First citizen won hearts and minds

THERE IS no procedure, no little booklet of protocol to mark the waning of a presidency. It ends in a whimper. Images of a vast dwelling being packed up and legions of personnel on the move are well wide of the mark. Only three of the Áras’s 21 non-household employees are private and will leave with Mary McAleese on November 10th.

Only those in the private living quarters will notice any outward difference. After 14 years of the pomp, protocol, panic, fresh paint aroma and mother-of-the-bride outfits that greeted her every movement, the President will say her goodbyes to Áras an Uachtaráin against a hum of panic that will be all about the next incumbent. The next day she will attend the inauguration and immediately resume her life as private citizen.

The three leaving with her are advisers Maura Grant and Wally Young and communications executive Gráinne Mooney.

“We’ll leave only a little hole”, says Mooney, with a wistful laugh, “life goes on . . . ” But 14 years is a “huge wallop” out of anyone’s life, as Mary O’Rourke put it.

Mooney, who was just 26 in 1997, practically grew up in the Áras, married and had a child during her time there. The three McAleese children grew up there too. Sara Mai was 12 and unhappy to be hauled out of Rostrevor for a life in the Áras. Ten years on, her practical mother cited the dogged, ultimately successful efforts of the child’s Liffey Valley rowing coach as an example of “that something in us that needs that wee bit of reassurance that we matter enough that someone keeps coming back”.

Meanwhile, all three children were free to live the lives of ordinary teenagers.

“The media respected the children’s privacy completely,” says Mooney. “Then again, the children never sought the limelight either.”

Now with an Oxford masters under her belt, Sara Mai is studying for a doctorate in the Royal College of Surgeons. Emma, who qualified as an electrical engineer, is back at college studying dentistry. Justin, a UCD Smurfit School graduate, works in accountancy.

Martin McAleese’s life has also changed beyond imagining. In the heady trajectory from quiet northern dentist to formidable and courageous peace negotiator, Senator and university chancellor, he gave the office two for the price of one, taking the once-derided bridge-building vow as seriously as his wife.

In a Republic often contemptuous of context and the lived experience, the McAleeses’ own childhood hinterlands were often overlooked. Both Catholic nationalists, they grew up in Protestant communities in flashpoint areas of Belfast. That was their “thinking, experiential” landscape, as Mrs McAleese put it, the one that saw her machine-gunned out of her home by loyalists as a girl and her profoundly deaf brother almost beaten to death in a sectarian attack. It’s hardly surprising that when asked for an outstanding memory, Martin McAleese recalls, in still-awed tones, the Tricolour fluttering on the bonnet of the car that took them from Portmarnock to his wife’s inauguration.

In the ebbing days of her presidency, her most cherished priorities are clear. Visits to “neighbours” such as the Phoenix Park special school, a Mass in Aughrim Street church, calls to the Irish Deaf Society, to St Ita’s hospital for people with disability in Beaumont and to the Pavee Point Travellers’ Centre; an event in a St Vincent de Paul hostel for homeless men and another for the Centre for Ageing Research and Development (Cardi).

She will plant a tree beside those of Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama at the Áras “peace site”, to symbolise the three countries’ peace efforts, and will support the Wexford Opera by making it one of her last presidential functions.

There will also be Áras receptions for various community, business, arts, culture and diplomatic groups to thank them for their support in all the bridge-building.

Fourteen years into the McAleese presidency, it is hard to believe that things were ever any different. Eileen Gleeson, Mrs McAleese’s first adviser, still recalls civil servants’ stunned reaction when it became clear the new president wanted children and representative ordinary people in Dublin Castle at her inauguration ceremony.

This was in the context of a poisonous election campaign when Eoghan Harris declared the sole male presidential candidate, Derek Nally, was the only one who could be relied up on to purge any hint of nationalism and to return the role to a “traditional” presidency. And Nally wouldn’t be into that “huggy-wuggy, clap-happy” stuff, either. By contrast, McAleese, that Fianna-Fáil nominated, northern nationalist, was not merely huggy-wuggy, but “dangerous”, “a tribal time bomb”, said Harris. A woman working to “a different moral agenda than most people in the Republic”, parroted Nally.

Memos leaked from the Department of Foreign Affairs were intended to damage her. Politicians declared she was soft on Sinn Féin/IRA. Media commentators had the vapours about her links with the bishops. Worse, they suspected lèse-majesté. Did this folksy, voluble, devoutly Catholic, northern nationalist Fianna Fáiler seriously aspire to being the successor of the regal Mary Robinson?

The resulting babel, combined with a distinctly edgy relationship with the media, culminating in the infamous dust-up between her FF handlers and journalists in a Galway hotel, hoisted her from virtual anonymity to national figure in weeks. The rest is history.

Within a month of her inauguration, she had scattered the critics by taking communion in a Protestant cathedral. Eight years in, when she blurted that Northern Ireland Protestants had taught their children to view Catholics with the same “irrational hatred” that Nazis had taught their young to view Jews, the first to her defence was a powerful UDA “brigadier”, Jackie McDonald. “No matter what she said or whatever way it was taken, it wasn’t meant that way,” he pronounced firmly. The golf with Martin was paying off.

In the meantime, well over 13,000 members of the Northern loyalist/unionist community had tip-toed warily into the McAleese Áras, many having crossed the border into “Éire” for the first time on Martin’s invitation.

The breadth and depth of the McAleeses’ engagement with the Northern tribes may never be fully grasped.

The downside to many “down here”, was that she seemed incapable of discussing anything without reference to the North.

But we had been warned. It was the priority in her inaugural speech. A second – which seemed to escape the notice of at least one recent presidential candidate – was to take a firmer role in promoting industrial Ireland. So she wasn’t only the first to visit Irish peacekeepers serving abroad, she also became the first to undertake trade delegations abroad – despite criticism and advice to the contrary.

“Where does it say in the Irish Constitution that it isn’t a part of the presidency,” asked Michael McDowell, “that the president should open sales of work and attend charitable events?”

That criticism tends to go hand in glove with accusations that she was a persistent “cheerleader” of the “economic miracle”. Her defenders would draw attention to speeches she made at the height of it, where she used terms such as “complacent consumerism” and “a creeping malaise . . . ”, where she considered that the country was losing sight of the fact that “our wealth is a means to a long-desired end and not an end in itself”, the fact that – for a moment – we had “within our reach the great destination of an egalitarian republic where the strong are driven by a restless and unselfish duty of care for the weak and where every life is given the chance to fully blossom”.

It took a while for those who didn’t vote for her to come around to the fact that Ireland hadn’t just landed a president with real warmth, empathy, intelligence and gravitas – the much derided “soft skills”, but also a skilled lawyer with a greater grasp of legal intricacies than almost anyone in the room, one, furthermore, with a talent for languages.

She made the work over 14 years seem effortless, so effortless that there was hardly a

Joe or Josephine Public who didn’t consider themselves capable of a run for the Áras this year.

She plans to take a masters in canon law and there is talk of universities in Rome. “But she is not going straight into anything,” says Gráinne Mooney.

Anyway, given Martin’s workload as a Senator, member of the Magdalene Laundries Commission and DCU chancellor, he won’t be fleeing to Rome for extended periods anytime soon. In the meantime, the suspicion is his wife will be perfectly happy to be plain Mrs McAleese for a while.