Boisi Center Interviews No

the boisi center interviews no. 85: October 29, 2013 mary mcaleese served as the president of Ireland from 1997 to 2011, during which time she was instrumental in the peace process in Northern Ireland. She spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before her presentation on peacebuilding and reconciliation in the context of Northern Ireland at the Boisi Center. owens: One of the things that has help to give leadership there—in terms who became a lawyer at a time when it been striking in reading about your of reconciliation in particular—that was was not normal or encouraged for women history is the power of female leadership facilitated by virtue of being a woman. to become lawyers, women like myself in Ireland—not only your remarkable People expected something different are good at working small spaces and fourteen-year tenure as president, but from women. And I think that’s always trying to develop from them something also your administration following that of been a leitmotif of my own life and my bigger than the space we were given. So another remarkable female president. Is in that sense, frankly, I think women there something specific about Irish poli- around the world do that. tics or culture that makes this possible? owens: How did growing up in Belfast mcaleese: I don’t think that it’s in a time of great strife and violence necessarily any different from other affect your view of life? Are there lessons places. If you were to look at the political about endurance or hope or peace that scene generally, we actually don’t have might apply to people in other places who a very large number of women engaged experience violence or terrorism in their in day-to-day politics. But women are communities? particularly suited, it seems to me. Both mcaleese: We were born into it, that’s Mary Robinson [her predecessor] and I the first thing. There was a normalcy would have been particularly suited to about divisions, sectarianism, the threat the presidency at a particular time in of violence. [My husband and I] were Irish politics simply by virtue of being both born at the beginning of the 1950s, women. It’s a bit like being a lay person and the IRA campaign continued right in the Catholic Church. On the one hand, into the 1950s. If you look at the history it’s a very powerless position to be in. But of the areas we were born into—my own on the other hand, it can also be quite a own career—that somehow, funnily parish, for example, Ardoyne—there had powerful position. Since you have noth- enough, being overlooked as a group been anti-Catholic sectarian pogroms ing to lose, if you wish, you can stand or as a member of a group sometimes there virtually in every generation, going your ground. You can state your case. You (despite the fact that it is quite shocking back for a century or more. We were born can’t be censured in the way that perhaps for whole sections of a community to in Belfast, a sectarian city. I grew up as somebody who’s more embedded in the be overlooked) gives you space in which a Catholic in a Protestant area; Martin power structure can be. to do things, think things, be things, grew up as a Catholic in a Protestant area. I felt that the presidency was essentially contemplate things that are not shaped We were constantly aware of sectarian- a pastoral role. Leaving aside the con- by the ambient traditional discourse, but ism, even as times changed and, in the stitutional role’s office work, there was allows you space to develop alternative 1960s, there appeared to be the growth of a pastoral space that I could occupy and ideas. And I suppose also, as a woman an accommodation between the govern- 1 the boisi center interview: mary mcaleese ment in the North and the government actually could think more creatively, grant-aided third-level education. We in the South. There appeared to be a could perhaps engage in a much more now had ambitions to become university settling of the conflict and particularly, imaginative and generous discourse? educated, to go into the professions. We in the light of Vatican II, more talk about And so that’s where we made our stand, were the people who started to push up ecumenism; but of course then that all both individually and then together. against the sectarian barriers that ex- went horribly wrong with the stirring up We’ve been together for over forty years, cluded Catholics for all sorts of nefarious of the sectarian dragon by Dr. Ian Paisley and married for thirty-seven. reasons. And we were—again to quote and his cohorts and by Protestant para- Heaney—we were the “intelligences, owens: Congratulations! militaries. It all blossomed again. But I brightened and unmannerly as crow- have to say, that sectarianism was always mcaleese: We started going out togeth- bars.” We were determined to take those in the atmosphere. We were always aware er when we were seventeen. So we made crowbars—in our case, intellectual crow- there were places we couldn’t go safely or these decisions as we were on the run, bars. He said in his poem, “Digging,” could only go with Protestant friends to that he was going to dig with his pen. defend us. We decided that we would change things with our brainpower and our powers of Then, when the Troubles broke out— persuasion, not the use of violence, and when effectively a civil war broke out on “We lived beside that those powers of persuasion would be our doorstep in 1969—though we had rooted in gospel values to love one anoth- lived in a sectarian conflict, we were each other — er. We just became determined that what really not prepared for the duration of we lived cheek we had inherited—which was a very, very that conflict. In my innocence—I was longstanding conflict—had to stop. Some only an 18 year old at the time—I thought by jowl—in generation had to stand against it and to it might last a week. Then it lasted a change the narrative to shift its trajectory month. Then it lasted a year and finally monumental towards peace. So that’s where we started. over thirty years. And during that time, there was huge provocation on all sides and dangerous Long before I ever became president, I and huge temptation to be drawn into ignorance of was involved in cross-community and an- one of the sides, by the sheer gravitation- ti-sectarian activities. I co-wrote a report al pull of history. Both sides have a very, one another, for the Irish Council of Churches, which very strong tradition of paramilitarism represents the Protestant churches and and fighting. Friends of ours made the but unaware of the Catholic Church, on sectarianism, choices to join paramilitaries. trying to chart a way for the churches to how ignorant we help us out of the mire. I did a series of In this context, you’re confronted with a broadcasts called “The Protestant Mind” conundrum. What do you do? You can were.” for BBC radio to try and penetrate the do what a lot of people do, which is just mind that I didn’t understand, because I pretend and ignore and hope that it all felt that one of the things that we really goes away. You can bury yourself in some failed to do was to truly try and stand kind of a middle class cocoon and protect and were helped by our families and by in the shoes of the Other. Worse than yourself by all sorts of techniques of neu- our faith. I was very well catechized by that, we lived beside each other—we tralization. We found that very difficult the Passionists in the way of the cross, in lived cheek by jowl—in monumental and to do because we both came from very endurance and stoicism—but not in the dangerous ignorance of one another, but tough, rough working class areas where it way of Heaney’s description of them in unaware of how ignorant we were. We wasn’t so easy to do that. And so we both his poem, “From the Canton of Expecta- actually thought we knew these people “made [our] stand”—to quote Seamus tion,” where he describes the generation well enough to be contemptuous of their Heaney—and our stand was we’re not go- to prior to me, which was my parents’ views, to ransack history for ammunition ing to get involved in violence. There has generation and grandparents’ generation, to throw at them—ammunition that to be a better, more humanly decent way as living “under high, banked clouds of showed how nefarious they were, how than this. Are we going to be conduits for resignation.” That generation was gone. they couldn’t be trusted, how sectarian the toxic spores that keep this going from The big disconnect between that gener- they were. And of course they did the generation to generation? Or could we ation and mine was education. We were same for us. Here we were, these two be part of a generation—now the most the beneficiaries of free second-level and Others, living cheek by jowl, but not educated generation on the island—that 2 the boisi center interview: mary mcaleese really working to try and find a coherent way of living in a neighborly way.

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