McAleese the only one who hasn't totally lost it

THE QUEEN of England recently spent £14,000 on a train journey from London to Liverpool. Although, as the comedian Frank Skinner has remarked, “That’s what happens when an old-age pensioner tries to operate the self-service ticket machine.”

They are having a bit of a ding-dong over in the UK about how much the queen costs them. The queen says that she needs more money from the British exchequer, and we foreign observers might say that the British public is inclined to give it to her.

They hold the queen in high regard, even if they might wonder about some of her spending habits, and are a great deal less sanguine about paying for the upkeep of a lot of her relatives.

How unlike the home life of our own dear President. I realise that the president of a small and deeply conflicted republic cannot really be compared to the richest woman in the world, but still, the unseemly debate about the queen’s shillings gets you thinking.

Last year the President cost us €3,065,000. This year it is estimated that she will cost us €3,422,000. You have to say that she is very good value.

It is hard to define the role of Irish president. Quite a lot of people who have held the job never came to grips with it, and who can blame them? It is a ceremonial role in a country which is deeply uncomfortable with ceremony, and for the most part loathes it. Presidential elections are always good craic, but things seem to go kind of quiet after polling day. The best story about this noble office, as far as one can tell, concerns our second president, Seán T O’Kelly, who was very small.

At a football match O’Kelly was walking across the pitch when a Dublin wag shouted, “Cut the grass and let’s see the President.” Alas, we were never going to build our own Versailles.

There is no one with whom I agree less than our President, but the time has come to praise Mary McAleese, pretty well without reservation. Because, to the average citizen, it does seem that our President is the only public figure who hasn’t lost it completely; who responds to scandal and suffering with grace; who comes up with simple and effective ideas with which to help and encourage us, the general public.

When 300 survivors of child abuse attended a reception at Áras an Uachtaráin at the end of last month, the President acknowledged that one day out in Phoenix Park could not “restore to your lives all the things that were taken from you”. However, several of her guests remarked that it was a happy occasion. The reception was certainly a 100 per cent improvement on what the rest of officialdom has managed for victims of child abuse in the weeks since the Ryan report. Whatever the presidency might mean, it meant a lot to the President’s guests that day.

It was a simple enough gesture, the reception. But many people heaved a sigh of relief when they saw it. It was the right thing to do. The idea for the reception was generated from within Áras an Uachtaráin itself. The recipients of it seemed honoured and moved by this, perhaps their first positive experience of the Irish establishment. They did not have to tie children’s shoes to the railings of this public building, as they had done during their protest at the Dáil. They were invited inside. The President is not afraid of them.

In the days following the reception at Áras an Uachtaráin only the Irish Examiner and the Daily Star praised the President, and her husband.

Of course, it could be said that she had only been doing her job in inviting the child abuse victims to Áras an Uachtaráin. But she did it so gracefully, with such confidence and obvious enjoyment. She is the only dignitary who has known what to do with the victims of child abuse, who were excluded from a vital press conference and kept hanging on the phone lines of the radio stations of the nation, while more qualified experts sat in studio, ruminating on what had happened to them.

With the reception at Áras an Uachtaráin the President has saved our national bacon.

Of course the President isn’t perfect. Her remark some years ago that the Catholics in Northern Ireland had lived under the equivalent of Nazi persecution was simply bonkers. Her reluctance to attend the Dublin Horse Show some years prior to that showed her limited knowledge of life in the South. But she is a hard worker and a quick learner and now she is putting the rest of our public representatives to shame.

She is remarkably effective. She knows what being president means.

There might now be a danger that the President herself is becoming neglected, when we should be cherishing her, if not equally, then at least fervently. Perhaps we are afraid to praise her, in case it all ends badly. We’ve had a pretty bad run as far as the public virtues are concerned. In the context of our public, communal life, McAleese is shining like a good deed in a very nasty world.