Mary McAleese’s extraordinary career has taken her from law studies in a troubled Belfast in the late 1960s, to lecturing and journalism in Dublin, on to a two-term presidency of Ireland and then to Rome to complete a doctorate in canon law. She is an intriguing, accomplished and decorated public figure. This memoir is suffused with her customary mixture of frankness and folksiness, a style she honed to great effect as president.

The book addresses many of the conquests and controversies associated with her journey, but there are also issues elided or omitted. And as she gazes back on her tender years, it does seem that some of her later awareness and causes have perhaps been transplanted back to those days. What is most striking about her account is how her life has been enveloped by an intense religiosity, a vital driving force, and central to the extensive range of contacts she amassed and used skilfully over six decades.

McAleese is the eldest of nine children. Her father Paddy was from Roscommon (from a family of “bare, subsistence farmers”) and her mother Claire was born in Derry with a father active in the IRA during the War of Independence. Mary was reared in Ardoyne among Protestants and experienced various changes of address; her father ended up managing the Long Bar on the Lower Falls Road.

She is keen to emphasise a happy childhood, “before the bubbling lava of sectarianism revealed its full volcanic fury”; open houses facilitating random and spontaneous visits, with holidays in Roscommon, daily masses, fraternities, sodalities and teenage angst about religion and politics before they were solved by a neighbourly priest who taught her to believe in “the power of God, prayer, goodness and love”.

She was heavily influenced by the Passionists of the Holy Cross Church and Monastery in Ardoyne, “the fulcrum of our lives”, though she decries the harshness of the Convent of Mercy primary school: “I detested the place and the unnecessary anxiety it inflicted on children”. While there is a barb about “the mercy (less) nuns”, religion outside of that seems to have been unquestioningly seen as overwhelmingly positive, notwithstanding “round the clock” sectarianism experienced during her secondary school years.

McAleese was admitted to the faculty of law in Queen’s University Belfast in August 1969 as the Troubles erupted and trauma came to the family, their house situated on the doorstep of a loyalist heartland, while “a government of bigots kept digging bigger holes”. Her mother initially sent the British soldiers “apple tarts and Victoria sponge” while her father, grand knight of the Belfast Council of the Knights of Columbanus, was heavily involved in peace efforts. Mary too worked with the Central Citizens Defence Committee. She “could not abide” the IRA, though it seems somewhat premature that at that point she saw John Hume as Daniel O’Connell’s successor.

The “ethnic cleansing of whole streets” during the pogroms had profound consequences and changed everything; the family’s “broken Ardoyne lives” are well captured; her profoundly deaf brother John was savagely assaulted and stabbed and her father’s pub bombed in October 1972. Loyalists attacked their house and it could have been worse but for the IRA: “that night they did save lives. Ours.”

A move to Rostrevor in Down was “a balm to addled minds and stressed out bodies”, but the traumatic legacies lingered and there was more pain: on the night in 1976 that she married Martin McAleese, an east Belfast Catholic, talented Antrim GAA star and accountant whom she had started dating in 1969, two of their close friends were killed by loyalists.

McAleese was one of three women to join the previously all-male Northern Ireland Bar; it was an uncomfortable time, even involving court dealings with previous assailants of her home. She was lucky to be appointed to the Reid Professorship of Law in Trinity in 1975, given that she had no teaching experience and relied initially on borrowed lecture notes. She greatly enjoyed Trinity and its inter-disciplinary collaborations, though she also detected what was to be another recurring theme: the “baleful ignorance of what was happening in Northern Ireland” and “almost dismissive distaste” towards conversations about it.

Fianna Fáil

A move to RTÉ in 1979 was part of a “restlessness to get to grips with the fullness of life in the south”, but her experiences with Today Tonight were spoiled by the poisonous atmosphere the Troubles had engendered there, the prevalence of Stickies whom she describes as “Marxist, quasi-unionist partitionists” and current affairs broadcasting that did not do justice to republican or moderate nationalist perspectives.

McAleese has harsh words for Today Tonight editor Joe Mulholland (“let wounds fester and was allowed to”) and the “deliberately personally oppressive” culture. She eventually resigned and returned to TCD, though she continued to do part-time work for RTÉ. She was expelled from the NUJ for double-jobbing, but it was clearly more than that given that other academics in broadcasting such as Brian Farrell were subjected to no such ignominy: “the other double-jobbers were not northern, female and Catholic”.

McAleese had every reason to feel aggrieved; she is also keen to present herself as devoid of any political agenda, but this is far-fetched; is it not extraordinary that she only gives one third of a sentence to her standing unsuccessfully as a general election candidate for Fianna Fáil in 1987? She also only mentions in passing that she appeared as a member of the Catholic Church’s delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984. And while we learn she has been “a voluntary adviser to the Episcopal conference on many occasions on a multiplicity of issues”, there is insufficient elaboration. What was the advice? Was it taken? She does, however, outline her involvement in the 1990s in pushing for mandatory reporting by church authorities of sexual abuse.

McAleese became director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies in Queen’s in 1987, and in 1995 that university’s first female pro vice-chancellor; much of the outreach work she did was on inter-church relations and she encountered many obstacles. She despised Fr Denis Faul (“cantankerous and caustic; at times sexist and offensively sectarian”) but was able to effectively use her great range of contacts; she was also, with Jim Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Irish News, drawn in to “sell” the Hume/Adams talks to “as many influential people as possible on the nationalist/republican side” and had regular meetings with them and Fr Alec Reid, the Redemptorist priest based in Clonard Monastery, to whom the book is dedicated.

McAleese does not criticise or praise moderately: John Hume was “not just a Prophet for our time but the Prophet”.

Bridge-building

McAleese was propelled in these efforts by her belief “that the commandment to love one another had a transcendent capacity to heal even the worst of toxic divisions”. She began “taking soundings” about the presidency, seeing it as a “quasi pastoral” role, and there is that sense throughout this book of McAleese as high priestess, personally and professionally, with boundless confidence, ambition and influential backers at a time when Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church still wielded so much power.

Her advocates bombarded taoiseach Bertie Ahern with recommendations. Again, she is quiet on her Fianna Fáil lineage, but she secured the party’s nomination remarkably easily.

McAleese turned out to be a very good president because she had a remarkable fixity of purpose when it came to the “bridge-building” theme. However, during the election campaign there were those who fervently wished her to stay on her side of the bridge, especially journalist Eoghan Harris, who she rightly describes as “gratuitously vitriolic” in his criticisms of her.

It is also true of her harshest critics that “there was little evidence that they had done much in the way of research about my career to date”. A leaked Department of Foreign Affairs memorandum “purporting to describe my political beliefs” did not, and the Redemptorists intervened to set the record straight.

The chapters on the presidency contain interesting and revealing material, especially about her husband Martin’s work in bringing loyalist paramilitaries in to the peace process fold. This toil was “full-time and pro-bono” and was undoubtedly important and successful, but the appropriateness of a presidential spouse engaging in such political work is not discussed. Showering lavish hospitality on hardened paramilitaries must have raised eyebrows; Martin even found himself filling out an Irish passport form for the UDA’s Jackie McDonald so he could visit the US.

Senior civil servants were also on board, with the need to get the UDA on permanent ceasefire deemed paramount. But McAleese’s criticism of the SDLP’s Margaret Ritchie for withdrawing funding from the Conflict Transformation Initiative until there was more tangible evidence of a loyalist commitment to peace is unwarranted, as was Martin’s attempt to prevent Ritchie doing it. After all, as Mary admits, “some within loyalism wanted to have their cake and eat it”. They certainly got their fill of cake and more.

In the meantime, McAleese continued her run-ins with cranky old Catholic men, be it rowing with Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston or chastising Pope John Paul II for asking Martin, “Would you prefer to be the president of Ireland rather than married to the president?” But it was still such a “privilege” to meet him, even though her meetings at the Vatican revealed “a hard, political power mongering side of the church’s top management structure”, a reminder that McAleese sometimes seems to be covering too many bases. Nonetheless, she does not hold back on Cardinal Desmond Connell criticising her for taking Communion in Christ Church Cathedral: “that condescending metaphysician and inept pastor”.

Five words of Irish

The process of getting Queen Elizabeth II to visit Ireland in 2011 makes for interesting reading; this was the icing on the peace process cake, though McAleese makes rather too much of the queen speaking five words of Irish in Dublin Castle, which McAleese had written phonetically and passed on through an intermediary. Prior to the visit McAleese also met Gerry Adams privately to get him on board for the royal visit, to no avail.

At times throughout the book, McAleese has a tendency to give far too much trivial detail (Ikea throws, lemon posset recipes, the quest “to find two-inch long knitting needles”). She is also drawn towards exaggerated prose (“my father sold the best meat pies in the history of pub meat pies”) and syrupy declarations, describing her husband as “physicist, accountant, dentist, senator, university chancellor, befriender of paramilitaries and amazing granddad… and he brought me breakfast in bed this morning”.

To my eye, these suggest a need to remind us how well she and he have done. But I suspect that is also born of defensiveness, an acute sense of what had to be overcome and a recognition that there has always been and remains considerable ignorance south of the Border about the experience of the Troubles.

After the presidency, McAleese went to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome to study Canon law; these chapters might have worked better as a postscript, as there are too many lengthy descriptions of meals, classes and social life. Once more there were run-ins with the Catholic bad boys, including the Legionaries of Christ; she informed them “how ashamed I was of my church’s attitude to gay people, women, collegiality and human reproduction”. Again, you can’t help wonder why she has stayed with such a church. She successfully defended her doctorate; Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin attended the viva.

Mary McAleese, it seems, is both Catholic Church insider and outsider, but the book’s narrative is much more about the outsider. A fascinating story and well worth the read, but not, I suspect, the full story.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD and an Irish Times columnist. His book The Border is published by Profile Books