Mam supported my coming out as a gay man

THE former president Mary McAleese was adamant about walking her son down the aisle when he married his long-term male partner last year, Justin McAleese revealed yesterday.

Mr McAleese, pictured, who intends to contest a seat for Fianna Fáil in south Dublin, was a highprofile campaigner in the marriage equality referendum of 2015.

Yesterday, speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Today With Seán O’Rourke, Mr McAleese opened up about coming to terms with his sexuality while growing up – and how his parents were a supportive influence. He said his anxiety over coming out to his family at 21 was tempered by the fact that his mother was a member of a committee tasked with reforming the law on homosexuality.

‘I knew I was going to come out to an environment where my parents weren’t going to kick me out of the house,’ he said.

And when the time came for Mr McAleese to tie the knot in June, his mother, a one-time professor of law at Trinity College Dublin, threw herself into the role of mother of the groom. ‘My mother was insistent that she would get to walk her son up the aisle because she started the campaign of the mummies walking their sons up to the aisle,’ Mr McAleese said yesterday.

‘I had to tell her it wasn’t going to happen, there would be no aisle.’

When asked about his mother’s controversial words regarding gender inequality in the Catholic Church, he said: ‘I look at my mam as a very proud son.’

Mr McAleese, a former assistant to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, now hopes to get on the Fianna Fáil ticket in the Dublin Rathdown constituency.