The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

For former President of Ireland Mary McAleese, the personal is the political. Growing up in Belfast with a deeply personal link to sectarian violence, her aim as President was to promote unity and build bridges between political, religious and cultural divides. Alastair speaks to her about misogyny in the Catholic Church, her role as a human rights lawyer, the violence of the Troubles, and much, much more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to The Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispoletics.com. Welcome to another episode of The Restis Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell and without Rory Stewart, who's having day off,

holiday or something, I don't know, preparing to attend the coronation with his friend, 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 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.

You were, I think still, are you still unique as being the, you're definitely the first woman president to succeed a woman president? Correct. 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. So 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 who were sitting in. Yesterday, he 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. But 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 out-promoted in favour of men. So 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, whether 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 going, you know, becoming a barrister and then a law lecturer and then, you know, a president. People have this notion that you're, you know, if you speak at all about the subject of women, women are strident, you know.

You know, men 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. Its 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 would 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. But 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 and six people in the world are notionally Catholic. And what's your relationship with the Catholic Church? 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, what 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. But it's all... Let's part that just for the moment. Part God. It's part God. Let's part 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. For good and bad. Good for good and bad across five continents. And there is good in it, but there is good in it. 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 because 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.

Just where we're 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. Canon. It 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 the 8th in trouble with the Pope? 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 canon 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 and terms. Do we have to call you anything special now that you're a canon lawyer? Not really, no. No, you can't call me Mrs. Cannon 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 in my life. I'm an academic. But in civil law. So I decided, when I, 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 young producers who is clearly not a person of faith and doesn't understand is, just scribble in me and out saying, can you ask her to explain what canon law is? But you see, there you go. Exactly. You 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. Jaria doesn't have that, is 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. And 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 17, 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 colour of a band was worn by certain types of monseigneurs, green for this crowd and pink for this crowd and purple for the other crowd. Where did Christ say that now?

Where exactly was that? So all of that. Do you know, are you sorry now you asked about canon law? So things like priests were to avoid women because we were objects of social. suspicion. Now, here's the bad news. I mean, I'm 72 years old and this is a real killer. Once you get to 40, you're no longer an object of suspicion. Oh, no, you can't say that, you can't say that. No, that's true. Up to 40, you're an objective. Excuse me. Are you a Catholic?

Is this a Catholic? Is this a canon law? Are you arguing? Are you in canon law with me now? Oh, is that the law? Up to 40, you know, you were an object of suspicion. After 40, really, you were pretty much dead. What was the life expected? What was life expectancy back then? So you just like, no. No. No. In it was a subject of suspicion. You were You just had a couple of years of non-suspicions. Yes. So 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. When they set up the Synod of Bishops on the family, you said 300 elderly-selebit men who've never changed a nappy in their lives and not the people to 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. We remained friends, funnily enough, but we had terrible rows because shortly after I became president, I took communion in a Protestant church.

And 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 a Catholic president went into a Protestant church, having, having, 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? Really? Okay. Right. Well, if they are, God help them. Because Cardinal Connell, he took out, he went mad. 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 rye over that altogether. Okay, listen, so you've got this incredibly powerful church, right, in the sense of a powerful church. And 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 to 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 Humanevite, 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. Before 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. And interestingly, we talk intergenerational. 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, the as a reality of the human condition, the capacity to change Ireland is it. Great. Okay. Let's just take a break. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarach here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away,

and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is

governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time,

to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned homosexuality. And you have a son who's gay. Yes.

Three children. 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-shuck, which is again, a sign of an advance.

Yeah, absolutely wonderful. got involved in campaigning for gay rights as a human rights lawyer in 1975. Before. 10 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 will be gay. But I didn't actually. But I didn't know when he was about seven that he was gay.

Yes, but I started campaigning for gay rights back in 1975. Why? Because I'd been, I knew nothing about, 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 working on a J1 visa in San Francisco. And my boss in the place that I was working in was the most gorgeous gay man and 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 I had, the word meant nothing to me. You thought he was happy? I thought she was a happy person. So my, my, my, my, my, I crush it on him was crushed. And I then, but he and I became great mates.

And because I was fascinated. I 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. Was 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 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah, David and I said. The guy who ran for president.

Yeah, exactly. Is he any of run against you? No. Oh, gosh, no. Later. Later. Later. I know.

We were mates. David came to me in the law school one day looking for advice because at that time, homosexual conduct was criminalised still in Ireland. So what would 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 thank you. a woman minister for justice, Mora Gagan Quinn. She changed the law.

But 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.

Luckily, she didn't have a vote anyway. And also I have her 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 father, my brother said, yeah, I am. He said, which that's grandson, aren't you still our son?

And what was it when we're having for dessert? And that was it was over. 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. And 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 may, 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 our head. 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 moment. Still 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

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 okay 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, you know, was hot-housed here in Northern Ireland in elitist groups. They 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. Okay. And I want to go right back to your childhood. I know that the Irish Constitution allows for anybody born in the Ireland 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. Well, I grew up in Ardoin, 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, really Protestant area. Well, Ardoin is very often described as a Catholic, you know, Republican nationalist enclave. I grew up on the other side of the street.

If you've ever driven up that road, the Cromden 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. So 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, you went through the front door and there was the picture of John the 23rd

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 neighbours 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 DeVallera. But I think probably what marked me off from many of my colleagues and friends of the time was my father was from the West of Ireland. And 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. He 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, my grandparents, were living in a small little cottage in the west of Ireland. And the electricity came down there.

road, my grandfather wouldn't have it because it was the devil's own cursed instrument. And secondly, it wouldn't catch on now. 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. And she, poor crater, 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 lamp shade on it. And when we went down for the official. turning on of the light. He already had six skyscapers attached to it and you couldn't see your finger in front of you

when we turned on the lights. Was this your first sort of opening event? Exactly. This was a 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, yeah. So, but about two years before he died, said 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, you know, 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. I mean, she was really a quasi-pr Protestant in his eyes because he lived. lived among Protestants.

On a campaigning, 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 grey trying to bring the northern parties to the realisation.

Your understanding of the North helped you in the South. It did. And also I had worked as a journalist. I had worked as a journalist for the national broadcaster, RTE in Dublin. I'd also been an academic lawyer. 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 McGlynn. 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. So 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 of their 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 Reed

and the Redemptorist Peace Ministry, which involved the talks between John Hume and Jerry Adams. So, and I had already, 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. Okay. So wind back to the troubles and growing up.

Yes. And there's an experience you've talked about before your dad run a pub. Yes. And we're on the Falls Road. On the Falls Road. And you were confronted very, very directly with the consequences. terrorists. Just tell us that. Well, we lived in Ardoin, but we now, we lived in a 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 put out of their houses. And then the murders, the sectarian murders started. And then the tit for tat with the provisional IRA coming into the frame. And our house was attacked. And to, well, attacked, serpriced. times actually. Crowds came and broke up paving stones and pitched them through our windows.

They attempted to kill my brother, who's profoundly deaf and almost succeeded in killing him, but thankfully not. Then these were all loyalist attacks now, and these were all by neighbours of ours, incidentally, known to us, known to us. And people whom, you know, we had been, some of them, in some cases we had been friendly with some of our, I'm the oldest of nine children, so some of brothers and sisters would have been friends with some of these people's children are brothers or sisters. So then when that didn't work and they killed our neighbor, murdered our neighbor who ran the little sweet shop up the road. And we realized then, I realized then, I was, what, I was 18 then, 19. And I realized, we're next, you know, they're coming down the road for us. And anyway,

they did. They came with machine guns and they emptied them through our windows. But luckily, because there were Protestants, they didn't know we were out at mass. So, um, and my mother had us out at first mass, thank you God. And so, yes, they didn't kill anybody, but they tried. Like my sister, Nora's bed was like a colander. I've never been able to forget that. I still get horrible dreams about seeing this mattress with all these mad holes in it. Anyway, so we survived, thanks be to God.

But then my father had a pub just off the Falls Road, a place called Leeson Street, a very well-known pub called The Long Bar. And they put a car bomb outside of it. And my father went out on, he got all his, because it was called a long bar because it ran across two streets. The car was left in the Leeson Street entrance. And my father got everybody out, the other entrance, Cyprus Street. He got them all out. But he went back to check.

And when he went back to check, he saw a young woman run across the road, a young girl, Olive McConnell, who thought her child was on the street. And because the Hugh and Cry had gone up, and that there was a car bomb. And she ran across the street. And unfortunately, my father thought she had tripped and fallen. But in fact, what had happened was the car bomb had exploded. My father mercifully was unharmed physically. But I'm told that it was the keys of the car had broken her neck.

And so she looked unmarked, you see. There was no blood. And my father grabbed her. And then when the first person on the scene, as it turned out, was an RTE, the national broadcaster, a cameraman, a great old friend of mine, as it turned out. later, he was first on the scene and he realized that my father did not know she was dead. And so my father was a very gregarious man, great storyteller, well, you know, full of fun. But that was the day his life changed, really.

When he came home, he was, we now know that he was suffering from a catatonic depression, which he suffered from for the next few years. He didn't speak for a couple of years. It was unable to talk. And funnily enough, I came home from university one day. and my mother said, my father just sat all the time listening to a transistor radio. And there was no words out of him at all. And it was being very hard on my mother raising nine children, no money coming in.

Your dad had not been, had depression before that? Never. My father, depressed. Are you mad? Never, never, ever, ever. Did he struggle with depression for the rest of his life? Oh, absolutely. No. Utterly. And there was no name for it then. We didn't know about, you know, trauma, post-traumatic anything. But as well as that, we didn't have a home of our own then, you see. We'd lost our home and we were living in a house that had been condemned.

It was owned by nuns who lent it to us. And we were now over in West Belfast in Anderson's town. And the house was a bit of a disaster to put it mildly. Like the day we walked into it, there were 19 of the windows and it had been broken. And somebody had tried to set fire to it. There were reasons for that as we discovered subsequently the IRA had been using it as a place to hide weapons. We didn't know that then, obviously. But they didn't want us there either.

thank you very much. So the loyalist didn't want us. The IRA crowd didn't want us. And we were in the middle of this. And my mother is now coping with nine children. And this man who went out that morning, you know, reasonably happy, good lucky, comes back not speaking. Anyway, fast forward to. You literally not speaking.

I'm literally not speaking. Not talking. No, not saying nothing. Just sighing into the fire. Go into bed, getting up in the morning, sighing, like a whole day of sighing. And it's just awful. Anyway, I came home from university one day. came in through the back door and my mother said to me,

you're not going to believe this. She said, your daddy, your daddy started to talk today. I said, what did he say? What did he say? And he said, shut up to hell, y'all, I'll bitch. I said, what? He said that to you? He said, no, she didn't say, didn't say it to me. He said it's some woman on the radio called Margaret Thatcher.

So, we call it the miracle of Maggie Thatcher. So Maggie brought him back to life. We don't even know what she said, because she wasn't Prime Minister, Alistair, at the time. she was Minister for Education when she was snatching the milk It must have been that Could it have been that?

It could have been that Why would the Irish media be covering Saskatchew? My father would be on BBC Okay You know just to get You know he was like a lot of people in Northern Ireland

He'd maximise the number of hours In the day when he could be insulted And so So you know he'd be listening maybe to Radio 4 or you know BBC Radio 1, Radio Radio Wallster I don't even know it existed then So we never were able to find out

what the broadcast was about. And after that, how, for the rest of his life, how chronic was the depression? He came back to himself and he tried his best. He did. Did he ever get treatment?

Not at all. Not at all. You didn't do that then. No, you were, no, he didn't. What would you say to your friends and people who came around and saw your dad like that? What would you say was going on?

You know, I don't, we didn't even talk about it. Here's a thing. We didn't talk about it. Honestly, Alistair is disgraceful. We didn't talk about it. hadn't the language. I was coming home one day from work here in Queens and I lived in Restrever and I loved to turn the car at the sea front and Warren Point and just say to the sea, take it all. I'll catch up with all my problems in the morning and the way back, but to the sea and the waves, take it now.

Going home to face whatever we were facing. But as it happened that week, I got a, I was ill and I was in bed. And my dad came round as he did every day and he sat at the edge of the bed. Out of the blue, I said to him, And Dad, could I take you back to that day of the explosion? And the day when our lives just seemed to change so catastrophically, could you tell me what went on your head? And you know what he said to me? You're the first person ever asked me that. This was donkey's years later.

I mean donkey's years later. And so he did. He talked about it. And I said, did you ever think of yourself as a person who suffered from, you know, an illness that needed help, you know, maybe from a psychiatrist or psychologist, no. He said, I didn't. He said, there were too many other people around me who had suffered death and destruction and people who had suffered physical injury.

So who was I to say there was anything wrong with me? And I've often said Northern Ireland is a place of swathes of people, like my father, who are suffering from real, real depression, but don't say it because they believe that there is a hierarchy of victims, there's a hierarchy of illnesses and we have a culture of stoicism that doesn't allow them to break through and say. Oh, even today, even today.

Really? Even today. Worse would you say than the rest of Ireland or the rest of the UK? Absolutely. Utterly. Look at the suicide rates here, Alistair. We've had more people die by suicide here since the Good Friday Agreement than died from the troubles.

The suicide rates here, I don't know if you've seen the stats, but the suicide rate here is through the roof. What does that tell us? Because the red line that shows you, the graph of actual suicides. Underneath that, there's another graph of attempted suicides, of mental ill health, of untreated mental health problems. There's a whole swath of that going on here. I know it. The people who take refuge in what we call cans, the can culture, drink it away or drug it away, or just be lonely in it. And I think that's one of the great tragedies of Northern Ireland that really

has not been properly dealt with. There are wonderful organisations, great organisation, for example, like wave trauma, that has tried to address that. But, you know, they're pushing them. They're pushing a mountain. They're just pushing a mountain in front of them. And of course, it's a lot harder if you don't have a functioning government. It's impossible if you haven't got a functioning government. Because again, like, so...

And this is the kind of stuff that doesn't even get talked about in the political context. And I think my father's a classic example of some kind of pride would let him talk about it. Not because he thought he'd be letting himself down or weakening himself, but rather that he thought, people might think that he was looking for sympathy. And there were so many other people deserving of sympathy. And we'd lost so many friends. I mean, the day I was married, two of our best friends were murdered the morning of my wedding, which kind of ruined the wedding, to put it mildly, you know, awful.

And here they are. And their family had terrible problems subsequently those two men. One of them had, you know, he had seven children, seven small children when he died for nothing except that he was, you know, a Catholic bar owner. And then in retaliation for them, the IRA, it was loyalist. murdered them. And the next day, the IRA go into a pub and kill a perfectly innocent Protestant man. And his daughter becomes a great friend of mine later where we both find ourselves in Florida in Miami. And we got talking politics because it was 12th of July and everybody was acting

the idiot, you know, banging drums and singing the songs that are associated with the 12th in great good humor and together. And then I discovered that her daddy had been killed in retaliation. for the two O'Reilly brothers who were murdered on the morning of my wedding. So, you know, that brings you back to our earth with a bump because that's the world we lived in, tit for tat, tit for tat. And nobody able to break out of the sectarian bunker. The only wounds that we felt were our wounds.

We didn't feel their wounds. And I think my father probably felt too, that like so many people here, there are much, people are much worse off than me. No, the thing you say about the hierarchy of pain and that, that's a very, very powerful point. Now, I love the fact, Mary, that we've done almost an hour. And we haven't talked once about your time as president, really. We haven't talked about so much in your life that you've done.

But I want to close with a couple of questions. One that does relate to your time as president and one that relates to the here and now. And you mentioned when you were growing up in the House's opposite, you'd have a picture of the Queen and yours you'd have a picture of JFK. And you did become the President who welcomed the Queen to the Republic, which was a pretty amazing moment. And the issue that I want to get you, and I really want you to get you going on this about here and now is your views on Brexit, which I have heard and which I love for our listeners to hear as well. You can tell you those two questions or whichever, or do you wish? Well, my presidency was about building bridges. I'd come from the north.

We were in the throes of getting the Good Friday Agreement sorted and getting a new dispensation for the North. I felt my job now here is to take the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement and indeed the Strand three part of the Good Friday Agreement. So between the Irish and the British. And also the cross-border. because the agreement was about people inside Northern Ireland, across border and then east-west relationship.

And across those three strands, I wanted to do what I could to drive forward the spirit. So building bridges was my theme, and we worked very hard, very assiduously at that. And long before I became president, I had met Her Majesty the Queen and had learnt from her that when I was actually a pro-vice chancellor here, I met her in the context of our big anniversary of our university.

And I had discussed with her that her great ambition to come to the Republic of Ireland. And I'd said to her, not quite a throwaway line. I meant it that if it was anything ever we could do to make that happen. I'd make sure I'd work essentially to make it happen. So when I went into office, I did, along with a lot of other people besides. So bringing her to the Republic for those four days, bearing in mind that some people were so security worried that they just wanted her to come in for half a day, get a cup of tea and get her gone. And, you know, and I said, actually, you can't call that a state visit. That's a flying visit. not the same thing. And if we do that, we still have to have a state visit. No, we're going to

do this right. Because I think she's going to come as a pilgrim. She's not going to come as a tourist. She's going to come as a pilgrim. And I knew that. I talked to talk to her so many times about it. And she and I had pretty much the same kind of religious sensibilities. And we both believe very firmly in the power of love. You're trying to tell me the Queen was a Catholic. No, not at all. But she was a very good Christian woman. She was a woman of deep Christian sensibilities. So she and I shared those. And so I knew that I knew for her that this was a pilgrimage. And I trusted her implicitly.

And thankfully she trusted me. So we set up a back channel for, you know, and the things that went into that visit that we were told could never go into it like her speaking Irish or going to Crowe Park or going to the Garden of Remembrance. She did them all with a heart and a half. She was wonderful. Superb. Was that a high point of your presidency?

Funnily enough, it was a great memory. Absolutely a high point. It was a high point in terms of the building bridges. Undoubtedly. If you're asking me for the best day of my life as president, it probably wasn't that. It was back in 2003 when we hosted the World Special Games Olympics. And in Croke Park, we had the opening of the games and we had young people with intellectual disabilities from all over the world. And honestly, I was up at that stage. And for one moment, I felt that I'd been beamed onto another planet because the mood was, it was sort of exuberance multiplied by a million. It was. It was. so beautiful and wonderful and that was special. But actually there was something of that too in the Queen's visit. It released a graciousness, a goodness, a happiness. And at the end of her visit, when she left, bearing in mind, she got more letters about that visit than she got about any state visit. So did I. I. I got loads of them. But one of them came from this 90-year-old woman

who started off saying that she was a Republican and she didn't like monarchs and she didn't like the monarch next door. And she didn't think I should have asked her, oh God, I read the letter and I thought, here we go. But then she said, I decided to watch it on television. And I watched it for four days. She said she wept for four days. She felt this history drain out of her to be replaced by something really healthy and good. And she said, when the Queen's flight took off from Cork Airport, she looked back on those four days and she said, this was choreographed by the angels. And I thought you should have seen the people who choreographed this deer. weren't angels, but you know God works in mysterious ways. But wasn't that wonderful? And I would

settle for that. So that was a wonderful relationship. It was a great high point because, you know, during Maggie Thatcher's time, we hadn't had a great relationship. And over the years, the relationship had been up and down. John Major, Blessam and Albert Reynolds had recalibrated the relationship brilliantly. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had worked on that assiduously. And now we were actually in a golden moment, really, where we really felt that. History was moving us in a direction where we were partners and friends, different but friends. And then came Brexit. And I could not believe Brexit.

There hadn't been a hint that the United Kingdom would even be remotely considering leaving the European Union, which for me is the greatest adventure and the greatest, the most noble adventure ever undertaken by humankind in the history of humankind. You know, that extraordinary phenomenon. France and Germany, the Allies and the Axis forces coming together after the great blood fest that was the Second World War, into this remarkable partnership for prosperity through collaboration, through cooperation, through collegiality. Remarkable. Phenomenal, I really bought into that.

I loved all that. And then suddenly we've Brexit. No green paper, no white paper, no preparation, just a bunch of shi. shibolets and suddenly, you know, and these ridiculous mad promises, and nobody mentions Northern Ireland and nobody mentions the Good Friday Agreement, with the noble exception, of course, of Tony Blair and John Major and Bertie Ahern, but also, of course, Theresa May, to whom I give huge credit. Well, the fact that she came here during the campaign.

She came here during the campaign. She saw the dangers. And then when she was Prime Minister, in order to avert those dangers, that deal that she came up with had a bus not been run over it by the deal. the UK, among others, that would have absolved us from these blessed years of arguing over a protocol. And what is more, we would have reverted to a situation that was so good here on the island of Ireland after we got the single European market in 1993 and the customs union. There was no need for a border.

Then the only border we had was a militarised border. Then the Good Friday Agreement and it gave us demilitarisation. So we had this huge normalisation on the island of Ireland, which was so healthy, built up good neighbourliness. We had the cross-border bodies under the Good Friday Agreement. We had the spirit of the agreement. And there was a wonderful, just a wonderful sense that we were now going to grow organically. So how do we go from that, can you visit? To Brexit.

To where we are. How did that happen in your view? Careless politics. The politics of populism. And really bad politics. from people, I mean, I have no, I'd say this publicly, I've said it before anyway. I have no respect for politicians who are populist and unprincipled and who are, you know, greedy poll climbers.

In the same way that I have no time for clerics who are greasy pole climbers. So you'd absolve Theresa May of that. Oh, that woman I admire. You'd absolve David Cameron? I like David Cameron, don't get me wrong. I do like him very much, but I think he, I think the calling of that referendum was just a big mistake. And Johnson? If he was going, if he was going to call it, have a two,

year, three-year period of green papers, white papers, discussions. I described it as like pulling a tooth with 10,000 roots. I also described it as a form of political necrotizing fasciitis. Which is what? Well, necrotizing fasciitis is a flesh-eating disease. And if you remember the amount of political time in Europe, in England and Ireland that was eaten up by the Brexit, the post-referendum discussions, you couldn't discuss anything else. And so for me, that's what it was. It was like a disease, a runaway disease. So how did you feel? And Boris, you asked me about... Don't call him Boris, Mary.

We don't call him Boris on this podcast. We call him Johnson. Mr. Johnson. I despaired. I disbared. I just despaired of him. And I despaired of Liz Truss. Their language of...

I heard in their language, the old language of disrespect for all things Irish. That kind of elitist, you know, upper class nastiness. We had lost all that. It was gone. It had evaporated. We weren't the colonised any longer.

You know, we were the next door neighbours, free and independent. But what we heard in Boris and what we heard in Liz is, oh my God, it's back to the empire. It's back to the colonies. They're treating us like, you know, we're the servants around here. It's appalling. It was just the worst period. But anyway, thankfully, I have to say, in fairness to Rishi Sunak, the effort that he has put in since becoming prime minister to redressing that and indeed dealing with the protocol

and coming up with the help of the European Union who've given acres of space to this. I mean, it really didn't, I wonder, didn't merit all of this space, quite frankly, but it was given willingly in order to help Northern Ireland blossom and the Good Friday Agreement come again into its own because that's what the people want. I mean, you look at the, I look at the referendum still.

For me, funnily enough, it isn't the Good Friday Day, which was a great day, but the best day was the 22nd of June. when the twin referenda were held north and south and we knew with absolute moral certainty that almost everybody you met on the street thought the same thing about the peace and was prepared to compromise

they might have a different political ambition but they didn't want anybody dying over it and they were not going to kill people over it and they wanted to embrace each other in a compromise that was the best ever Mary I could talk you all day you could definitely talk all day That is, that is for sure.

As my mother says. Honestly, it was absolute joy. I've enjoyed talking to you. It's been great. And thank you for what you do for mental health also. Because, you know, it's the hidden one, isn't it? Yeah. Mary, thanks a lot.

We'll see you soon. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.