Mary McAleese spoke about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and her work to support peace in Northern Ireland and rapprochement with Britain.
Former President of Ireland Mary McAleese spoke in favor of efforts to build peace and understanding across communities in conflict at a conference in Washington, DC on September 10, and shared diplomatic insight from her experience as head of state in the decades following the Troubles.
McAleese, who served as Ireland’s mostly ceremonial head of state from 1997 to 2011, was the keynote speaker during the opening plenary of PeaceCon 2024, a conference bringing together policymakers and professionals in the field of peacebuilding. The talk took place at the offices of the United States Institute of Peace.
The former president, who was raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, spoke about her experience as a teenager during the Troubles, a decades-long conflict between Protestant unionists who supported continued British rule and Catholic republicans seeking reunification with the Republic of Ireland to the south. McAleese was raised in Ardoyne, a mostly Catholic and Irish republican area that she said had the “highest incidents of sectarian murders carried out during the Troubles.” Before she was born, her parents moved to a majority Protestant neighborhood, which she said was her “introduction to that binary world that we managed, somehow, to be a spore that was not normative [sic].” She described becoming friends with local Protestant youth as “the greatest gift I could have been given” and an experience that helped her understand Protestantism in a bitterly divided region.
McAleese said sectarian division and conflict were a defining element of being raised in Northern Ireland, and that her friends and she were “conscripts into worldviews where history was a setpiece, the past was a given.” She criticized the weaponization of history by different actors in the Troubles, who she said had edited history to favor their side, flatter their views, and teach Northern Irish children to hate each other. She described several attempts by unionist paramilitaries to kill her father, one of which ended with a car bomb killing a young woman and traumatizing him. Eventually, McAleese’s family was forced to move when paramilitaries shot machine guns through the windows of their home.
McAleese said that it was living through the violence of the Troubles that made her come to a realization: “This is stupid. This is just stupid.”
“The stupidity of it, the maleness of it, the patriarchalness [sic] of it,” she said, “offended me greatly.” Summarizing her thoughts on armed violence, she said “You can let the genie of violence out of the bottle, and you will pay dearly. You will also spend years trying to get that genie back in the bottle, back to this thing called peace.” It was this coming-of-age experience, said McAleese, that led her to become involved in initiatives to build peace, which she described as “the future, the ambition for the best of human nature.”
McAleese also bemoaned the tendency to ignore religion as a factor in driving conflict, pointing out the cultural importance of religious traditions for many people. She said that while she appreciated her Catholic education, she acknowledged that it had a “dark side”, and that religious feelings should be analyzed and criticized when they foster conflict.
The former president remarked on the necessity to engage with militant actors in the interest of peace. She argued that if unionists had stuck to their promise to “never talk to terrorists” and refused to negotiate with the republican party Sinn Fein, at the time considered to be the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, the Good Friday Agreement would have been impossible. McAlesee, who helped oversee talks between moderate republican leader John Hume and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, also praised the mediating role played by former U.S. senator and Special Envoy for Northern Ireland George Mitchell in securing the agreement that put an end to three decades of communal violence, saying that he should be “canonized.”
McAleese also spoke about her personal efforts as president to reset relations with the United Kingdom. During the last year of McAleese’s presidency, Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Ireland, becoming the first British monarch to visit the country since it gained independence. McAleese said that it was her backchannel negotiations with the Queen that opened the path to a historic four-day visit, which the former president said was strongly discouraged by both British and Irish diplomats and security officials. During the state visit, the monarch endeared herself to her hosts by laying a wreath at Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, a memorial dedicated to those who died for Irish independence, stepping onto the pitch at Croke Park where 14 people were killed by British forces in 1920, and even speaking Irish at a ceremony in Dublin castle.
At the end of the hour-long talk, McAleese made a call for nuance and understanding amidst conflict. She finished her address by highlighting the need for a vigorous peacebuilding community and quoting the Irish Catholic priest and peace mediator Alec Reid, saying: “Blessed are the peacemakers, they will never be unemployed.”
