PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE has condemned the murder of Kevin McDaid as evidence of enduring sectarianism in the North and the continuing threat to the peace process.
“We only had to hear the news from Northern Ireland from yesterday to see how in Co Derry, in Coleraine, the rearing again of that awfully ugly face of sectarian hatred that resulted in the death of a young man and more grief to another family. And it comes just a few short months after the awful wastefulness and the tragedy and evil of Massereene and Lurgan,” she said.
Speaking in Boston at a lunch hosted by the American-Ireland Fund, Mrs McAleese said she hoped the people of Coleraine would come together to reject Mr McDaid’s killers as the people of Massereene had united following the killing of British soldiers last March. “In that assertion of community solidarity, we will see the strength of the peace process revealing itself and unfolding itself. Showing that there is now not a sense of two divided communities but a growing sense of one society determined to put behind its sectarian past, determined to resolve its political problems through dialogue and through the structures of the Good Friday Agreement.”
Mrs McAleese said the peace process remained strong, but that the recent murders served as a reminder of what happens when human hearts remain cold towards one another. “We cherish the peace that we have because we know the very, very deep human cost that has been paid for that peace.”
The President, on a six-day visit to Massachusetts, praised the American-Ireland Fund’s work in supporting reconciliation in the North and promoting prosperity throughout Ireland. Mrs McAleese welcomed the fund’s recent initiative to help the “Forgotten Irish” elderly Irish immigrants in the US who face isolation. “Your care for them will be invaluable, for it tells them that they are a valued part of our large web of kith and kin, of clan and community and their lives matter to us,” she said.
Mrs McAleese hailed president Barack Obama’s nomination yesterday of Sonia Sotomayor as the next supreme court justice.
Ms Sotomayor (54), who grew up in poverty in the South Bronx, would be the first Hispanic and the third woman supreme court justice in US history. “I’m thrilled, absolutely delighted that the best person for the job is a woman . . . I hope that she will make an extraordinary contribution to legal thinking and to legal theory and to legal practice,” said Mrs McAleese.