Mary McAleese

Mary Patricia Leneghan was born on 27 June 1951 in Belfast, the eldest of nine children in a Catholic family ^[1]. She grew up in Ardoyne, a district of north Belfast that became one of the most bitterly contested areas of the city as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s. Her father ran a pub, and the family's daily life was shaped by the sectarian geography of the neighbourhood, where Catholic and Protestant streets sat side by side ^[2].

The violence of that period touched the Leneghan household directly. The family home was attacked, her deaf brother was badly beaten, and the family was eventually forced out of Ardoyne altogether, moving to Rostrevor in County Down ^[2]. McAleese has often spoken of these years as the experience that convinced her that reconciliation between the two traditions on the island was not an abstraction but an urgent practical need.

She was educated at St Dominic's High School on the Falls Road and went on to study law at Queen's University Belfast, graduating in 1973. She was called to the Northern Ireland Bar the following year ^[1]. For a young Catholic woman from Ardoyne, a legal career was itself a statement of ambition in a society where such paths had long been difficult to enter.

In 1975, at the age of twenty four, she was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin, succeeding Mary Robinson in the post ^[3]. The appointment brought her south of the border and into the intellectual life of the Republic. Anyone asking who was Mary McAleese before the presidency finds the answer in this period: a lawyer, broadcaster, and academic who moved comfortably between Belfast and Dublin at a time when few did.

She joined RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster, in 1979, working as a journalist and presenter on current affairs programmes including Frontline and Today Tonight ^[1]. Journalism sharpened her public profile, though her relationship with the newsroom was not always smooth, and she returned to Trinity College in the early 1980s before moving back to Belfast.

In 1987 she became director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen's University Belfast, and in 1994 she was appointed a pro vice chancellor of the university, the first woman to hold that rank there ^[3]. She also stood unsuccessfully as a Fianna Fáil candidate in the 1987 Dáil election in Dublin South East, an early sign of political ambition that would resurface a decade later. During these years she took part in church and community initiatives on reconciliation, including the Catholic Church delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984 ^[2].

In 1997 McAleese won the Fianna Fáil nomination for the presidency, defeating former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds in an internal contest that surprised many observers. She then won the election on 30 October 1997 with a decisive share of the vote, becoming the eighth President of Ireland ^[4]. Her inauguration made history twice over: she was the first president born in Northern Ireland, and her succession to Mary Robinson marked the first time in the world that one elected female head of state directly followed another ^[4].

She took as the theme of her presidency the phrase building bridges, and she pursued it methodically. She invited community groups, loyalist and republican alike, to Áras an Uachtaráin, hosted annual celebrations of the Twelfth of July for Northern Protestants, and travelled repeatedly across the border ^[2]. Among the most discussed Mary McAleese achievements was her steady, unglamorous work of contact and hospitality during the years when the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was being negotiated and then implemented.

Her decision in December 1997 to take communion in a Church of Ireland cathedral in Dublin drew criticism from some Catholic clergy, but it signalled her willingness to act on her ecumenical convictions ^[5]. In 2004 she was re elected without a contest, no other candidate having secured a nomination, and served a second seven year term ^[4].

The crowning moment of her presidency came in May 2011, when Queen Elizabeth II made the first state visit by a British monarch to independent Ireland. McAleese had worked toward the visit for years, and the images of the two heads of state laying wreaths together at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin were widely read as a closing chapter in a century of Anglo Irish estrangement ^[6]. She left office in November 2011 with approval ratings that remained remarkably high across her fourteen years.

In 1976 she married Martin McAleese, an accountant and later a dentist whom she had known since her teenage years in Belfast. The couple have three children, a son and twin daughters ^[1]. Martin McAleese became an active partner in the bridge building project of the presidency, quietly cultivating relationships with loyalist community leaders in Northern Ireland, work for which he was later nominated to Seanad Éireann in 2011.

McAleese is a practising Catholic whose faith has been central to her public identity, though she has never been an uncritical one. Throughout her career she has pressed the church on the role of women, on its treatment of gay people, and on clerical accountability ^[5]. Her son Justin is gay, a fact the family discussed publicly during the 2015 Irish marriage referendum, when both Mary and Martin McAleese campaigned for a yes vote ^[7].

After leaving Áras an Uachtaráin, McAleese turned to the formal study of canon law, the internal legal system of the Catholic Church. She earned a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and completed a doctorate in the subject at Dublin City University in 2018, with research on the rights of children in canon law ^[3].

Her relationship with the church hierarchy grew openly confrontational in these years. In 2018, after the Vatican refused her permission to speak at a conference inside its walls, she delivered a widely reported address in Rome describing the church as an empire of misogyny and calling for the admission of women to ministry ^[5]. She has also published books drawing on her research, including Children's Rights and Obligations in Canon Law: The Christening Contract, which appeared in 2019 ^[3].

Academic honours followed. In 2018 she was appointed to a chair at the University of Glasgow, and in 2019 she was elected Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, returning as titular head of the university where she had once been a young professor ^[8]. She has continued to write, lecture, and broadcast, and published a memoir, Here's the Story, in 2020 ^[1].

Any Mary McAleese biography has to reckon with the distance between the Belfast of her childhood and the Dublin of her presidency, and with how much of that distance she personally helped to close. Elected at a moment when the peace process was fragile, she used a largely ceremonial office to normalise contact between communities that had spent decades avoiding one another ^[2]. The 2011 royal visit, unthinkable a generation earlier, remains the most visible monument to that effort ^[6].

She also reshaped expectations of the Irish presidency itself. Following Mary Robinson, she confirmed that the office could be an active moral platform rather than a retirement post, and that women could dominate it: between them the two Marys held the presidency for twenty one consecutive years ^[4]. Among the plainest Mary McAleese facts is her longevity in public esteem, having twice been entrusted with the office and having left it with her standing intact.

Her later career as a canon lawyer and internal critic of the Catholic Church has given her a second public life, unusual for a former head of state. Whether pressing for women's ordination or defending the rights of children within church law, she has kept the habit formed in Ardoyne of arguing with institutions from the inside rather than walking away from them ^[5].