ACROSS THE DIVIDE
McAleese will not be daunted by scale of integration challenge Ex-President has led process with typical vigour
BUILDING BRIDGES was the theme that Mary McAleese adhered to with boundless faith in her two terms as President of Ireland.
It was a tidy encapsulation of her commitment to bringing people together, and most obviously the two communities in the broken society in which she grew up in the North.
By that measure, the business of bringing together three Gaelic sport bodies into one inclusive GAA is a minor challenge.
There is little comparison between the two jobs, no matter how deeply felt passions for football, hurling and camogie may be. In her presidency, McAleese addressed matters that were all too often about life and death.
Yet it seems clear that McAleese will have to draw on at least some of what she learned in her Presidency, and throughout her long and distinguished career outside Áras an Uachtaráin, if she is to navigate the path to full integration by 2027, as outlined in this week’s timeline towards that target.
McAleese is the chair of the Steering Group for Integration, and has led the process with characteristic vigour.
She was adamant on Tuesday in Croke Park that the target for full integration will be met in a threeyear timeframe, despite the awesome logistical challenges.
She neatly summed up the outstanding ones as the three Fs: finance, facilities, and fixtures. But there is enormous detail to be considered, too, around administration and governance structures.
And in the absence of specifics around how these will be resolved, or how the path to integration will be negotiated, or indeed what the pathway even looks like, the magnitude of the challenge becomes apparent.
That’s before resistance, no matter how residual or sotto voce its expression, is considered.
Yet what seems certain is that the confidence the former President will withstand the setbacks that are certain to lie ahead. She will remain as chair of the steering group, a role to which she was appointed in September 2022.
When she appeared on Patrick Kielty’s first Late Late Show in September of last year, she was bullish about the process of bringing together the Camogie Association, Ladies Gaelic Football Association and the GAA.
‘We’re pretty much there,’ she told Kielty, going on to reveal that the plan for integration would be revealed in February, and it drew rapturous applause.
She also told a story that night about visiting the birthplace of Michael Cusack in Clare, and being wowed that a man born in poverty in 1847, the worst year of the Famine, went on to found the GAA.
She repeated that story in Croke Park, which perhaps speaks to the impact the trip had on her, but which also undoubtedly showcases her talents as an orator, as befits someone who enjoyed a distinguished academic career, as well as a spell working as a broadcaster in RTÉ.
It was a reminder of that familiar McAleese style, by times forthright and precise, and on other occasions verging on twee and folksy.
It was a combination that worked brilliantly in her 14 years as President, when the groundbreaking Mary Robinson years were succeeded by a less formal, more dynamic force, and one with a keener understanding of the impulses and passions of Irish society than perhaps anyone who has held the post of President before, or since.
She may have been born and raised in Northern Ireland, but Mary McAleese, in her public life, has long shown an acute recognition of Irish life.
She is the eldest of nine children, her father a Roscommon man and her mother from Derry.
She was born in Ardoyne in 1951, and raised in an intensely Catholic household, which wasn’t unusual for the time.
But with the outbreak of the Troubles, violence visited the family. Her deaf brother was severely beaten and stabbed, while the pub her father managed was bombed.
Loyalists also attacked the McAleese home, and a move to Rostrevor in Co Down followed.
On the night the then-Mary Leneghan married Martin McAleese, two of the couple’s close friends were murdered.
If it is trite to say the Troubles shaped her, it is also undoubtedly true, and bestowed on her a passion for reconciliation, and understanding, and dialogue.
It also meant when she moved south, first to lecture in Trinity College Dublin, she was sensitive to attitudes to the violence in the North that were frequently insensitive or dismissive.
That, fused with her formidable intelligence and obvious ambition, contributed to her emergence as a candidate for Fianna Fáil in the 1997 presidential election (she had been an unsuccessful Dáil candidate for the party a decade earlier).
Her husband was a talented footballer, winning a Sigerson Cup with Queen’s in 1971, but his wife’s passion for Gaelic Games was formed in its own right.
That partly explains her passion for the integration project, but it is also driven by the understanding that this is plainly the right thing to do.
Such knowledge is now widely shared at every level of the three organisations, and if there are stubborn pockets of prejudice, they are of less concern than the sheer scale of the logistical challenges.
This, in turn, informs some reticence at significant levels of the associations.
The comments of Laois county board chairman PJ Kelly last month are worth considering in that light.
‘Of late, integration is making a lot of traction,’ he told local radio.
‘I think it needs to slow down a little. I think we do need to have a better plan in place.
‘We all talk about infrastructure. Have we enough for ourselves in the GAA at present? I would say no,’ he added.
That is reflective of the concerns about facilities, and the logistics involved around pitches and facilities for training and matches.
‘I know the public are waiting apprehensively (sic) for an update from our former President Mary McAleese,’ Kelly said.
‘In a recent interview on ‘The Late, Late Show’, she may have given out, my own belief, false hope that this is nearer to fruition than it actually is.’
The line between realism and obstruction can be a fine one, but Kelly’s observations would be understood by those involved at club level, in particular.
With the exploding costs of inter-county teams already putting enormous financial pressure on counties, the price of integration is preying on minds.
McAleese displayed her pragmatism when addressing this on Tuesday.
‘Integration does give us a very powerful argument because of course Government now wants to encourage gender balance,’ she said.
‘It wants to encourage the inclusion of women in sport. It wants to encourage what has been a phenomena in recent times, the growth of women’s sport across many, many codes, not just camogie and Gaelic football, so we want to be part of that.
‘When we went to Government to talk about the facilities that we would need, one of the things we have in our working group was to look at the facilities we have, a really granular and detailed account of what we have and what we need.’
Those details remain unpublished, like the plan generally.
The timescale looks forbidding, the amount of work to be done daunting.
But Mary McAleese will remain undaunted.
She has faced down much bigger obstacles.
The bridge-building goes on.
‘It wants to encourage the inclusion of women in sport... the phenomenal growth in recent times’