brian Keenan cryptically remarked to the taxi driver on his final journey into freedom - through Syria to Ireland:

“So this is the road to Damascus!”

INAUGURAL SPEECH AS PRESIDENT November 11, 1997. - ______

A uaisle, Lá stairiúil é seo im'shaol féin, i saol mo mhuintire, agus i saol na tíre go léir. Is pribhléid mhór í a bheith tofa mar Uachtarán na hÉireann, le bheith mar ghuth na hÉireann i gcéin is i gcóngair.

This is a historic day in my life, in the life of my family and in the life of the country. It is a wonderful privilege for me to be chosen as Uachtarán na hÉireann, to be a voice for Ireland at home and abroad. I am honoured and humbled to be successor to seven exemplary Presidents.

Their differing religious, political, geographical and social origins speak loudly of a Presidency which has always been wide open and all embracing. Among them were Presidents from Connaught, Leinster and Munster to say nothing of America and . It is my special privilege and delight to be the first President from . The span of almost sixty years since the first Presidential Inauguration has seen a nation transformed. This Ireland which stands so confidently on the brink of the 21st century and the third millennium is one our forebears dreamed of and yearned for; a prospering Ireland, accomplished, educated, dynamic, innovative, compassionate, proud of its people, its language, and of its vast heritage; an Ireland, at the heart of the , respected by nations and cultures across the world.

The scale of what we have already accomplished in such a short time allows us to embrace the future with well-based confidence and hope. It is the people of Ireland who, in a million big and small ways, in quiet acts of hard work, heroism and generosity have built up the fabric of home, community and country on which the remarkable success story of today's Ireland is built.

Over many generations there have been very special sources of inspiration who have nurtured our talent and instilled determination into this country. Many outstanding politicians, public servants, voluntary workers, clergy of all denominations and religious, teachers and particularly parents have through hard and difficult times worked and sacrificed so that our children could blossom to their fullest potential. They are entitled to look with satisfaction at what they have achieved. May we never become so cynical that we forget to be grateful. I certainly owe them a deep personal debt and as President I hope to find many opportunities both to repay that debt and to assist in the great work of encouraging our children to believe in themselves and in their country.

Among those who are also owed an enormous debt of thanks are the countless emigrants whose letters home with dollars and pound notes, earned in grinding loneliness thousands of miles from home, bridged the gap between the Ireland they left and the Ireland which greets them today when they return as tourists or return to stay. They are a crucial part of our global Irish family. In every continent they have put their ingenuity and hard work at the service of new homelands. They have kept their love of Ireland, its traditions and its culture deep in their hearts so that wherever we travel in the world there is always a part of Ireland of which we can be proud and which in turn takes pride in us. I hope over the next seven years there will be many opportunities for me to celebrate with them.

At our core we are a sharing people. Selfishness has never been our creed. Commitment to the welfare of each other has fired generations of voluntary organisations and a network of everyday neighbourliness which weaves together the caring fabric of our country. It has sent our missionaries, development workers and peacekeepers to the aid of distressed peoples in other parts of the world. It has made us a country of refuge for the hurt and dispossessed of other troubled places. It is the fuel which drives us to tackle the many social problems we face, problems which cynicism and self-doubt can never redress but painstaking commitment can. We know our duty is to spread the benefits of our prosperity to those whose lives are still mired in poverty, unemployment, worry and despair. There can be no rest until the harsh gap between the comfortable and the struggling has been bridged. The late Cearbhall O Dalaigh, Ireland's fifth president and, dare I say it, one of three to grace the office, said at his inauguration in 1974:

"Presidents, under the Irish Constitution don't have policies. But a President can have a theme."

The theme of my Presidency, the Eighth Presidency, is Building Bridges. These bridges require no engineering skills but they will demand patience, imagination and courage for Ireland's pace of change is now bewilderingly fast. We grow more complex by the day. Our dancers, singers, writers, poets, musicians, sportsmen and women, indeed our last President herself, are giants on the world stage. Our technologically skilled young people are in demand everywhere. There is an invigorating sense of purpose about us.

There are those who absorb the rush of newness with delight. There are those who are more cautious, even fearful. Such tensions are part of our creative genius; they form the energy which gives us our unique identity, our particularity. I want to point the way to a reconciliation of these many tensions and to see Ireland grow ever more comfortable and at ease with the flowering diversity that is now all around us. To quote a Belfast poet Louis MacNeice

"a single purpose can be founded on a jumble of opposites."

Yet I know to speak of reconciliation is to raise a nervous query in the hearts of some North of the border, in the place of my birth. There is no more appropriate place to address that query than here in Dublin Castle, a place where the complex history of these two neighbouring and now very neighbourly islands has seen many chapters written. It is fortuitous too that the timing of today's Inauguration coincides with the commemoration of those who died so tragically and heroically in two world wars. I think of nationalist and unionist, who fought and died together in those wars, the differences which separated them at home, fading into insignificance as the bond of their common humanity forged friendships as intense as love can make them.

In Ireland, we know only too well the cruelty and capriciousness of violent conflict. Our own history has been hard on lives young and old. Too hard. Hard on those who died and those left behind with only shattered dreams and poignant memories. We hope and pray, indeed we insist, that we have seen the last of violence. We demand the right to solve our problems by dialogue and the noble pursuit of consensus. We hope to see that consensus pursued without the language of hatred and contempt and we wish all those engaged in that endeavour, well. That it can be done - we know. We need look no further than our own European continent where once bitter enemies now work conscientiously with each other and for each other as friends and partners. The greatest salute to the memory of all our dead and the living that they loved, would be the achievement of agreement and peace.

I think of the late Gordon Wilson who faced his unbearable sorrow ten years ago at the horror that was Enniskillen. His words of love and forgiveness shocked us as if we were hearing them for the very first time, as if they had not been uttered first two thousand years ago. His work, and the work of so many peacemakers who have risen above the awesome pain of loss to find a bridge to the other side, is work I want to help in every way I can. No side has a monopoly on pain. Each has suffered intensely.

I know the distrusts go deep and the challenge is awesome. Across this island, North, South, East and West, there are people of such greatness of heart that I know with their help it can be done. I invite them, to work in partnership with me to dedicate ourselves to the task of creating a wonderful millennium gift to the Child of Bethlehem whose 2000th birthday we will soon celebrate- the gift of an island where difference is celebrated with joyful curiosity and generous respect and where in the words of John Hewitt

"Each may grasp his neighbour's hand as friend." 4

There will be those who are wary of such invitations, afraid that they are being invited to the edge of a precipice. To them I have dedicated a poem, written by the English poet, Christopher Logue, himself a veteran of the Second World War.

“Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge And they came, and he pushed and they flew."5

No one will be pushing, just gently inviting, but I hope that if ever and whenever you decide to walk over that edge, there will be no need to fly, you will find there a firm and steady bridge across which we will walk together both ways.

Ireland sits tantalisingly ready to embrace a golden age of affluence, self-assurance tolerance and peace. It will be my most profound privilege to be President of this beautiful, intriguing country. May I ask those of faith, whatever that faith may be, to pray for me and for our country that we will use these seven years well, to create a future where in the words of William Butler Yeats.

"Everything we look upon is blest"

Déanaimis an todhchaí sin a chruthú le chéile.

4 “A Little People”, by John Hewitt in The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, ed. Frank Ormsby, Blackstaff Press 1992 p.539. 5Come to the Edge by Christopher Logue in Selected Poems, pub. Faber and Faber p.64 ADDRESS AT THE IRISH FAMINE MEMORIAL DINNER, NEW YORK.

On Tuesday 16 July 2002 a unique memorial to the in Ireland (1845-50) was opened in New York. At this special dinner, attended by Governor Pataki and other distinguished guests, President Mary McAleese of Ireland delivered this remarkable speech in which she linked Ireland's 19th century disaster with the tragedy of September 11 and then went on to appeal for a compassion arising out of awareness of both calamities towards those who still endure poverty and hunger in other parts of our world.

Dia dhaoibh a cháirde. Tá an-áthais orm bheith i bhur measc inniu ar an ócáid speisialta seo.

Governor Pataki, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure to be back in New York and to be here as we celebrate a great, but poignant occasion. Poignant, because the Irish Famine represented such a wrenching disturbance of the course of Irish history, and poignant because of our proximity to the devastation of the World Trade Centre. Doesn't it seem almost prophetic though, that the site for the Irish Famine Memorial should be in the memory-shadow of that tragic absence that is the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.

The spirit of the people of this city now fills that space with their courage, generosity, kindness, resilience and decency. That spirit took the tragedy visited upon this country by the poison of human hatred and turned it spontaneously into the triumph of love. There can be no better next-door neighbour for the new memorial, for this is now an area where a bustling noisy city, silently but powerfully holds its most sacred memories.

Against that backdrop both physical and psychological, the Irish Famine Memorial evokes memories of a dreadful time in nineteenth century Ireland that is tragically repeated today in so many parts of our 21st century global homeland. The monument is an outward call to conscience and to responsibility, daring us, challenging us to care about the stranger in far off lands who is dying right now of hunger, who is wondering does anyone care and who despairs for his or her children and their future.

Human solidarity could not give life back to those who died on September 11th but it gave hope to those who survived. Human solidarity cannot recreate the millions of lives wasted through poverty, hunger and disease but it gives us hope that we can together consign them to history - we can by our efforts and our care help our world to reveal its truest strength, its truest potential when all its children are nourished, educated, housed and living through times of peace and prosperity.

An illusion, a pipe dream? Only if we walk past on the other side and when this city was tested there were none who walked on by. Many people have worked with a real passion to make this event possible. Each is a champion of those far-off strangers who is hoping for a new and better day. Each is a champion of our own Irish famine dead whose sad lives seemed then to be so shrouded in indignity and worthlessness. You have vindicated their suffering, made it a resource or good, conferred on them not just a righteous dignity but an opportunity to be the provokers of global change, the bringers of global care.

I would like to thank Governor Pataki, in particular, for the personal interest he has taken in this remarkable venture. It demonstrates, not just his deep appreciation for things Irish, but also in a wider context, his commitment to raising awareness about world hunger, both through the teaching of the famine curriculum in New York public schools, and in supporting the magnificent memorial which we will dedicate tomorrow.

I would also like to congratulate, Jim Gill, President of the Authority, and CEO, Tim Carey, who, along with their dedicated committee, have been the driving force behind this project. I commend all of those who have worked so hard, both here in the US and in Ireland, to realise this splendid work of public art.

The Slack family from Attymass, Co. Mayo, who donated the cottage for the memorial, and who are with us this evening surely deserve special mention as does Brian Tolle who has transformed the cottage into a new conscience at the heart of New York for the suffering, hungry people of our world. Little did those who first built that little humble cottage dream that it would grace such a different quarter acre site, on the banks of the Hudson River and in the absent shadow of the tragic World Trade Centre.

The reaction in Ireland to that awful September 11th day carried with it manifest traces of the past we share from those grim famine days when so many of our people came to this city with nothing but the breath in their bodies, the memory of death and the hope of the desperate. Generations of their children have prospered and we in Ireland are immensely proud of the success of our Irish family here. We are grateful too for the unfathomable contributions they have made to life at home in Ireland. Your success gave us faith in ourselves. Your support gave us a lifeline to a new future. Your showcasing of Irish identity and Irish culture gave us renewed pride in our heritage and with your help that heritage is deepened, enriched and widened in every generation.

Ireland was once cursed by starvation and poverty in the same way that so many still are cursed today. The folk memory of our own loss has never faded from the Irish psyche which is why you will find Irish men and women working in every part of the world where there is famine, working to bring hope where there is only despair. But there is a job to be done in building up the conscience, restoring the memory, ensuring that we do not forget, putting the sorry state of our brothers and sisters in front of us where we can see it, where we can reflect and respond. That is the job this memorial is about.

W.B. Yeats put it so well: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Those who tread the half acre will meet the strangers on whose dreams they tread and as they make their way home we hope that in their hearts will be lodged a new and unforgettable memory and a new vision they each can commit to of a world where hunger is a memory and where happiness is in the grasp of all. Go raibh maith agaibh.