YouSaid · the spoken record

Mary McAleese

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68
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2023-06-05
most recent
2023-06-05
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1
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  1. “Of education, discussion. In Ireland we are a people who talk And interestingly, we talk intergenerationally. You have to, you know, because you're in the house with your granny and your mummy. And out of that came a complete change of view. Thank God people can change their views. And if ever there was an example of that, the profundity of that as a reality of the human condition, the capacity to change, Ireland is it.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yes, and who has moved? The people of God have moved. These are people who are very often still going to mass or are still connected to God and to spirituality in some shape or form. A lot of them, I admit, very turned off by the church because of misogyny, homophobia, and of course the big scandal. And of course the first scandal was the scandal in relation to what we call the humane vitae, which outlawed the use of artificial contraception against the advice of Catholic theologians and Catholic doctors. And that was at the time when we had the beginnings of the massification of second level education, the confidence that comes from education, and importantly, the critiquing skills that come from education. Before that, you had a population who sat in the pews and were told what to think. Now that was not just reversed, but really there was a ton of”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, if they are, God help them. Because Cardinal Connell, he took out, he went mad and said terrible things. And he also then said, of course, that the Church of Ireland communion, the Protestant or Anglican communion, as it might otherwise be known, was a sham. A sham, really. Are people who are worshipping the same God he believes in, who go to church in the same way that he does. And somehow because they give me communion, offer me their Eucharistic hospitality that I'm engaging in a sham. So anyway, there was a fierce rry over that altogether”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And you see, God is sitting up there in heaven, you know, and he's watching very carefully who goes into Protestant churches, who goes into Catholic churches. And if a Catholic president went into a Protestant church having promised to be a president for everybody and to respect everybody and to respect all faiths and none, and having been invited by my Protestant neighbours to this service and offered their communion hospitality, he absolutely, apparently God did not like the fact that I took communion”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Oh, yes, well. I had a dreadful ride with Cardinal Connell. We remained friends funnily enough, but we had terrible rows because shortly after I became president, I took communion in a Protestant church.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “You argue in canon law with me now. Oh, is that the law? Is that the law? Up to 40. That was the thing that up to 40, you know, you were an object of suspicion after 40, really. You were pretty much dead. What was the life expectancy? You were losing your teeth in your looks, you know. What was life?”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Other cried, and where did Christ say that? Now, where exactly was that? So, all of that, do you know, are you sorry now you asked about canon law? So things like priests were to avoid women because we were Objects of suspicion. Now here's the bad news. I mean, I'm 72 years old and this is real killer. Once you get to 40, you're no longer an object of suspicion.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “No, it does not, absolutely does not. So the Catholic Church developed a system of laws. Essentially, it started out as ways of solving problems. I mean, the church founded by Christ wasn't five minutes old when the apostles and disciples were fighting as if they all lived in Northern Ireland all their lives. And it took somebody to solve the problems. And as every problem was solved with an answer, each of those answers essentially became a law. And then they started to aggregate, you know, and suddenly there were bunches of them. And then they put them together in canons. And then eventually after 2,000 years in 1917, they codified them. And that was hilarious because when they codified them, they realized, what a lot of bologna was in there. Swathes and swathes of laws about what color of a band was worn by certain types of monsignors, green for this crowd and pink for this crowd and purple for the”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You see, there you go. Exactly. That's a really good question. Well, canon law is the legal architecture of the Catholic Church built up over 2,000 years. And it was because the Catholic Church was a universal church, hugely influential throughout the world. And indeed, is the only faith system in the world to have permanent representative status at the United Nations? Now for”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Not really, no, no. You can't call me Mrs. Cannon lawyer. It doesn't sound right. But I did make it my business precisely because I'm a scholar. I'm an academic. That's what I've always been all my life. I'm an academic. But in civil law. So I decided, when I lived in Northern Ireland, I lived in a hugely dysfunctional society in which religion was a deeply, deeply embedded perspective. And it was a Christian religion in which Christians hated each other, basically, fundamentally.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And what was missed, and it may very well have been missed for political reasons. Was canon law? Because, of course, it's the connection.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's orphanages its leprous area, all of which are wonderful institutions. They also have a dark side. We know the dark side in terms of clerical child sex abuse. We know the dark side in terms of the appalling use of corporal punishment in institutional care. We know all that. But what we don't really know is the more ephemeral, the stuff that we can't, if you like, set a commission to measure. And that is the embedded attitudes that go from generation to generation that outcrop in law. Just where we're sitting right now, if I look across the street from where we are, that's where I was educated as a lawyer in the law school here at Queen's University. And we had, in our first year, we learnt Roman law, which was fine most interesting. And then we went straight from Roman law to the common law.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Fundamentally, that is for me what it is. But let's part that just for the moment because let's park God for the moment and let's talk about this extraordinary structure built up over centuries which is today the biggest NGO in the world. There is nothing to equal the Catholic Church in the world in terms of its NGO status. It has 200,000 schools. It educates some 70, 80 million children. It is a huge key influencer of attitudes and laws and that's the important thing. Laws for bad. Good for good and bad across five continents and there is good in it but there is also bad in it and part of the bad is if you like the breaking mechanism that it is for women right across those five continents because the attitudes that it takes with it across those five continents into its schools into its welfare system into”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Because I'm darned if I leave it and be allowed then to be ignored. Oh no, no, no. I mean, one must say you stay because also I believe in fairness that it helps.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Utterly still the case. I mean, the Catholic Church is probably a classic example. It is not the only faith system, regrettably, in the world that has a culture of embedded misogyny. There is a tendency, I think, in the secular media. I would be as guilty of it as anyone else, to rather dismiss religion as passe. It's yesterday's world. Who bothers with religion? And to some extent, I think that is true. Young people are walking away from religious practice, precisely for those reasons because they find it a hostile world. Young women in particular. But the truth of the matter is, I mean, five out of seven people on our planet identify with some one of the world's major religions. You mentioned the Catholic Church to which I belong. It one in six people in the world are notionally Catholic.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “If you speak at all about the subject of women, women are strident. Men are articulate, but women are strident. And a thing that is often missed in the telling is we come from cultures in which are deeply, I mean, really deeply embedded attitudes about what is appropriate for men and what is appropriate for women.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Lives than the lives that were previously available to them, which were corralled into narrow, very often domestic spaces or low grade job service type spaces, where they were never expected to shine or certainly never expected to outshine men and certainly never expected to be out promoted in favour of men. So there's been a huge cultural shift in terms of women preparing themselves to have the skills, the qualifications. And I think not just the heft and the momentum, but the personal courage, because it does take personal courage in many ways to invent yourself as a woman who is going to areas of life, whether it doesn't matter what profession it is, because there are very few of them that were not dominated by men in some way or another. And part of the difficulty was, and I found it certainly becoming a barrister and then a law lecturer and then, you know, a president, people have this notion.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We're talking at a time when someone might come straight back at us and say, well, you know, you've been the president of Ireland. You know, you got to be a provice-chancellor of the university we're sitting in yesterday, a women in business conference in Belfast. I looked down and there was the head of the civil service, a young woman, the chief justice of Northern Ireland, a woman. I looked and I found Louise Richardson, an old friend of mine, who was the first woman vice-chancellor of Oxford. But actually, we can also say of each of them they were firsts, you know. And that itself is telling there is a generation coming through now, thankfully, with the Advent, particularly of Free Second Level Education, and the massification of third level education, which women have really taken advantage of. Women have seen education as the conduit to much more broadly opportunity.”

    2023-06-05 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 21: Mary McAleese: Building bridges as the President of Ireland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source