A ‘staunch Catholic’, yet McAleese has often been at odds with hierarchy

CATHOLIC Church defenders and political foes have cited Mary McAleese’s Dáil ambitions for her son as motivation for her strident criticisms around the papal visit, which begins today.

Two simple facts helped fuel these attacks this week, led by Fine Gael and Independent TD Mattie McGrath. First is that Ms McAleese had long been seen as a lover of the Catholic Church and among its most active lay people in this country. Secondly, throughout her long career she has often shown herself to be extremely ambitious and single-minded in pursuit of her goals.

But drilling just a little deeper to the remarkable story of Ireland’s eighth president reveals a more nuanced story. It questions whether these latest criticisms stand up to scrutiny.

Let’s not waste too much time setting out a few basic facts here. Mary McAleese (pictured) has always been an ambitious woman, one does not get to be the first Catholic and woman to head Queen’s University Belfast without such ambition. Her achievement in getting the Fianna Fáil nomination, and subsequently winning through a very bitter presidential election campaign in 1997, speaks for itself.

It is true her son, Justin McAleese, wants to be a Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin-Rathdown, and she is always likely to try to enhance his electoral chances.

It is often forgotten that she unsuccessfully contested a Dáil seat in Dublin herself in February 1987, polling just over 2,000 votes.

Equally, much of her motivation for strident criticisms of Catholic policies on same-sex unions, and the LGBT community, draws on the experience of

Justin, who is homosexual and a well-known gay rights campaigner.

She irked many Church leaders by her comments in recent weeks, while others see political opportunism playing a role.

Mr McGrath said on Thursday that Ms McAleese had been happy to win the mainstream traditional Catholic vote in 1997. He and others, like Senator Rónán Mullen, decried her “negativity” as intruding on faithful Catholics’ enjoyment of the impending visit by Pope Francis.

The intriguing story of her 1997 election campaign showed her to be extremely single-minded, once goals were identified they were pursued with huge determination. The unwritten story of how she helped engineer a second presidential term, without having to contest an election, is equally intriguing but for another day.

It is often commented upon that Ms McAleese represented the Irish Catholic bishops at the 1984 New Ireland Forum, convened by Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to explore ways out of the North’s cycle of murder. This was just one of a string of committees and delegations on which she helped the Catholic hierarchy, causing her friend Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich to teasingly dub her “the bishops’ woman”.

But citing that important incident in isolation deprives us of some more important elements of a bigger picture. The reality is Ms McAleese, while insisting she loves the “bones and stones of the Catholic Church”, has often been seriously at odds with the Church leaders.

As far back as September 1994, she was publicly asking why ordinary Catholics, who felt they had been treated unfairly by their Church, had no formal means of redress beyond fulminating in private, or just walking away from it all entirely.

Equally, she has long been a staunch advocate for women priests. Back in March 1995, she publicly noted that young girls were finally allowed to serve Mass and advocated this meant the Church should move on with the appointment of female deacons. She would later argue that citing dogma to back excluding women from ordination was simply misogyny by another name. It is clear that the experience of growing up in Belfast amid the horror euphemistically dubbed ‘the Troubles’ gave an additional staunchness to her Catholicism.

But even critics must acknowledge her ecumenism, both politically and religiously.

In 1995, as a self-declared life-long GAA member, she publicly backed moves to end the Rule 21 ban on police and security services joining the association. She later famously put her “bridgebuilding” presidential theme into action by personally reaching out to loyalist paramilitaries in the North.

Some of her stances were nuanced and misunderstood. A declaration in November 1996 that integrated schooling would not undo the cancer of sectarianism, which was personal and home-bred rather the product of schools, was taken to mean she was against integrated schooling.

Ms McAleese insisted she was not but was against over-stating the potential of Catholics and Protestants attending the same schools.

This week’s political backlash against her will not surprise many, least of all Ms McAleese herself. “Being so far at odds with Church teaching is a very uncomfortable place for a believer,” she once said.