YouSaid · the spoken record

Mary McAleese

lines on the record: 68
first: 2023-06-05
most recent: 2023-06-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Enjoyed talking to you. It's been great. And thank you for what you do for mental health also. Because it's the hidden one, isn't it?”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through with the help of the European Union, who've given acres of space to this. I mean, it really didn't, I wonder, didn't merit all of this space, quite frankly, but it was given willingly in order to help Northern Ireland blossom and the Good Friday Agreement come again into its own. Because that's what the people want. I mean, you look at the, I look at the referendum still. For me, funnily enough, it isn't the Good Friday Day, which was a great day, but the best day was the 22nd of June, when the Twin Referenda were held north and south, and we knew with absolute moral certainty that almost everybody you met on the street thought the same thing about the peace and was prepared to compromise. They might have a different political ambition, but they didn't want anybody dying over it, and they were not going to kill people over it, and they wanted to embrace each other in a compromise. That was the best ever.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mr. Johnson, I despaired. I despaired. I just despaired of him. And I despaired of Liz Truss, their language of, I heard in their language the old language of disrespect for all things Irish, that kind of elitist, you know, upper class, nastiness. We had lost all that. It was gone. It had evaporated. We weren't the colonized any longer. You know, we were the next door neighbors, free and independent. But what we heard in Boris and what we heard in Liz is, oh my God, it's back to the empire. It's back to the colonies. They're treating us like, you know, we're the servants around here. It's appalling. It was just the worst period. But anyway, thankfully, I have to say, in fairness to Rishi Sunak, the effort that he has put in since becoming Prime Minister to redressing that and indeed dealing with the protocol and coming up”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, necrotizin fasciitis is a fleshy thing disease. And if you remember the amount of political time in Europe, in England and Ireland that was eaten up by the Brexit, the post-referendum discussions, you couldn't discuss anything else. So for me, that's what it was. It was like a disease, a runaway disease.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If he was going to call it have a two year, three year period of green papers, white papers, discussions, I described it as like pulling a tooth with 10,000 roots. I also described it as a form of political necretizing fasciitis.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like David Cameron, don't get me wrong. I do like him like him very much, but I think the calling of that referendum was just a big mistake.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Careless politics. The politics of populism and bad, really bad politics from people. I mean, I have no, I'd say this publicly, I've said it before anyway. I have no respect for politicians who are populist and unprincipled and who are”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She came here during the campaign. She saw the dangers. And then when she was Prime Minister, in order to avert those dangers, that deal that she came up with had a bus not been run over it by the DUP, among others, that would have absolved us from these blessed years of arguing over a protocol. And what is more, we would have reverted to a situation that was so good here on the island of Ireland after we got the single European market in 1993 and the customs union. There was no need for a border. Then the only border we had was a militarized border. Then the Good Friday Agreement and it gave us demilitarization. So we had this huge normalization on the island of Ireland, which was so healthy, built up good neighbourliness. We had the cross-border bodies under the Good Friday Agreement. We had the spirit of the agreement. And there was a wonderful, just a wonderful”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Good Friday Agreement with the noble exception, of course, you know, of Tony Blair and John Major and Bertie Ahern, but also, of course, Theresa May, to whom I give huge credit.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could not believe Brexit. There hadn't been a hint that the United Kingdom would even be remotely considering leaving the European Union, which for me is the greatest adventure and the greatest, the most noble adventure ever undertaken by humankind in the history of humankind. You know, that extraordinary phenomenon. France and Germany, the allies and the Axis forces coming together after the great bloodfest that was the Second World War into this remarkable partnership for prosperity through collaboration, through cooperation, through collegiality. Remarkable, phenomenal. I really bought into that. I loved all that. And then suddenly we've Brexit. No Green Paper, no white paper, no preparation, just a bunch of shimalths, and suddenly, you know, and these ridiculous mad promises, and nobody mentions Northern Ireland, and nobody mentions”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She said she wept for four days. She felt this history drain out of her to be replaced by something really healthy and good. And she said, when the queen's flight took off from Cork Airport, she looked back on those four days and she said, this was choreographed by the angels. And I thought you should have seen the people who choreographed this deer. There weren't angels, but you know God works in mysterious ways. But wasn't that wonderful? And I would settle for that. So that was a wonderful relationship. It was a great high point. Because, you know, during Maggie Thatcher's time, we hadn't had a great relationship. And over the years, the relationship had been up and down. John Major, Bless him and Albert Reynolds had recalibrated the relationship brilliantly. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had worked on that assiduously. And now we were actually in a golden moment, really, where we really felt that history was moving us in a direction.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off saying that she was a Republican and she didn't like monarchs, and she didn't like the monarch next door, and she didn't think I should have asked her, oh God, I read the letter and I thought, here we go. But then she said, I decided to watch it on television. And I watched it for four days.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funnily enough, it was a great memory, absolutely a high point. It was a high point in terms of the building bridges, undoubtedly. If you're asking me for the best day of my life as president, it probably wasn't that. It was back in 2003 when we hosted the world special games Olympics. And in Croke Park, we had the opening of the games and we had young people with intellectual disabilities from all over the world. And honestly, I was up on that stage. And for one moment, I felt that I'd been beamed onto another planet because the mood was, it was sort of exuberance multiplied by a million. It was so beautiful and wonderful. And that was special. But actually there was something of that too on the Queen's visit. It released a graciousness, a goodness, a happiness. And at the end of her visit, when she left, bearing in mind she got more letters about that visit than she got about any state visit. So did I. I got loads of them. But one of them came from this 90-year-old woman who started...”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all, but she was a very good Christian woman. She was a woman of deep Christian sensibilities. So she and I shared those. And I knew for her that this was a pilgrimage. And I trusted her implicitly. And thankfully, she trusted me. So we had set up a back channel for, you know, and the things that went into that visit that we were told could never go into it like her speaking Irish or going to Croak Park or going to the Garden of Remembrance. She did them all with a heart and a half. She was wonderful. Superb.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That some people were so security worried that they just wanted her to come in for half a day, get a cup of tea, and get her gone. And, you know, and I said, actually, you can't call that a state visit. That's a flying visit. It's not the same thing. And if we do that, we still have to have a state visit. No, we're going to do this right. Because I think she's going to come as a pilgrim. She's not going to come as a tourist. She's going to come as a pilgrim. And I knew that. I talked to her so many times about it. And she and I had pretty much the same kind of religious sensibilities. And we both believe very firmly in the power of love.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“between the Irish and the British, and also the cross-border, because the agreement was about people inside Northern Ireland across border and then east-west relationship. And across those three strands, I wanted to do what I could to drive forward the spirit. So building bridges was my theme, and we worked very hard, very assiduously at that. And long before I became president, I have met Her Majesty the Queen and had learnt from her that when I was actually a pro-Vice-Chancellor here, I met her in the context of our big anniversary of our university. And I had discussed with her that her great ambition to come to the Republic of Ireland, and I'd said to her, not quite a throwaway line. I mean, I meant it, that if it was anything ever we could do to make that happen, I'd make sure I would work assiduously to make it happen. So when I went into office, I did, along with a lot of other people besides. So bringing her to the Republic for those four days, bearing in mind”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my presidency was about building bridges. I'd come from the north. We were in the throes of getting the Good Friday Agreement sorted and getting a new dispensation for the North. I felt my job now here is to take the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement and indeed the Strand 3 part of the Good Friday Agreement.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That her daddy had been killed in retaliation for the two O'Reilly brothers who were murdered on the morning of my wedding. So, you know, that brings you back to earth with a bump because that's the world we lived in, tit for tat, tit for tat. And nobody able to break out of the sectarian bunker. The only wounds that we felt were our wounds. We didn't feel their wounds. And I think my father probably felt too that like so many people here, there are people who are much worse off than”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there were so many other people deserving of sympathy. And we'd lost so many friends. I mean, the day I was married, two of our best friends were murdered the morning of my wedding, which kind of ruined the wedding, to put it mildly, awful. And here they are. And their family had terrible problems subsequently, those two men. One of them had, you know, he had seven children, seven small children when he died for nothing except that he was, you know, a Catholic bar owner. And then in retaliation for them, the IRA, this was loyalists, murdered them. And the next day the IRA go into a pub and kill a perfectly innocent Protestant man. And his daughter becomes a great friend of mine later. We both find ourselves in Florida, in Miami. We got talking politics because it was 12th of July and everybody was acting the idiot and banging drums and singing the songs that are associated with the 12th in great, good humor and together. And then I discovered.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think my father's a classic example of some kind of pride wouldn't let him talk about it. Not because he thought he'd be letting himself down or weakening himself, but rather that he thought people might think that he was looking for sympathy.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Utterly, utterly. Look at the suicide rates here, Alistair. We have had more people die by suicide here since the Good Friday Agreement than died from the troubles. The suicide rates here, I don't know if you've seen the stats, but the suicide rate here is through the roof. What does that tell us? Because the red line that shows you the graph of actual suicides underneath that, there's another graph of attempted suicides, of mental ill health, of untreated mental health problems. There's a whole swathe of that going on here. I know it. The people who take refuge in what we call cans, the canned culture, drink it away or drug it away, or just be lonely in it. I think that's one of the great tragedies of Northern Ireland that really has not been properly dealt with. There are wonderful organisations, great organisation, for example, like Wave Trauma that has tried to address that. But, you know, they're pushing them. They're pushing a mountain.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he did. He talked about it. And I said, did you ever think of yourself as a person who suffered from an illness that needed help maybe from a psychiatrist or psychologist? No. He said, I didn't. He said, there were too many other people around me who had suffered death and destruction and people who'd suffered physical injury. So who was I to say there was anything wrong with me? And I've often said Northern Ireland is a place of swathes of people like my father who are suffering from real, real depression, but don't say it because they believe that there is a hierarchy of victims. There's a hierarchy of illnesses and that we have a culture of stoicism that doesn't allow them to break through and say, oh, even today, even today.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't, we didn't even talk about it. Here's the thing we didn't talk about. Honestly, Alistair is disgraceful. We didn't talk about it. We hadn't the language. I was coming home one day from work here in Queens, and I lived in Restrevor, and I love to turn the car at the seafront in Warren Point and just say to the sea, take it all. I'll catch up with all my problems in the morning and the way back. But to the sea and the waves, take it now. Going home to face whatever we were facing. But as it happened that week, I was ill and I was in bed. And my dad came around as he did every day and he sat at the edge of the bed. And out of the blue, I said to him, Dad, could I take you back to that day of the explosion? And the day when our lives just seemed to change so catastrophically, could you tell me what went on in your head? And you know what he said to me? You're the first person ever asked me that. This was donkey shears later. I mean donkey shears later.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He came back to himself, and he tried his best. He did. Did At all. Not at all. You didn't do that then because he didn't.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to get, you know, because he was like a lot of people in Northern Ireland, he maximised the number of hours in the day when he could be insulted. He'd be listened maybe to Radio 4 or, you know, BBC Radio 1, Radio All Star. I don't even know what it existed then. So we never were able to find out what the broadcast was.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't even know what she said because she wasn't Prime Minister Alistair at the time. She was Minister for Education, I think.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm literally not speaking, not talking nothing, just sighing into the fire, going to bed, getting up in the morning, sighing like a whole day of sighing. And just awful. Anyway, I came home from university one day, came in through the back door, and my mother said to me, I'm not going to believe this. She said, your daddy, your daddy started to talk today. I said, huh? What did he say? What did he say? And he said, shut up to hell, y'all bet. What? He said that to you. He said, no, she didn't say he didn't say it to me. He said it's some woman on the radio called Margaret Thatcher. So we call it the miracle of Maggie Thatcher.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this man who went out that morning, you know, reasonably happy go lucky comes back not speaking anyway, fast forward.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely, no, utterly, utterly. And there was no name for it then. We didn't know about trauma or post-traumatic anything. But as well as that, we didn't have a home of our own then, you see. We'd lost our home and we were living in a house that had been condemned. It was owned by nuns who lent it to us. And we were now over in West Belfast and Andersonstown. And the house was a bit of a disaster, to put it mildly. The day we walked into it, there were 19 of the windows and it had been broken. And somebody had tried to set fire to it. There were reasons for that as we discovered subsequently the IRA had been using it as a place to hide weapons. We didn't know that then, obviously, but they didn't want us there either. Thank you very much. So the loyalists didn't want us. The IRA crowd didn't want us. And we were in the middle of this. And my mother is now coping with nine children.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unmarked, you see, there was no blood. My father grabbed her. And then when the first person on the scene, as it turned out, was an RTE, the national broadcaster in Ireland, a cameraman, a great old friend of mine, as it turned out later. He was first on the scene and he realized that my father did not know she was dead. And so my father, it was a very gregarious man, great storyteller, well, you know, full of fun. But that was the day his life changed really. When he came home, he was, we now know that he was suffering from a catatonic depression, which he suffered from for the next few years. He didn't speak for a couple of years. He was unable to talk. And funnily enough, I came home from university one day. My mother said, my father just sat all the time listening to a transistor radio. And there was no word, no words out of him at all. And it must have been very hard and my mother raising nine children, no money coming in.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Lease and Street, a very well known pub called The Long Bar. And they put a car bomb outside of it. And my father went out on, he got all his, because it was called a long bar because it ran across two streets. The car was left in the Leeson Street entrance. And my father got everybody out, the other entrance, Cypress Street. He got them all out. But he went back to check. And when he went back to check, he saw a young woman run across the road, a young girl, Olive McConnell. who thought her child was on the street. And because the hue and cry had gone up, that there was a car bomb. And she ran across the street. And unfortunately, my father thought she had tripped and fallen. But in fact, what had happened was the car bomb had exploded. My father mercifully was unharmed physically. But I'm told that it was the keys of the car had broken her neck. And so she looked”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had been friendly with some of our, I'm the oldest of nine children, so some of my brothers and sisters would have been friends with some of these people. Children are brothers or sisters. So then when that didn't work and they killed our neighbor, murdered our neighbour who ran the little sweet shop up the road. And we realized then, I realised then I was 18 then, 19. And I realized we're next. They're coming down the road for us. And anyway, they did. They came with machine guns and they emptied them through our windows. But luckily, because they were Protestants, they didn't know that we were out at mass. And my mother had us out at first mass. Thank you, God. And so, yes, they didn't kill anybody. But they tried. Like my sister, Nora's bed was like a colander. I've never been able to forget that. I still get horrible dreams about seeing this mattress with all these mad holes in it. Anyway, so we survive thanks, Peter God. But then my father had a pub just off the Falls Road place.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We lived in Ardenne, but we lived in a Protestant part of Ardoyne. We live right beside a loyalist estate. And there had been a campaign of intimidation against Catholics in that area. Very significant campaign. A lot of people were put out of their houses. And then the murders, the sectarian murders started. And then the tit for tat with the provisional IRA coming into the frame. And our house was attacked. And attacked several times, actually. Crowds came and broke up paving stones and pitched them through our windows. They attempted to kill my brother, who's profoundly deaf and almost succeeded in killing him, but thankfully not. Then these were all loyalist attacks now. And these were all by neighbours of ours, incidentally, known to us, known to us. And people whom we had been, some of them in some cases,”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a dentist there and in Bessbrook. And I had then come back with our children. We'd come back to live and strategically placed ourselves beside my mother for babysitting purposes in the magnificent village of Rostrevor in County Down. So I knew that I, you know, I know the north. Insofar as anybody knows the north, we all have our own narratives and our own experiences, but I had been a little bit involved in politics when I was here before when I was working here. I also was very much involved in church life and very much involved with Father Alec Reed and the Redemptorist Peace Ministry, which involved the talks between John Hume and Jerry Adams. And I had already, you know, also even the choice of becoming a lawyer was part and parcel of trying to get under the skin of this place and to understand what is it about the law and structure that is holding us back and that which have changed could help us to move forward.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did. And also, I had worked as a journalist. I had worked as a journalist for the national broadcaster, RTE in Dublin. I'd also been an academic lawyer. I was educated and grew up here. I worked here for a short time as a barrister. I knew this place intimately and then had come back to live in Northern Ireland in 87. My husband had trained as a dentist in Dublin but then had come to work along the border in a famous place called Cross McGlenn.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was part of, if you like, of the attraction that I knew the North. Bear in mind, this was 1997. And George Mitchell was now, you know, had gone very grey trying to bring the northern parties to the realization.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. Oh, my grandfather thought my father was mad to have married a northern woman, even though she was a Catholic, I mean she was really a quasi Protestant in his eyes because we lived among Protestants.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. But about two years before he died, my father had insisted on the electric going in, and we went down to see this great event happening, this great concession. I mean, George Mitchell has nothing on what my father trying to persuade my grandfather to get the electric. I toggled between the madness of Belfast and the awful sectarianism and the west of Ireland.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until the very end, when he got a single light bulb, there wasn't a lamp shade on it, and when we went down for the official turning on of the light, he already had six lightscapers attached to it, and he couldn't see your finger in front of you when we turned on the light”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my lord. So there you go. My poor grandmother had to suffer the indignity of all the neighbors getting their kettles and their cookers. And she, poor creather, was still using the open fire for cooking and for all of that.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We never did in our family. My grandfather had been in the IRA, had been in ADC to Devilera. But I think probably what marked me off from many of my colleagues and friends at the time was my father was from the west of Ireland and he was from Ruscommon in the west of Ireland where I now live. So I had another hinterland to draw from. And we would go there as soon as school closed. You got out of Northern Ireland. It was a pretty awful place to grow up in, let's face it. As a Catholic, it was a miserable place. The police force didn't represent us. The government didn't represent us. The judiciary didn't represent us. They all pretty much were down on us. The system was down on us. We were aware of that. So, you know, at every hand's turn, my father got us out of here. And my father came here for work because work was very scarce. He came here at 14 years of age with his first parent.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ardoin is very often described as a Catholic republican nationalist enclave. I grew up on the other side of the street. If you've ever driven up that road, the Kremlin Road, you will see that there's a huge wall, massive big wall. And that wall didn't exist in my day, but it might as well have because there was the wall in people's hearts and minds. But I grew up in the Protestant side, which meant that I'd only ever Protestant friends, apart from my school friends. So that was good, actually, because I also had a great understanding of where my Protestant friends were coming from, what they thought of politics, how they loved the Queen. In our house, you went through the front door and there was the picture of John XXIII and John F. Kennedy. I walked across the street and in through the door and there was the picture of Her Majesty the Queen. So I knew that. And I also knew that some of my neighbors had very strong connections to the British Army.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in Ardoin, one of the most deprived parishes areas in Northern Ireland. It is the area with the greatest incidence of sectarian killings bar none.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that still goes on. Unfortunately. And because, again, it's got to do with embedded practices. A lot of this stuff, particularly sexism and homophobia, has become what I would call privatized now. In the past, people could articulate it openly because they thought that it was perfectly okay to say it. Now we don't accept that language, but it still goes on in what I might call little hermetically sealed bubbles where people feel safe just in the same way that sectarianism did and was hot housed here in Northern Ireland in elitist groups. They wouldn't say the same thing outside those groups that they would say inside them. But the fact that it was said inside gave those toxic ideas legs.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, they've experienced it every which way, every which way they've experienced it, and because it's still in the ether, unfortunately. On the other hand, they live through times now where they know from the referendum in the republic that at least 66% of the people they meet on the streets are on their side. And that's a wonderful thing. That's a wonderful thing to walk down your street hand in hand with your partner knowing you're not going to be spat at our head. But we still, like every place has, the act of homophobic violence, the picking off of the low-hanging fruit, the young gay guy who's coming out of a bar on his own at night, you know, who's going to get kicked by some mother.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corollary of where we're going if we're talking about equality of citizenship. And how ridiculous it seemed at the time, both the best way of gauging that is that my mother did not bring me up to give out about what I'd said. Even right up to the campaign my mother would have been saying that she'd have to follow the church. Luckily, she didn't have a vote anyway. No, I also have her gay brother. And in fact, in fairness to my father and mother, when he announced that he was gay around the table some 40 years ago, my father said, are you gay son? My father, my brother said, yeah, I am. He said, that's grandson. Aren't you still our son? And what was it we're having for dessert? And that was it. It was over.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, no. Later, later, later. No, we were mates. David came to me in the law school one day looking for advice because at that time homosexual conduct was criminalized still in Ireland. So what were we going to do? So anyway, a bunch of us set up the campaign for homosexual law reform, went to the European Court of Justice, Mary Robinson. God bless her. She took that case pro bono. And we won in the European Court of Human Rights. And anyway, we won that case. And then thankfully, a woman minister for justice, Maura Gagan-Quinn. She changed the law. But way back in, I think about 1979 or 78, I was the first person on radio to suggest, in answer to a question from a journalist, that the campaign, you know, probably would end up with looking for the right to gay marriage. And this was regarded as a subject of great mirth. But I said, well, of course, I mean, that's a natural.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And so he told me about how he'd been excluded by his family. Like me, he was Catholic. And he told me about, you know, how oppressed he felt both in family terms. And his family had effectively thrown him out because they believed the church is teaching and they believed a lot of the ambient views about homosexuals that they were evil. So I remember coming back thinking, like this is a human rights issue. This is ludicrous. So at the first opportunity, when I came to work in Trinity College, one of the first friends I made was a very well-known gay senator, David Norris. David, nice”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought she was a happy person. So my crush on him was crushed. And I then, but he and I became great mates. And because I was fascinated. I'd never heard of this stuff before. And I was fascinated. And then I learned from him because in fairness there was a kind of an aura of sorrow and darkness that hung over him for all that he was a gay person in every way.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is wonderful. It's a sign of an advance. Yeah, absolutely wonderful. I got involved in campaigning for Ten years before my son was born. Some people think that I coached him to be gay from the day he was born. You will be gay. But I didn't, actually. But I didn't know what he was about seven, that he was gay. But I started campaigning for gay rights back in 1975. Why? Because I'd been, I knew nothing about, I was in this university, I never heard the word gay. I didn't know there were any gay people when I was at university. I thought everybody around me was heterosexual, but I didn't even kind of question that because just nobody talked about it. And then in 72 I went to America to work on a J1 visa in San Francisco. And my boss in the place that I was working in was the most gorgeous gay man and he was handsome as well as when he came in. And one of my colleagues took me aside and said, you know, don't be falling for him because he's gay. And I went. I know he's really nice. He's lovely. She said, no, no, no, no. What I mean is, because the word meant nothing to me.”
2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source