'Mary Patricia McAleese' (
[1]; born
27 June,
1951) is the eighth, and current,
President of Ireland. She is Ireland's second
female president and the world's first woman president to succeed another. She was first elected president in 1997 and was re-elected, without contest, to another seven year term in 2004. Born in
Belfast in
Northern Ireland, prior to becoming president she was a
barrister,
journalist and
academic.
Background
McAleese was born 'Mary Patricia Leneghan' () in
Ardoyne,
Belfast where she grew up. Her family was forced to leave the area by
loyalists when the
Troubles broke out. She was educated at
St. Dominic's High School, the
Queen's University of Belfast (from which she graduated in 1973), and
Trinity College in
Dublin. She was called to the
Northern Ireland Bar in 1974 and is today also a member of the Bar in the
Republic of Ireland. In 1975 she was appointed Reid Professor of
Criminal Law,
Criminology and
Penology in Trinity College, succeeding
Mary Robinson (a succession that would repeat itself twenty years later, when McAleese assumed the presidency).
During the same decade she acted as legal advisor to, and a founding member of, the
Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, but she left this position in 1979 to join
RTÉ (the Republic of Ireland's national television service) as a journalist and presenter, during one period as a reporter and presenter for their 'Today Tonight' programme. In 1976 she married Martin McAleese. In 1981 she returned to the Reid Professorship, but continued to work part-time for RTÉ for a further four years. In 1987 she returned to Queen's University to become Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In the same year she stood, unsuccessfully, as a
Fianna Fáil candidate in the
general election.
McAleese was a member of the
Catholic Church Episcopal Delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984 and a member of the
Catholic Church delegation to the
North Commission on Contentious Parades in 1996. She was also a delegate to the 1995
White House Conference on Trade and Investment in Ireland and to the subsequent Pittsburgh Conference in 1996. In 1994, she became the
Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Queen's University of Belfast, the first woman and second Catholic to hold the position. Prior to becoming president in 1997 McAleese had also held the following positions:
★ Director of
Channel 4 Television.
★ Director,
Northern Ireland Electricity.
★ Director,
Royal Group of Hospitals Trust.
★ Founder member of the
Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas.
Presidency
Irish President Mary McAleese
In 1997 McAleese defeated former
Taoiseach Albert Reynolds in an internal, party election held to determine the
Fianna Fáil nomination for the Irish presidency. Many commentators criticised Fianna Fáil's decision to nominate McAleese, claiming the election of a Belfast Catholic would harm relations with
Britain. In 1990 the right wing journalist and commentator
Eoghan Harris referred to her as a "tribal time bomb".
[1]
Her opponents in the
1997 presidential election were
Mary Banotti of
Fine Gael,
Adi Roche (the
Labour candidate) and two independents:
Dana Rosemary Scallon and
Derek Nally.
She won the seat for presidency with 45.2% of first preference votes. In the second and final count against Banotti, she won 58.7% of preferences. On
11 November,
1997, she was inaugurated as the eighth President of Ireland, the first time in history that a woman had succeeded another woman as an elected
head of state anywhere in the world.
McAleese's initial seven year term of office ended in November 2004, but she announced on
14 September of that year that she would be standing for a second term in the
2004 presidential election. Following the failure of any other candidate to secure the necessary support for a nomination, the incumbent president stood unopposed, with no political party affiliation, and was declared elected on
1 October. She was officially re-inaugurated at the commencement of her second seven year term on
11 November. McAleese's very high job approval ratings were widely seen as the reason for her re-election, with no opposition party willing to bear the cost (financial or political) of competing in an election that would prove very difficult to win.
[2]
McAleese has said that the theme of her presidency is "building bridges". The first individual born in
Northern Ireland to become President of Ireland, President McAleese is a regular visitor to Northern Ireland, where she has been on the whole warmly welcomed by both communities, confounding the critics who had believed she would be a divisive figure. However, she is still viewed with suspicion by a large number of
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) supporters, and a considerable number of
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) supporters. She is also an admirer of
Queen Elizabeth II, whom she came to know when she was Pro-Vice Chancellor of Queen's. It is said to be one of her major personal ambitions to host the first ever visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British head of state. In March 1998, McAleese announced that she would officially celebrate the
Twelfth of July as well as
Saint Patrick's Day, recognising the day's importance among
Ulster Protestants. She also incurred some criticism from the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy by taking communion in an Anglican (Church of Ireland) Cathedral in Dublin.
On
27 January 2005, following her attendance at the ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz concentration camp, she caused controversy by making reference to the way in which some Protestant children in Northern Ireland had been brought up to hate Catholics just as German children were encouraged to hate
Jews under the
Nazis [3],
[4]. These remarks caused outrage among unionist politicians. McAleese later apologised
[5], conceding that, because she had criticised only the sectarianism found on one side of the community, her words had been unbalanced.
On
22 May 2005, she was the
Commencement Speaker at
Villanova University in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania,
U.S.. The visit prompted protests by conservatives due to the President's liberal views on homosexuality and women priests.
[2] She was the commencement speaker at the
University of Notre Dame on
May 21,
2006. In her commencement address, among other topics, she spoke of her pride at Notre Dame's Irish heritage, including the nickname the "Fighting Irish".
Since
November 19,
2005, she is the longest-serving current
female elected Head of State following the retirement of
Chandrika Kumaratunga of
Sri Lanka.
On
May 3,
2007, she was awarded the
The American Ireland Fund Humanitarian Award.
On
June 3 2007 she attended the canonization in Rome of
Saint Charles of Mount Argus, her fifth visit to the
Vatican in two years.
Council of State
Meetings
Presidential appointees
'First term'
★
Gordon Brett
★
Brian Crowley, MEP
★
Ruth Curtis
★
Christina Carney Flynn
★
Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy
★
Martin Naughton
★
Noel Stewart
'Second term'
★
Colonel Harvey Bicker
★
Anastasia Crickley
★ Mary Davis
★
Senator Martin Mansergh
★
Enda Marren
★
Prof. Denis Moloney
★
Daráine Mulvihill
External links
★
Official biography
★
BBC Extended interview with President McAleese (audio) (interview of 2/3/2003)
★
AIF Humanitarian Award speech
References
1. President detonates the tribal time-bomb
2. "President would defeat Higgins, poll shows". February, 2004 article from ''The Irish Times''
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4214263.stm
4. http://www.breakingnews.ie/2005/01/27/story186673.html
5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4217545.stm
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