McAleese tells of her Communist ambitions at 13
‘I gave my mother the head staggers’
IF HER dream had come true, we would most likely never have seen her as president of Ireland.
Mary McAleese revealed in an intimate interview yesterday how she gave her mother the ‘head staggers’ when, as a 13-year- old girl in 1964, she said she wanted to join the Communist Party.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had just come through the Cuban missile crisis, his adversary, then JFK, had been slain and the world was still mourning his loss.
As the Cold War raged, young Mary Leneghan, as she was then, thought Communism was the future and her ambition to be part of it almost frightened the life out of her mother.
McAleese’s mother had the ‘head staggers’ when she found out her daughter had applied to the Communist Party of Britain and Ireland. Her foray into communism also spooked the head nun at St Dominic’s High School in west Belfast.
Her father had offered a job as a barman to a militant socialist named Pat, who made it his mission to teach the young Mary Spanish, socialism and the lyrics of The Internationale. She recalled: ‘He had fluent Spanish incidentally, but it was absolutely diabolical and delivered in a deadpan Belfast accent.
‘He was a big part of our lives growing up and as a result of his tutoring I put in an application, I think I was about 13, to join the Communist Party of Britain and Ireland. It caused an awful kerfuffle with the head nun in my school, but thankfully that application seems to have died a death.’
The 69- year-old former president also told Miriam O’Callaghan’s RTÉ Radio show yesterday that she believed her family’s experience with the Catholic Church had made them very sceptical.
She said her younger brother Clement did not confront the abuse he endured as a child from the headmaster of his school, Father Finnegan, until he was 50.
The cover-up of clerical child abuse by trusted bishops had made her mother’s generation very sceptical and she said it would be decades before that trust was restored.
She recalled an angry priest once arriving at her house during her mock A-Levels and berating her mother for having a hysterec
‘I still am committed to the Church’
tomy. Her mother had had the procedure to save her life as she was seriously ill, but Father Honorius said she was still of childbearing age, an expression that stuck with Mary.
She added, however: ‘I still am committed to the Church, I still regard myself as part of it, and have no plans to leave it, even though at times one could be sorely tempted because the management structure is so appallingly inefficient at the very best.’