Outspoken Catholic feminist with presidential ambitions

Too Catholic, according to a Northern academic, himself a Catholic

Too Catholic, according to a Northern academic, himself a Catholic. Too Catholic, according to a Southern political commentator, herself a Catholic. Mary McAleese has never managed to shed her image as the Catholic girl from Belfast who rose to become a Trinity College law professor, briefly the darling of the Southern media and then, to the astonishment of those media, the token woman in the Hierarchy's delegation at the 1984 New Ireland Forum.

But she is far more complex than the conservative Catholic caricature of her Dublin reputation.

Her religion is hugely important to her. She grew up in the little Protestant streets on the edge of Catholic Ardoyne. At 18 she came home from celebrating the exam results that would allow her to study law to find gangs of uniformed B-Specials running riot through the neighbourhood.

Three years later her family lost their home when it was machinegunned while they were at Mass and the police advised them for their own safety not to return. Her profoundly deaf brother was beaten senseless in a sectarian murder attempt.

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"That's where my faith in God came in," she says. "If I hadn't had that I wouldn't have been able to endure the despair I felt at those times." Her spiritual and prayerful side allowed her to contain her occasional outbursts of anger. The violence she has seen has made her into a pacifist, going much further than the Catholic Church in refusing to support any argument in favour of the "just war" or capital punishment.

A lot was made during her high-profile Dublin days in the 1980s of her active opposition to abortion and divorce.

What are less well-known are her more recent stands in favour of women priests and against the church's unjust hierarchical structures, including outspoken criticism of its handling of the clerical child sex abuse scandal.

As the North's most prominent lay Catholic and Ireland's most outspoken Catholic feminist, she has a direct line to many bishops, and is not afraid to tell them what she thinks of them.

Politically she is an enthusiastic nationalist. When she moved south to Dublin, aged 24, to succeed Mary Robinson as Reid Professor of Criminal Law at TCD, she was shocked by two things. One was the "glazed-over look" when she started to talk about the North; the other was the constant label as the "Northern Catholic from Ardoyne", with the attendant risk of being dubbed an IRA fellow traveller for her nationalist views.

She is scathing about people like Conor Cruise O'Brien and the Workers' Party sympathisers she worked with when she doubled as an RTE current affairs reporter and presenter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She feels their revisionist view of history and eagerness to pander to the unionists allowed "a kind of apologetic Catholicism to develop, that ran away from confronting the dark side of Northern Ireland".

Like Mary Robinson, she is an unsuccessful Dail candidate, added to the Fianna Fail ticket in Dublin South East by Mr Charles Haughey in 1987.

Professionally, her success has been more in the area of university administration than criminal law. In late 1987 she and her dentist husband returned North where she became director of Queen's University's Institute of Professional Legal Studies.

Her appointment led to a storm of unionist abuse. David Trimble, who had once taught her, was a disappointed candidate for the job.

Three years ago she found herself in the right place at the right time. Queen's, whose staff had traditionally been heavily skewed towards the Protestant community, was besieged by religious discrimination legal cases, with massive cost and compensation payouts.

The vice-chancellor, Gordon Beveridge, gave Dr McAleese a personal professorial chair and shortly after promoted her to pro-vice-chancellor, the second-highest level in the university's administration. She was the first woman and the first Catholic to reach such an exalted position, and one of her first jobs was to oversee the anti-sectarianism training that all Queen's staff now had to undergo.

SHE is not popular with many senior Queen's academics, although this is less to do with her Catholicism than their resentment at the meteoric career rise of a brash and ambitious university politician. Unionist students echo the paranoid view of their community that she is bent on a drive for personal power aimed at turning Queen's into a majority Catholic university.

Those who work with her on ecumenical initiatives, notably the ground-breaking church report on sectarianism, see a different Mary McAleese. "She is no triumphalist Catholic wanting to stick people's noses in the dirt," says a Protestant layman. "She can be a tough cookie, but she strikes me as the sort of person who would strive to be fair and understand other people's points of view, particularly those of Protestants."

She is famous for her huge energy and combativeness. "If she's attacked, she'll defend herself," says a colleague. She is superbly articulate, a Belfast straight talker of a kind who makes many Southerners feel uncomfortable.

However, she has few of the diplomatic skills of the woman she aspires to succeed. The perception that she is the candidate of Fianna Fail's pro-life wing will limit her appeal. Ultimately, the party does not see her as one of its own, and that is enough to ensure she has little chance of gaining its nomination.