Mary Mcaleese
The former Irish president on the art of building bridges
Toxic language and the damage it can do is something that Mary Mcaleese, the former Irish president, knows all about. Having been at the very heart of the process that tackled sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland, almost two decades after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, she still worries about the power of careless words and the damage abusive language can do.
Still affectionately known in her homeland as President Mary, since stepping down in 2011 after two terms in office, this 65-year-old lawyer chooses as an example words used by Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, who has been asked to form an alliance with Theresa May to support her minority Conservative Government.
Reflecting on the March Stormont elections that immediately preceded the UK general election, she says: “Arlene Foster paid a really dear price for the language she used in relation to teaching of the Irish language in schools, and also about the nationalist population. She described working with Sinn Fein as ‘feeding a crocodile’. It was a throwaway line, but that was language that hurt the nationalist population. There was a massive turnout of voters for Sinn Fein in those elections.”
For the time Mcaleese was in office, the key starting point in bringing peace and reconciliation to Northern Ireland – where she was born and raised – was to “dial back” on the loaded language that divided the communities there. But she now raises these events not as a comment on Mrs Foster’s role in supporting the current UK Government, but rather as a wider point to illustrate the damage that words can do in the delicate political atmosphere that now pervades not just Northern Ireland, or even the rest of the UK, but many other parts of the world. “I am growing daily more alarmed by the rise of the language of hatred,” she says, pointing to events in the United States after a divisive presidential election, in Europe accompanying the rise of populist, far-right parties, and even just over the Irish Sea in Britain, as the Brexit vote reshapes our political process.
The trading of insults and jibes between opponents is, she acknowledges, part and parcel of political culture. “Some of the abuse and ridicule can be very enjoyable,” she admits, “but there is a danger in poking fun at people who are in positions of public leadership because we empower that poking of fun right the way down the line”. Intolerant, alienating language, she feels strongly, is dangerous because it prevents finding common ground. “People remain inside their boxes, constantly wounded by the brickbats thrown at them from the opposite side. It is conducive to fostering division and rancour. Then that rancour becomes something you have to live with on your street.” If it sounds an exaggerated scenario, then Mcaleese saw at first hand all about what hate-filled language can do. She grew up in the Sixties in the Catholic part of sectarian Belfast, where savage verbal abuse between nationalists and Unionists was the backdrop to her childhood, alienating neighbour from neighbour, and eventually being accompanied by bombs and bullets.
In 1972, as a young woman, she and her family had to flee their home in the Ardoyne area of the city after a machine gun attack by loyalists. That traumatic formative experience, she says, goes a long way to explaining why a central part of her contribution to the peace process as Irish president was to work tirelessly to find ways to get the two sides talking again.
And she is still playing her part in the task of reconciling the opposing sides. In a new book, The Moral Heart of Public Service, published by the Westminster Abbey Institute, she contributes a chapter – alongside William Hague and Rowan Williams – on the central importance of “building bridges” to the Good Friday Agreement.
Yet while in Ireland she still sees a coming together of society, elsewhere she fears things are going in the opposite direction. Speaking from the family farm on the banks of the River Shannon in Co Roscommon, where she moved after vacating the presidential palace in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, she says: “Here, we have come out of a violent conflict. We had 4,000 dead bodies. We’ve learnt how things run out of control if you don’t build bridges with one another. So we are therefore slightly ahead of the posse.” In what she describes as “divided and divisive times”, she urges politicians, campaigners and ordinary people everywhere to adopt what she refers to as “the discipline of compromise”. At its simplest, she says, this means, “deciding that, if this person is going to be your neighbour in perpetuity, you’d be as well to get on with one another, and try and put behind you your grievances or upsets.”
Language, she points out, can be a blessing and a curse. It drives people apart, but also can bring them back together. As a positive example, she recalls the headline-grabbing moment when, as Irish president, she played host to the Queen on her historic visit to Dublin in 2011, the first by a British monarch since most of Ireland went its separate way almost a century before.
“In her remarkable speech at the state dinner, the Queen said the words ‘A Uachtaráin agus a chairde’, which translate as ‘president and friends’. Anybody who knows the history of Ireland, and the history of the Irish language, will know the huge efforts that had been made, particularly in the 19th-century in imperial Ireland, to destroy the Irish language. I knew, the moment she used those words, that hearts that were quite hard against British Empire, monarchy and Britain, would melt. Here was someone who was not simply a very high-level tourist coming to see us, but someone on a mission of reconciliation.”
Such behaviour, she says, is today all too rare. “Regrettably, the mechanisms that we use to express our views today are infinitely more powerful, more raw and more damaging than any mechanism we had available to us in the past – particularly social media, but also radio and television.
“The language that is used now has lost any sense of care about one another. In-your-face seems to be perfectly acceptable.”
The result, she suggests, is that “we are constantly rubbing raw wounds with words that are designed to wound, and that is a problem we
‘The moment the Queen used those words, hard hearts melted’
have to overcome. How do you reintroduce into our public discourse the elimination of personal abuse and ridicule because things have become very, very personal?”
It is not, she insists, a question of pretending divisions don’t exist. “It doesn’t stop you having solid political differences and expressing them robustly, but it means that you are careful in the way in which you express them not to add a layer of unnecessary damage.”
Mcaleese’s intention is not to lecture, but rather to offer a heartfelt plea, born of bitter personal experience, about what can be done unthinkingly by words, and how quickly things can escalate.
“You are right now in the space we used to be in with sectarian politics,” she says. “You are looking down the road at a really pretty merciless political environment.”