To mark a decade in office, President Mary McAleese tells Kathy Sheridanabout family life in the Á ras, and how her own personal experiences have shaped the way in which she has approached the job
At a 10-year distance, the hysteria seems comical. A couple of days before her state visit to New Zealand, sitting in the state drawing-room of Áras an Uachtaráin on the kind of gilded Louis XIV furniture that discourages slouching, opposite a poised, straight-talking yet guarded woman once condemned as a "tribal time bomb", 1997 seems like a distant epoch.
Back then, the Eoghan Harris fickle finger of fate had landed approvingly on the only male of the five presidential candidates. Derek Nally, he asserted, could be relied upon to purge any hint of nationalism and to return the role to a "traditional" presidency. And he wouldn't be into that "huggy-wuggy, clap-happy stuff". By contrast, the Fianna Fáil-nominated, Northern nationalist was "dangerous", "a tribal time bomb".
Thus it was that the gentlemanly Nally, parroting the words of his short-lived adviser, John Caden, found himself accusing Mary McAleese of working "to a different moral agenda than most people in the Republic".
It was open season.
Department of Foreign Affairs memos were leaked, intended to damage her.
Politicians declared that she was soft on Sinn Féin/IRA. Media commentators were wary of her links with the bishops. Worse, they suspected lèse-majesté. Did this folksy, informal, voluble, devoutly Catholic, Fianna Fáiler, "how-about-ye?" Northerner seriously aspire to being Mary Robinson's natural successor? The resulting babel, combined with a distinctly edgy relationship with the media, culminating in the infamous dust-up between her FF henchmen and journalists in a Galway hotel, hoisted her from virtual anonymity to national figure in weeks.
All grist to the mill of her gleeful FF strategists, of course, whose purpose was to keep her on the front pages while harvesting the sympathy vote.
But what was it like to be the target? "It was kinda heartbreaking," she says, after an uncharacteristic pause.
What makes it almost comical now is that within a month of her election, she had scattered the bishops and baffled her critics by openly taking communion in a Protestant cathedral.
Eight years in, when she blurted that Northern Ireland Protestants had taught their children to view Catholics with the same "irrational hatred" that Nazis had taught their young to view Jews, the first to defend her in the ensuing eruption was UDA "brigadier" Jackie McDonald, one of the most powerful loyalists in the North. "No matter what she said or whatever way it was taken, it wasn't meant that way," said McDonald unequivocally.
Ten years in, more than 13,000 members of the Northern loyalist/unionist community have tip-toed warily into the McAleese Áras and emerged smiling.
YOU SEE, BOTH she and Martin always knew what they were doing, she says evenly. They had grown up in Protestant communities in flashpoint areas of Belfast (unlike her armchair critics, she doesn't add). "That was our hinterland, that's the area that we know really well . . . The thinking, experiential landscape. [ Which involved being machine-gunned out of her home by loyalists as a girl and seeing her profoundly deaf brother almost beaten to death in a sectarian attack.] That is our landscape, always has been . . . I think that knowledge of that hinterland made us very sure-footed."
Their once- or twice-monthly dinners and routine "Northern Ireland" lunches have played a central role. As one Southern guest put it, only half-jokingly, "basically, it's to show them that we don't eat our babies down here".
First, each guest is personally phoned by Martin. "That's very important to us," says the President, "that people coming - some of whom will be travelling south of the Border, to Éire, as they'd call it, for the first time in their lives and probably never thought that if they ever came South, that it would be to this house - will feel they already know someone in this house." That's after they've recovered from the shock of a call from the Éire President's husband. Most think it's a wind-up. "A lot of the time people say, 'ah Jimmy or Willie, will you stop it, you're always doing that . . .'."
At dinner, where she urges guests to "be nosy" about their fellow diners, Martin, too, hosts a table in what has evolved into a two-for-the-price-of-one presidency. After spending three years winding down his orthodontics patient list, he has worked "wholeheartedly" for the presidency, she says. "That's how he's able to make the phone calls to the people, how he's able to go up North as he is today, talking to loyalist groups, trying to encourage them along the path of dialogue . . . and he's very good at that."
In 2005, following the "Nazi" clanger, an editorial in The Irish Times duly took her to task, but concluded that President Mary McAleese had "done more, in fact, to bridge the North-South divide with concrete contact than her illustrious predecessor".
The downside is that, to many, she seems incapable of discussing anything without reference to the North. But we had been warned; it was her priority in her inaugural speech. The second was to take a firmer role in promoting industrial Ireland.
SHE BECAME THE first Irish president to head up business delegations abroad. "I just see ourselves as part of Ireland Inc. I'm the lead ambassador for the country . . . and business people are as entitled as anybody else to have that ambassadorship working at their backs." Was this how she planned to differentiate herself from the Robinson presidency? The question clearly stings.
"I never, ever did that. I never, ever consciously did that. I think that would have been the road to nowhere. I'm a different person. I've lived through different times. It's been a different Ireland - and that's the President I've been. I haven't tried to model myself on anyone. I haven't tried to differentiate myself from anyone . . . There were certain similarities with Mary Robinson; we had both been lawyers, both academics, both worked in a university.
"I had a completely different job profile. I had been a vice chancellor of a university, I'd had very extensive people management experience, I'd had very extensive business experience. I had been a director of two major and very successful companies. I had been a director of Channel 4 Television through very, very heady times, I had been a director of Northern Ireland Electricity; one of the reasons I had also been put on the board was to help the process towards privatisation. So I had that experience as well.
"I'd also come from Northern Ireland, I'd had that experience, and I had the experience of living in a very, very divided community at one of the worst interfaces of that divided community. So I was always going to bring a completely different perspective. There was no point in doing an imitative perspective, that wouldn't have been my style."
Despite that experience, she occupies a role that forever teeters on the edge of collapse into the "huggy-wuggy, clap-happy stuff" of Senator Harris's nightmares. But visiting groups and individuals - such as relatives bereaved by suicide - who have listened to her practical, soothing eloquence in the Áras attest to being touched and consoled.
Her approach to big social issues has been to seek and sound out people whom she regards as "really sound" on the subjects: Tony Bates on suicide; former UDR colonel Harvey Bicker on the North; Statia Crickley and Sister Stan on immigration and the marginalised; Roscommon builder Shane Malone on construction and Polish workers. She has no kitchen cabinet, she stresses, and has had no special adviser since Eileen Gleeson left that post at the end of the first term of office.
"I don't believe in that and I don't believe that's what I was elected to have either. I have what the Constitution bequeathed me, which is the Council of State. Seven years in, I appointed Harvey to the Council of State. That's the only official recognition . . ." As well as her sounding boards, she invariably brings her own folksy wisdom and keen observation to bear on social problems.
Criticised for suggesting that isolated old men should be "nagged" and "pestered" to get out of the house, she responds as she often does, by culling from personal experience: "I think, for example, of my own youngest daughter [ SaraMai, aged 12 when she left Rostrevor for the Áras] who was so miserable, so unhappy when she first came here, at having lost all her friends, her school and her grandparents left behind all the way in far off, nine-million-miles-away Rostrevor. I pestered her and pestered her to get involved with something and eventually, when she still wouldn't do it - the other two had gone off and were rowing - I literally dragged her down to the River Liffey and was very fortunate to meet the coach that subsequently she relied so much on, and I said to him 'could you do something with her please?' - which he did . . . She herself would tell me now that that was a turning point . . . I just think there is something in us that needs just that wee bit of reassurance that we matter enough that someone keeps coming back."
SHE HAS SPOKEN out about the dark side of the boom, the alcohol, the drugs, the drug dealers - "the criminal entrepreneurs who are working in direct parallel with our legitimate entrepreneurs . . .", and some wonder why she bothers.
What she would do if she had a magic wand? "I'd inculcate people with a deep personal sense of responsibility." Well, yes, but how do you do that? She stops, shrugs, laughs: "I haven't a baldy clue."
But she hopes that "through a process of debate, discussion, education, that we do with it what we've done with so many other things . . . that we provoke the change of heart that has manifestly happened in Northern Ireland . . . Things don't stay the same. People do respond to challenge." Is she concerned that we have grown a business culture of grasping dishonesty? "God, I don't think so. I think our business ethic is good." What about ethics in public life? "I don't think it's for me to comment on matters that are currently before tribunals. But I believe in public life, I believe when you are being paid out of the public purse to provide an ambassadorship for your country and provide a public service, that people are entitled to expect the highest of public ethics; the highest [ pause for emphasis], private [ pause] and public [ pause] ethics. It's as simple as that."
Is there a danger that the Irish presidency has become a tad feminised, that little Irish boys are growing to believe that only a womamay apply? "Well, you know, I don't get too worried about that. We've had eight presidents, right? Two have been women," she says with a raised eyebrow. "It's not exactly time for hysteria just yet."
There is no pandering to any lobby, only the furnace of her own experience and the fiercely-held belief that what is happening in colleges and workplaces is the process of old injustices being corrected.
"What it means is that we are actually in serious danger of actually using our talent base well for the first time in our history . . . It's only 100 years ago that the provost of Trinity College said that over his dead body would women get through the door of the college - and he was absolutely right, because the minute he died, in they came, and they are coming in increasingly large numbers to the point where today, there are very few girls growing up where they're going to hear in Ireland what I heard, when at 14 or 15, I said I wanted to be a lawyer - and the parish priest saying to me straight off the bat, those awful words 'You can't, because you're a woman'."
Her own two girls and boy - Emma (25) and the 22-year-old twins, Justin and SaraMai - are all high achievers. Emma studied electrical engingeering at UCD, and went to work for the ESB before she "apostasised", in the words of her mother, and is now studying dentistry - "just like her Dad" - in Trinity. Justin has just finished his Masters in the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and is a trainee accountant in Dublin. SaraMai completed her Masters in biochemistry at Oxford and is now studying immunology in Maynooth. "And she is just so happy to be home," says her mother triumphantly.
There have been no Euan Blair moments (such as being found prostrate in Temple Bar), or at least none that we know of. "That was nothing that I did. That was something that the media did," she says. "They gave the children peace, they gave them space . . . and that has meant an awful lot to us. They've lived everyday lives, they've lived reasonably good lives, and it would have been awful for them to have felt that every single time they went through the door, that they would have had to look over their shoulders all the time."
HOW DOES SHE cope with being on public display? Both the hair and body are given a work-out every morning. "Every morning, I'm up at a quarter to seven and I do an hour either in the gym or around the house . . . I'm big into the running. Well, I don't call it running because Martin would really, really, really take me to task - what he does is run, what I do is jog, apparently," she says in the tone of a woman obliged to fight her corner against "three fitness fanatics" (Martin and daughters). "Then somebody comes to do the hair and I'm ready for the day. Yes, it's wonderful, although it's one small indulgence that I've always had because my mother and my brother [ and most of her mother's seven sisters] of course are hairdressers."
Her usually excellent health suffered a blip a few years ago when she suddenly lost weight and was briefly hospitalised for what was described as an infection. The problem was severe and recurring infected cellulitis over several months, according to a source.
She will be 60 when she steps down in four years' time, "still a relatively young person", as she says herself. Martin will probably do more of what he already does in his free time - organising old colleagues from the Dublin Dental Hospital to work on regular rotation in Kenya and working his dentistry skills in global disaster areas.
And will she be writing her memoirs, holed up on their 30-acre Roscommon farm? "Might do that. Don't know. That's a kind of a lurking possibility I suppose . . . I might, if God was good, have grandchildren maybe, though there's not a whole heap of sign of anything stirring in that direction yet . . . My mother's immediate reaction to our eldest doing a five-year dental course was 'well, goodbye to the grandchildren then' . . . I don't want to know what lies ahead. My mother always said, 'while you're planning, God's laughing' and I think there's an element of that in my thinking. And I like the mystery."