21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics.

0:30friend, the king. But I'm delighted to be joined by, I think you're the second former president that we've had on the podcast, Mary McAleese, two-term president of the Republic of Ireland. And Mary, I don't know where to start with you because there is an awful lot to get through. I think that, you know, we get quite a lot of criticism for not having enough women on the the leading podcast and there is a pretty obvious reason for that which is that through time and still today there are far more male leaders than female leaders right you were i think still are you still unique as being the you're definitely the first woman president to succeed a woman president you followed mary robinson but still leadership is very very male and you've talked a lot in the past about misogyny within Irish society, within culture more broadly, within the church.

1:26So I want to start with that really, your take on women in leadership. Why so few? How do we get more? We're talking at a time when someone might come straight back at us and say, well, you know, you've been the president of Ireland, you know, you got to be a pro-vice chancellor of the university we're sitting in. Yeah, yesterday had a women in business conference in Belfast. I looked down and there was the head of the civil service, a young woman, the chief justice of Northern Ireland, a woman. I looked and I found Louise Richardson, an old friend of mine, who was the first woman vice chancellor of Oxford.

2:03But actually, we can also say of each of them, they were firsts, you know. And that itself is telling. There is a generation coming through now, thankfully, with the advent, particularly of free second level education, and the massification of third-level education, which women have really taken advantage of. Women have seen education as the conduit to much more broadly opportune-laden lives than the lives that were previously available to them, which were corralled into narrow, very often, domestic spaces or low-grade job service-type spaces where they were never expected to shine or certainly never expected to outshine men and certainly never expected to be outpromoted in favour of men.

2:49So there's been a huge cultural shift in terms of women preparing themselves to have the skills, the qualifications, and I think not just the heft and the momentum, but the personal courage, because it does take personal courage in many ways, to invent yourself as a woman who is going to areas of life, it doesn't matter what profession it is, because there are very few of them that were not dominated by men in some way or another. And part of the difficulty was, and I found it certainly, becoming a barrister and then a law lecturer and then a president, people have this notion that if you speak at all about the subject of women, women are strident.

3:30Men are articulate, but women are strident. And a thing that is often missed in the telling is we come from cultures in which are deeply, I mean really deeply, embedded attitudes about what is appropriate for men and what is appropriate for women. So just on that, you talk about the culture, and of course Ireland has got this very, very strong tradition of Catholicism and the power of the church. And you've said some extraordinary things about the church in the past. You call the Catholic Church an empire of misogyny. It still is. A global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny. It's never even tried to seek a cure, though it exists.

4:09Its name is equality. Correct. And you think that's still the case? Oh, utterly still the case. I mean, the Catholic Church is probably a classic example. It is not the only faith system, regrettably, in the world that has a culture of embedded misogyny. There is a tendency, I think, in the secular media, I'd be as guilty of it as anyone else, to rather dismiss religion as passé. It's yesterday's world. Who bothers with religion? And to some extent, I think that is true. Young people are walking away from religious practice precisely for those reasons, because they find it a hostile world, young women in particular.

4:43But the truth of the matter is, I mean, five out of seven people on our planet identify with some one of the world's major religions. You mentioned the Catholic Church, to which I belong. One in six people in the world are notionally Catholic. And what's your relationship with the Catholic Church? Well, I remember the Catholic Church. But why, if you see it as this... Oh, because I'm darned if I leave it and be allowed then to be ignored. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, one must stay. You stay because also I believe in fairness that it has... But is it not about believing in God? Well, fundamentally that is for me what it is.

5:17But let's park that just for the moment. Let's park God for the moment. And let's talk about this extraordinary structure built up over centuries, which is today the biggest NGO in the world. There is nothing to equal the Catholic Church in the world in terms of its NGO status. It has 200 ,000 schools. It educates some 70, 80 million children. It is a huge key influencer of attitudes and laws. And that's the important thing. Good for good and bad. Good for good and bad across five continents. And there is good in it, but there is also bad in it. And part of the bad is, if you like, the breaking mechanism that it is for women right across those five continents.

6:02because the attitudes that it takes with it across those five continents, into its schools, into its welfare system, into its orphanages, its leprosaria, all of which are wonderful institutions, they also have a dark side. Well, we know the dark side in terms of clerical child sex abuse. We know the dark side in terms of the appalling use of corporal punishment in institutional care. We know all that. But what we don't really know is the more ephemeral, the stuff that we can't, if you like, set a commission to measure. And that is the embedded attitudes that go from generation to generation that outcrop in law.

6:43Just where we are sitting right now, if I look across the street from where we are, that's where I was educated as a lawyer in the law school here at Queen's University. And we had, in our first year, we learned Roman law, which was fine. Roman law, most interesting. And then we went straight from Roman law to the common law. And what was missed, and it may very well have been missed for political reasons, was canon law. Because, of course, it's the connection from Roman law to canon law to the common law. The English common law that I grew up with was largely historically based on canon law. Why was Henry VIII in trouble with the Pope?

7:27You know, did nobody ever ask themselves that question? Because, of course, he was subject to the canon law of the Catholic Church in relation to marriage. But not just marriage. It was in relation to many things. When I was a young lawyer, criminal responsibility started at the age of seven. That was embedded in our common law and eventually in our statute law. Where did that come from? that we can on law. So I decided whenever I ended my time as president that I'd become a canon lawyer because I had the temerity, the temerity to believe that there was so much wrong with the church in terms. Do we have to call you anything special now that you're a canon lawyer?

8:04Not really. No, no, you can't call me Mrs. Canon lawyer. It doesn't sound right. But I did make it my business precisely because I'm a scholar. I'm an academic. That's what I've always been all my life. I'm an academic but in civil law so i decided when i lived in northern ireland i lived in a hugely dysfunctional society in which religion was a deeply deeply embedded perspective and it was a christian religion in which christians hated each other basically fundamentally one of the one of the young producers who is clearly not a person of faith and doesn't understand is just scribble me you know saying can you ask us to explain what canon law is but you see there you Exactly.

8:41You know, that's a really good question. Well, canon law is the legal architecture of the Catholic Church, built up over 2 ,000 years. And it was because the Catholic Church was a universal church, hugely influential throughout the world, and indeed is the only faith system in the world to have permanent representative status at the United Nations. Now for you. Sharia doesn't have that, does it? No, does not. Absolutely does not. So the Catholic Church developed a system of laws. Essentially, it started out as ways of solving problems. I mean, the church founded by Christ wasn't five minutes old when the apostles and disciples were fighting as if they all lived in Northern Ireland all their lives.

9:21And it took somebody to solve the problems. And as every problem was solved with an answer, each of those answers essentially became a law. And then they started to aggregate, you know, and suddenly there were bunches of them. And then they put them together, you know, in cannons. And then eventually, after 2 ,000 years in 1917, they codified them. And that was hilarious because when they codified them, they realized what a lot of baloney was in there. Swathes and swathes of laws about, you know, what color of a band was worn by certain types of monsignors. green for this crowd and pink for this crowd and purple for the other crowd and where did christ say that now where exactly was that so all of that now do you know are you sorry now you asked about canon law um so things like priests were to avoid women because we were objects of suspicion now here's the bad news i mean i'm 72 years old this is real killer once you get to 40 you're no longer an object of suspicion say that man you can't say that no that's true up to 40 you're an objective excuse me are you a catholic is this the canon law are you arguing canon law with me now oh is that the law is that the law up to 40 yeah that was the thinking that up to 40 you know you were an object of suspicion after 40 really you were pretty much what was the life you were losing your teeth and your looks you know what was life expectancy back then so you just know yeah you just had a couple of years of non-suspicion yes no basically i've had a long long years of being you know non-suspect but then it's very suspect for other reasons you've said some strong stuff in your time.

10:55When they set up the Synod of Bishops on the family, you said 300 elderly celibate men who've never changed a nappy in their lives are not the people that decide what's a family. Yeah, or about family life. Yeah. Or about how we as parents should instruct our children in Christian family life. These elderly men that you would run into in your time as president. Correct. What did they make of you? Oh, yes. Well, I had a dreadful row with Cardinal Connell. And we remained friends, funnily enough, but we had terrible rows because shortly after I became president, I took communion in a Protestant church.

11:31And you see, God is sitting up there in heaven, you know, and he's watching very carefully who goes into Protestant churches, who goes into Catholic churches. And if a Catholic president went into a Protestant church, having promised to be a president for everybody and to respect everybody and to respect all faiths and none, and having been invited by my Protestant neighbours to this service and offered their communion hospitality, he absolutely, apparently God did not like the fact that I took communion. Do you think we should insert that there is an ironic tone to your voice just in case some people are taking that at face value?

12:05Really? Okay, right. Well, if they are, God help them. Because Cardinal Connell, he took out, he went mad and said terrible things. And he also then said, of course, that the Church of Ireland communion, the Protestant or Anglican communion, as it might otherwise be known, was a sham. A sham, really. These are people who are worshipping the same God he believes in, who go to church in the same way that he does. And somehow, because they give me communion, offer me their Eucharistic hospitality, that I'm engaging in a sham. So anyway, there was a fierce row over that altogether. Okay, listen, so you've got this incredibly powerful church, right, in the sense of a powerful church.

12:43And yet Ireland, on all of these issues you've talked about, has moved immeasurably. Yes, and who has moved? The people of God have moved. Because these are people who are very often still going to Mass or still connected to God and spirituality in some shape or form. A lot of them, I admit, very turned off by the church because of misogyny, homophobia and, of course, the big scandal. And of course, the first scandal was the scandal in relation to what we call the Humanae Vitae, which outlawed the use of artificial contraception against the advice of Catholic theologians and Catholic doctors. And that was at the time when we had the beginnings of the massification of second level education, the confidence that comes from education, and importantly, the critiquing skills that come from education.

13:35Before that, you had a population who sat in the pews and were told what to think. Now that was not just reversed, but really there was a tsunami of education, discussion. In Ireland, we are a people who talk, talk, talk. And interestingly, we talk intergenerationally. You have to, you know, because you're in the house with your granny and your mummy. and out of that came a complete change of view. Thank God people can change their views and if ever there was an example of that, the profundity of that as a reality of the human condition, the capacity to change, Ireland is it. Great, okay, let's just take a break.

14:22You mentioned homosexuality, and you have a son who's gay. Yes. Three children. Three. Two girls and a boy. Two girls, yeah. So if you go back a couple of generations, how difficult would that have been for Ireland? And what's the situation now for gay people in Ireland? Well, it's interesting. I know you've got a gay T-shirt, which is, again, a sign of an advance. Yeah, absolutely wonderful. I got involved in campaigning for gay rights as a human rights lawyer in 1975. Before? Ten years before my son was born. I mean, some people think that I coached him to be gay from the day he was born. You know, you will be gay.

14:54You know, but I didn't actually. But I didn't know when he was about seven that he was gay. But I started campaigning for gay rights back in 1975. Why? Because I knew nothing about gay. I was in this university. I never heard the word gay. I didn't know there were any gay people when I was at university. I thought everybody around me was heterosexual. But I didn't even answer. I didn't even kind of question that because just nobody talked about it. And then in 72, I went to America to work on a J1 visa in San Francisco. And my boss in the place that I was working in was the most gorgeous gay man.

15:25and he was handsome as well as many gay men are. And one of my colleagues took me aside and said, you know, don't be falling for him because he's gay. And I went, I know he's really nice. He's lovely. She said, no, no, no, no. What I mean is, because the word meant nothing to me. You thought he was happy. I thought he was just a happy person. So my crush on him was crushed. And I then, but he and I became great mates. And because I was fascinated. I'd never heard of this stuff before. And I was fascinated. And then I learned from him because there was, in fairness, there was a kind of an aura of sorrow and darkness that hung over him for all that he was a gay person in every way.

16:02Was this around the kind of Harvey Milk time? Correct. And so he told me about how he'd been excluded by his family. Like me, he was Catholic. And he told me about, you know, how oppressed he felt both in family terms. And his family had effectively thrown him out because they believed the church is teaching and they believed a lot of the ambient views about homosexuals, that they were evil. So I remember coming back thinking, this is a human rights issue. This is ludicrous. So at the first opportunity, when I came to work in Trinity College, one of the first friends I made was a very well-known gay senator, David Norris.

16:39Oh, yeah. Yeah, David and I. The guy who ran for president. Yeah, exactly. Did he run against you? Oh, gosh, no. Later, later. We were mates. David came to me in the law school one day looking for advice because at that time, homosexual conduct was criminalized still in Ireland. So what were we going to do? So anyway, a bunch of us set up the campaign for homosexual law reform, went to the European Court of Justice, Mary Robinson. God bless her. She took that case pro bono. And we won in the European Court of Human Rights. Sorry. And anyway, we won that case. And then thankfully, a woman minister for justice, Maura Gagan Quinn, she changed the law.

17:16But way back in, I think, about 1979 or 78, I was the first person on radio to suggest, in answer to a question from a journalist, that the campaign probably would end up with looking for the right to gay marriage. And this was regarded as a subject of great mirth. But I said, well, of course, I mean, that's a natural corollary of where we're going if we're talking about equality of citizenship. and how ridiculous it seemed at the time. I suppose the best way of gauging that is that my mother did not bring me up to give out about what I'd said. Even right up to the campaign, my mother would have been saying that she'd have to follow the church.

17:56Luckily, she didn't have a vote anyway. No, and also I have a gay brother. And in fact, in fairness to my father and mother, when he announced that he was gay around the table some 40 years ago, my father said, are you gay, son? My brother said, yeah, I am. He said, that's grandson. Aren't you still our son? And what was it we were having for dessert? And that was it. It was over. That was it. It was over. There was never a word about that. So your brother and your son, what experience have they had of homophobia? Look, they've experienced it every which way. Every which way they've experienced it.

18:26And because it's still in the ether, unfortunately. On the other hand, they live through times now where they know from the referendum in the Republic that at least 66 % of the people they meet on the streets are on their side. And that's a wonderful thing. That's a wonderful thing to walk down your street hand in hand with your partner, knowing you're not going to be spat at or hit. But we still like every place has the act of homophobic violence, the picking off of the low hanging fruit, the young gay guy who's coming out of a bar on his own at night, you know, who's going to get kicked by some.

19:00Still goes on. Yeah. So that still goes on, unfortunately. And because, again, it's got to do with embedded practices. You know, a lot of this stuff, particularly sexism and homophobia, has become what I would call privatized now. In the past, people could articulate it openly because they thought that it was, you know, that it was perfectly OK to say it. Now, we don't accept that language, but it still goes on in, you know, in what I might call little hermetically sealed bubbles where people feel safe. just in the same way that sectarianism did and was hothoused here in Northern Ireland in elitist groups.

19:37They wouldn't say the same thing outside those groups that they would say inside them. But the fact that it was said inside gave those toxic ideas legs. OK, and I want to go right back to your childhood. I know that the Irish Constitution allows for anybody born in the island of Ireland to become president. But it still strikes me as quite extraordinary that you were born in Northern Ireland, grew up here, mainly educated here, and yet went on to become President of Ireland. So I'd be quite interested in that. And also just the other point in your childhood is your sense of the troubles and any of the experiences that kind of really experience of what was happening here.

20:15Well, I grew up in Ardogne, one of the most deprived parishes, areas in Northern Ireland. It is the area with the greatest incidence of sectarian killings bar none. So you're a Catholic living in a Protestant area. Well, Ardoin is very often described as a Catholic, Republican, nationalist enclave. I grew up on the other side of the street. If you've ever driven up that road, the Cromlin Road, you will see that there's a huge wall, massive big wall. That wall didn't exist in my day, but it might as well have because there was the wall in people's hearts and minds. But I grew up on the Protestant side, which meant that I'd only ever Protestant friends apart from my school friends.

20:52So that was good, actually, because I also had a great understanding of where my Protestant friends were coming from, what they thought of politics, how they loved the Queen. In our house, she went through the front door and there was the picture of John XXIII and John F. Kennedy. I walked across the street and in through the door and there was the picture of Her Majesty the Queen. So I knew that. And I also knew that some of my neighbors had very strong connections to the British Army. We never did in our family. My grandfather had been in the IRA, had been in ADC to De Valera. But I think probably what marked me off from many of my colleagues and friends at the time was my father was from the west of Ireland.

21:37And he was from Ruscommon in the west of Ireland, where I now live. So I had another hinterland to draw from. and we would go there as soon as school closed. You got out of Northern Ireland. It was a pretty awful place to grow up in, let's face it. As a Catholic, it was a miserable place. The police force didn't represent us. The government didn't represent us. The judiciary didn't represent us. They all pretty much were down on us. The system was down on us. We were aware of that. So, you know, at every hand's turn, my father got us out of here. And my father came here for work because work was very scarce.

22:12He came here at 14 years of age with his first pair of shoes. First pair of shoes. He said, you know, he was 20 before they fitted him. Because his father went into town and bought them without my father being with him. And my grandfather at that stage and my grandparents were living in a small little cottage in the west of Ireland. And the electricity came down their road. My grandfather wouldn't have it because it was the devil's own cursed instrument. And secondly, it wouldn't catch on. Oh, my Lord. So there you go. And my poor grandmother had to suffer the indignity of all the neighbours getting their kettles and their cookers.

22:46And she, poor creator, was still using the open fire for cooking and for all of that. It stayed without electricity for the rest of his life. Until the very end, when he got a single light bulb. There wasn't a lampshade on it. And when we went down for the official turning on of the light, he already had six flyers attached to it. And you couldn't see your finger in front of you when we turned on the light. Was this your first sort of opening event? Exactly. This was the big opening event. So hold on, when did he die then? Well, my grandfather died in the 1970s. So right to the 70s. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

23:21But about two years before he died, my father had insisted on the electric going in. And we went down to see this great event happening, this great concession. I mean, George Mitchell has nothing on my father trying to persuade my grandfather to get the electric. So I toggled between the madness of Belfast and the awful sectarianism and the West of Ireland. And in terms of the Republic, community in the Republic, you never felt there was a resistance to you because of where you came from? Oh, yes. Oh, my grandfather thought my father was mad to have married a Northern woman, even though she was a Catholic.

23:58I mean, she was really a quasi-Protestant in his eyes because we lived among Protestants. On a campaign, I'm obviously interested in campaigning. When you were campaigning to be president, how conscious were people that you were this rather exotic creature from the North? Well, that was part of, if you like, of the attraction that I knew the North. Bear in mind, this was 1997. Yeah. And George Mitchell was now, you know, had gone very gray trying to bring the Northern parties to the realization. So your understanding of the North helped you in the South? It did. And also I had worked as a journalist.

24:27I'd worked as a journalist for the National Broadcaster, RTE in Dublin. I'd also been an academic lawyer. I had, you know, I was educated and grew up here. I worked here for a short time as a barrister. I knew this place intimately and then had come back to live in Northern Ireland in 87. My husband had trained as a dentist in Dublin, but then had come to work along the border in a famous place called Cross McGlenn. He was a dentist there and in Bestbrook. And I had then come back with our children. We'd come back to live and strategically placed ourselves beside my mother for babysitting purposes in the magnificent village of Restrever in County Down.

25:02So I knew that I, you know, I know the North. And so far as anybody knows the North, you know, we all have our own narratives and our own experiences. But I had been a little bit involved in politics when I was here. Before, when I was working here, I also was very much involved in church life and very much involved with Father Alec Reid and the Redemptorist Peace Ministry, which involved the talks between John Hume and Gerry Adams. Yeah. So, and I had already, you know, and also even the choice of becoming a lawyer was part and parcel of trying to get under the skin of this place and to understand what is it about the law and structure that is holding us back and that which have changed could help us to move forward.

25:44Okay. So, wind back to the troubles and growing up. Yes. There's an experience you've talked about before. Your dad ran a pub. Yes. And where. On the Falls Road. on the Falls Road and you were confronted very, very directly with the consequence of terrorism. Just tell us that. Well, we lived in Ardoin, but we now, we lived in the Protestant part of Ardoin. We live right beside a loyalist estate. And there had been a campaign of intimidation against Catholics in that area. Very significant campaign. A lot of people were put out of their houses. And then the murders, the sectarian murders started.