PRESIDENT MARY McAleese was addressing American businessmen with Irish connections, at breakfast on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange. After a brief exposé explaining Ireland’s transition from underachievement to affluence and then crisis, she reverted to empathetic mother-in-chief.
Ireland has taken the necessary steps, Mrs McAleese said. But “those cuts in public spending, they have had real and very, very painful effects on families across the country, and on services, and people rightly feel – don’t get me wrong – people are mad as hell. They feel hurt. They feel angry that Ireland has been landed in this predicament by once trusted individuals and institutions.”
At least three times in the course of six public appearances yesterday, Mrs McAleese used the bullet metaphor, as when she told guests at the Stock Exchange: “If there’s a bullet that we have to bite, we bite the bullet. And that’s what we’re doing now.”
The President advocated “a robust, credible reform” of the regulatory system to restore trust. “Slip-sliding back to the old days is not an option,” she said. “It’s not on the agenda.”
Down on the trading floor, more than 1,000 men huddled around booths laden with monitors that flashed graphs and figures intelligible only to Wall Street’s initiated. The Irish Tricolour flew from the columned facade, alongside the Stars Stripes, but the traders paid little heed to the Irishwoman in the red suit. Time is money. “Give me 5,000! I need 5,000!” a trader screamed nearby, oblivious to the President’s passage.
Mrs McAleese was introduced to James Maguire, whose ancestors left Cork in 1840. Mr Maguire started out as a bond boy at $8 a week and now buys and sells for the US billionaire Warren Buffett. After the precipitous plunge in share prices on Thursday, he told the President with a heavy New York accent, “If you want to measure bad as far as dollars are concerned, today’s a bad day.”
In a fifth-grade classroom at Public School 197 in Brooklyn, the President watched the history of Ireland in four acts: The Potato. The Famine. Emigration. Famous Irish-Americans.
Bono was classified among the latter. A schoolboy without a fact-checker informed us that for his charity work, U2's lead singer "was awarded the Peace Nobel (sic) Prize". Mrs McAleese sang along as 22 11-year-olds delivered a touching rendition of When Irish Eyes are Smiling.
But she could not escape the economy. “During your term, have there been any economic problems?” 10-year-old Arian Pentza. “D’ya think?” Mrs McAleese asked, beaming gently. From her election in 1997 until two years ago, things were good. “Do you all know the recession word? We got hit very badly. . .”
Throughout the day, the themes of famine and economic crisis intertwined. If Ireland could resolve the “centuries old and intractable conflict” in the North, surely it could “overcome the economic challenges we face now,” Mrs McAleese told the businessmen.
A child asked Mrs McAleese whether her own family had been affected by the famine. They were from Co Roscommon, one of the worst hit, the President replied.
“My grandfather told how his grandmother saw bodies lining the road, nine deep, hundreds of bodies. He also told how his grandmother’s mother went to the big house where the British aristocracy lived, the local big wigs.
“She was a widow with four children and she begged for food. She was given what they called Indian corn, which wasn’t fit for humans. They had to boil it and boil it, and two of her children died from eating it. In the records of the big house, we found her name on the list of people who got food,” said Mrs McAleese.