I MYSELF lived in an area . . known as Ardoyne", Mary McAleese once said. Itwas a classic macaleesism, compressing factual imperfection into a broader legalistic truth. The impression gained - and one that she has encouraged repeatedly - is that she is from that grim working-class ghetto oppressed by the tyranny of unionism and the British war-machine.
But she is not from Ardoyne. She lived some considerable distance away and, unlike Ardoyne people in their tiny tenement hovels, the Leneghans owned their own home - a substantial Victorian redbrick house. Their children went to grammar school, and Mary even played badminton, of all things. In the complex tapestry of class and religion and local loyalty in North Belfast, the Leneghans would certainly have cherished their distance from Ardoyne, and vice versa. But Mary McAleese did not lie. She said her home was "known as Ardoyne." Inaccurately known to, say, the press, but known all the same.
"We were quite poor in those years", she said of the time after her father's pub, The Long Bar, was damaged by a bomb "designed to kill him". But her family was not poor. Belfast publicans are resilient and shrewd, and Mr Leneghan was repeatedly able to invest in property. After the Leneghan home was wrecked by loyalists- without any intervention by the RUC, according to the standard legend, and knowing the RUC of the time, I well believe it - the Leneghans lived in Fruithill Park, a neatly prosperous West Belfast suburb. And the attack on The Long Bar was actually on its clientele, who were not the then non-existent "Workers' Party" described in this book, but the Official IRA command, for whom it was their officers' mess. In the sordid arithmetic of paramilitary tit-for-tat, one might say it was a legitimate target.
She once told of a rocket tailfin which had been found in her garden at Fruithill. Soldiers, she said, took it away but it blew up later, killing one and blinding the other. But apparently the incident described (in which both soldiers finally died, though this biography reports just one) occurred long before the Leneghans arrived in Fruithill. Still, it's a good story and havinggood stories to tell is pure Belfast.
But Mary McAleese is more than a spinner of yarns. She is authentically sui generis. In the mid-1980s when a professor of law at Trinity, she vigorously allied herself with the most unprincipled politician in the history of the state, Charles Haughey. Together they campaigned successfully to have a banon abortion added to the constitution and the ban on divorce retained; they opposed the Single European Act and the Anglo-Irish agreement. Today their wholly negative and, in his case, cynically destructive) triumphs lie in ruins, as does his reputation; yet she is President of Ireland. It is a quiteextraordinary achievement, and a testimony o her resilience, her astonishing determination and her charisma.
It has not been a primrose path, to be sure. Her career in RTE was ended byMcCarthyite anti-Catholic "liberals", and her politics have often been unnerving. I recall no criticisms of the IRA as withering as those of the RUC - Northern Ireland, she memorably said, was "an archetypal police state". What? Like the Third Reich or the USSR? Archetypal police states do not lose 300 officers killed by terrorists, and archetypal police states certainly do not permit trials for their alleged killers. Nor do I recall - and this biography does not record - any particular condemnation of the murders by the IRA of her fellow-lawyers: Willie Doyle, Edgar Graham and others. Admittedly, these apparent omissions might be more my failure of memory than of historical record. Moreover, when your husband has a dental practice in Crossmaglen, how outspoken can you practically be in your criticism of the IRA? On the other hand, did she as President really have to shake the hand of Bic McFarlane, the unrepentant butcher of the Bayardo Bar and the man charged in connection with a kidnap which concluded with the murders of a garda recruit and of Private Patrick Kelly, a serving soldier of the Army of which she now has the honour to be commander-in-chief?
The President co-operated in neither the preparation of this biography, nor - I hope - in its style, which is tabloid-breathless, with subordinate clauses and phrases promiscuously given the full status of sentencehood - "And to think she had nearly married somebody else. How different her life would have been", or "Now brutally her life had been upended. A life which had started with such promise". And there are errors which seem to be quite needless, since this biography ends with her election two years ago. It is, for example, Fionnuala 0 Connor, not O'Connor, Eilis McDermott not Ailish.
We all present imperfect credentials to this world, and Mary McAleese is no exception. But she has grown into the presidency, and her presence in the Aras has been an enormous reassurance to the republican community of the redemptive possibilities of democracy. Her politics proved to be no bar to her rising to the highest post in the land. Hers might well prove to be the most historically significant - and therefore the most welcome - election in the presidency's history.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist