President follows in parents' footsteps

Her mother received a City & Guilds qualification for hairdressing. Her father got his City & Guilds certificate for bartending. And yesterday President Mary McAleese received her own award from the vocational education and training body.

Mrs McAleese received an honorary fellowship from the British body in recognition of her achievements in law, academia, the media and in her current office.

Other honorary fellows include former British prime minister Sir John Major and Sir Howard Cooke, former governor-general of Jamaica.

City & Guilds, which opened a Dublin office six years ago, offers more than 500 qualifications in skills such as business support, sound engineering, hair and beauty, security, health care support services.

The former Professor of Law at Trinity College in Dublin said that this award meant "something very special to me on a personal level".

Of all the qualifications she received, she said they never seemed to be as valuable as the ones her parents got because it was much more difficult for them to return to education while working and raising a family.

"I now feel a particular sense of achievement at having something that I can now almost equate to my mother's and father's achievements," she said.

Mrs McAleese said she could not remember a time when she did not know about City & Guilds because it was a key factor in the later education of many people in the Belfast parish where she grew up.

Most people had to leave school early, but City & Guilds gave them an opportunity to return to education and training.

City & Guilds registers 20,000 students every year but Mrs McAleese said she expected her mother to remind her that the other 19,999 recipients had to undergo "a much more rigorous process" to get their certificates than she did.