Heres The Story A Memoir – Mary McAleese

Deirdre had the bright idea that before we could eat, each of us had to line up the harps on our two plates. We were slightly terrified of the staff, which was ridiculous, for every one of them was slightly terrified of us: we were all unknown quantities to each other. But the harp-alignment exercise provoked the first of many laughs we all shared together.

Our living quarters were above and adjacent to the offices of the secretariat, and sat in the middle of what was pretty much an open thoroughfare. There was little privacy. I was not sure how we would acclimatise to being on permanent parade. By happenstance, the discovery of asbestos meant that we had to move out to allow for renovations. I was able to sequester rooms in a far corner of the house known as the West Wing, and it became our private family home, well away from the official life of the Áras.

Thankfully it had its own back door, where abandoned bikes, hurls, helmets and school bags looked a lot less alarming than they did when strewn at the front door of the President’s official residence. OceanofPDF.com Immediately we set to work honouring the promise to build bridges. There was an urgency to it. The conflict in Northern Ireland was ongoing, but a lot of effort was being expended in trying to bring it to an end.

Over the thirty years of the Troubles there had been a number of failed inter-governmental attempts at constructing a peace agreement. Each had contributed to a body of experience and insight that became useful tools in the hands of a new generation of peacemakers. Some worked on the visible front line of politics; others worked in back channels. My job, once elected, was to use the office of the President to explore the areas of long-standing distrust and estrangement that could, I was sure, be bridged by a sustained effort at friendship-building.

From 11 November 1997 it was time to put into effect all we had learned over years of living and working on both sides of the border. The Áras was to be a welcoming place, especially to those who had never considered visiting it. The first thing to do was to open the house to the general public for the first time: we established public visits to the state rooms every Saturday, and eventually created a visitors’ centre that told the history of the house and the presidency.

Mary McAleese was born in Belfast in 1951. In 1975 she was appointed Reid Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin, and in 1987 she became Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She was elected President of Ireland in 1997, and re-elected unopposed in 2004. Since stepping down as President in 2011, she has earned a PhD in canon law while emerging as a forceful critic of the institutional Church’s misogyny.

OceanofPDF.com This book is dedicated to the memory of the late Father Alec Reid CSsR, priest and peacemaker OceanofPDF.com 1 People have notions about the place where I was born and raised: Ardoyne, north Belfast. During the Troubles, Ardoyne was rebranded in the mass media as ‘The Ardoyne’. It became the area with the highest per capita incidence of sectarian murders and gained a reputation as a place apart.

Ardoyne was not a place apart. It was – and still is – the canary in the mine. Looking back, I can see it for what it was: a dangerously overlooked corner of the United Kingdom where the lives of many decent people of all persuasions fell or were shoved into the crevices of a turbulent history they did not create. Ardoyne is sometimes characterised as a Catholic ghetto, but that is to mistake part of it for all of it.

My family was Catholic, but for as long as we lived in Ardoyne we lived among predominantly Protestant neighbours who belonged to a kaleidoscope of different churches and gospel halls. Growing up there in the 1950s and 60s, I learned from first principles that by failing to build bridges to our estranged neighbours, we lived with a dangerously (and deliberately) restricted view of life. In a divided society, the contest for hearts and minds begins with the recruitment of its children to intolerance of others.

I was raised as a Catholic whose identity was Irish, not British. I grew up among Protestant neighbours whose identity was mostly British, not Irish. I hoped the island of Ireland would one day be reunited. My neighbours could not imagine anything worse. They were loyal to the Crown and the United Kingdom.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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