For all her popularity, Mary McAleese is an elusive figure. Will a second term give her the confidence to be more open about the deep religious faith that motivates her, asks Fintan O'Toole
Last Wednesday was a light day for the President, Mary McAleese. In mid-morning, she drove the short distance from Áras an Uachtaráin to the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham to make a short speech at the opening of a conference on lifelong learning. In mid-afternoon, she had a photocall at the Áras with the winners of the EU Young Scientists competition. The next day was also going to be an easy one, with nothing more onerous on the agenda than a visit to the National Ploughing Championships.
It was becoming more and more obvious that she was going to be re-elected unopposed and that she didn't have to worry about an election. So there was no obvious reason why she should have declined an invitation for Wednesday evening.
On the face of it, it was an invitation she ought to have welcomed. In perhaps the most combative speech of her presidency, delivered to a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, she had spoken of how, in Ireland, "carefully hidden stories . . . are coming out of the shoe-boxes in the attic and into daylight". The event she was invited to open was certainly about taking the shoe-boxes out of the attic. Gerard Mannix Flynn's play and exhibition, entitled James X, at Liberty Hall in Dublin, is an extraordinarily graceful exploration of his own experiences, from his early childhood onwards, at the hands of the State which committed him to its industrial schools and prisons. It is an event of great symbolic importance: an attempt to heal a hurt that runs very deep and that, as the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, remarked last week, we are still struggling to come to terms with.
One of the differences between President McAleese and her predecessor is that Mary Robinson would have jumped at the chance to open Mannix Flynn's show. She would have seen it as an opportunity to use the presidency in a way that avoided party politics but that was nevertheless deeply political. She would have understood that the mere presence of the head of State at such an event would have made an eloquent statement. It seems, however, that the event, and the subject, was just too sharp, too dangerous, too angular for President McAleese. For those who accuse her of blandness, here was evidence for the prosecution.
Yet that speech in Virginia in May last year, when she spoke of the hidden stories coming into the daylight, was another side of Mary McAleese. The manner of its delivery showed why she has been such a popular president. Her bearing was in sharp contrast to that of the shy, sometimes awkward Mary Robinson.
President McAleese has an uncanny ability to be both lofty and warm, both regal and populist, both head of State and national mammy. She can put an audience at its ease while keeping an element of dignified distance. She can deliver long and complex sentences in a conversational tone and a mellifluous voice. And she is, on her day, one of the most accomplished public speakers in global politics. That day in Virginia, she stuck to a long script without once giving the impression that she was reading. Fluent, intelligent, always in touch with her listeners, she held a tough audience of academics, journalists, students and locals in the palm of her hand. When she had finished, one member of the entourage of the governor of Virginia sighed, looked around at the others at her table and whispered in a voice hovering between awe and despair: "You know, our president couldn't speak even one of those sentences."
Nor was that speech just a matter of style. She gave a much more nuanced and hard-edged version of the Ireland she so often celebrates in a language of airy uplift.
"More money in pockets has visibly lifted standards of living, but it is being badly spent too, on bad habits that have never gone away," she said. "The Irish love of conviviality has its dark side in the stupid, wasteful abuse of alcohol and its first cousin, abuse of drugs. They chart a course of misery and malaise so utterly unnecessary that we need to re-imagine an Ireland grown intolerant of behaviour which it has too benignly overlooked for too long."
While those comments successfully ignited a debate back home, McAleese also commented wryly on the inequalities of the new Ireland.
"The widespread embrace of prosperity has been a wonderful and heartening phenomenon," she said, "but if you are still marooned on the beach and the uplifted boats are sailing over the horizon, the space between can seem a frightening, unbridgeable chasm."
SO WHICH IS the real president? The one who often avoids awkward occasions and who sometimes uses her extraordinary powers of eloquence to dignify boilerplate feel-good rhetoric about how "Ireland still has a story to tell which is the envy of almost all others" and how, as she informed the Oireachtas on the eve of the millennium, "today where the name of Ireland is spoken, the word success is close behind"? Or the sparky, feisty woman who could deliver a lecture to lawyers, as she did at UCD in 1999, and excoriate her own profession as "a closed shop and an often pedantic and precious institution" with a "gravitational tendency towards vanity"?
Part of the problem in answering such questions is that at times Mary McAleese has seemed to be weirdly disconnected from life in the Republic in a way that is not perhaps surprising for someone who has spent so much of her life outside the State.
This is a president who kicked off her term of office with an inaugural speech in which she talked about how "At our core we are a sharing people. Selfishness has never been our creed". It was a strange statement at a time when the McCracken tribunal report, with its details of the Ansbacher scam, was still being digested and a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, showing massive and largely unpunished tax evasion to be rife, was making the headlines.
Another example came in April 2002. At the time, the Government had been forced to withdraw its Disability Bill in the face of a storm of anger from people with disabilities and their families. That same month, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was considering the appalling practice in Ireland of incarcerating people with intellectual disabilities in mental hospitals. So when President McAleese agreed to open a seminar for the group, Disabled People of Clare, she was widely expected to take the opportunity to respond with a statement of the basic values of equality.What did she say?
"It is thankfully reassuring to see how much progress has been made in the care and treatment of people with disabilities in recent years."
The dreamy optimism of President Pangloss, in which all seems to be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, reached its height in her address to the Oireachtas on the eve of the millennium. It presented a vision, the like of which has not been heard since the heady days of the Irish Revival in the late 19th century, of an ideal Ireland that was destroyed by filthy foreigners and might be born again. She evoked, to the hilarity of medieval historians, a lost "golden age" of a near-perfect Christian civilisation "in the middle part of the first millennium". This golden age "fell victim to the Viking invasion" and was followed by an unending succession of "wars, invasions, rebellions, plantations and plagues". But, she hinted, the golden age was at hand again. A new "age of miracles" was about to begin.
There is a naivety to this side of McAleese that, at its worst, makes her sound like a mixture of a Madison Avenue advertising maestro and an old Communist dictator spouting about Utopia while the people mutter darkly behind their hands. Yet there is something real behind it, a genuine source of passion and conviction. Her difficulty is that it is a source she is reluctant to reveal too clearly.
Mary McAleese is a deeply committed Catholic. Probably the most personal speech of her presidency was one she gave in 1999 in Florence to the conference of the World Community for Christian Meditation. It is fascinating because it is the speech not of a head of State, but of a believer among believers. Its vision is deeply and utterly religious, a "vision of how Christ's message of love and unity can be realised" in this world. Its answer to the world's conflicts and problems is "our faith in God, in His infinite love".
Her great difficulty is that she came to office at the worst possible time for a missionary Christian, a time when the public is less comfortable with a religious definition of the State than at any other period in its history.
IT IS NOT accidental that Mary McAleese became a widely accepted president through a religious act - the taking of communion in a Protestant church. She clearly knew what she was doing when she openly took the bread and wine at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin a few weeks after taking office. Before that moment, she was the woman who had represented the Irish Catholic bishops in a hardline presentation at the New Ireland forum in 1984. After it, she was the woman who had infuriated and upset the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, who denounced her action as a sham. As a political manoeuvre, it was brilliantly conceived and nervelessly executed. But it was also a lesson in how dangerous and unsettlingly divisive religious symbolism could be. In the long term, it probably discouraged her from appearing as an openly religious figure.
Another reason not to do so, of course, was her quiet work alongside her husband in reaching out to Loyalist communities in Northern Ireland. The theme for her presidency, as she has stressed ad nauseam is Building Bridges, and one of her problems is that Building Bridges is not in fact a theme, merely a slogan. Yet the one area in which she has given it real substance has undoubtedly been her work with the North's Protestant community. Though her manner of expressing it yesterday was a little embarrassing (the thought of anyone weeping for joy at the sight of Ian Paisley is rather disturbing), her excitement at the possibility of a genuinely inclusive settlement in Northern Ireland is clearly real. Constantly reminding Northern Protestants of her own religious feelings, however, might have put an obstacle in the way of that work.
All of this, though, raises important questions for her second term. Is it really fair to blame Mary McAleese for being bland and then to want her to keep quiet about the things she feels most deeply about?
There is surely a connection between her tendency to make vacuous statements full of generalised uplift and the fact that the things that really animate her vision - her faith in Christ and her desire for a world that matches that faith - are mostly thought to be too embarrassing for the head of a secular state to utter. If the Church were not so sexist, she would have made a wonderful bishop, and it may well be that part of her appeal for very many people is that she is in fact, at a time when the authority of the hierarchy has been so badly damaged, a kind of alternative bishop. That might not be such a bad thing for a president to be.
The question is whether a secular state can tolerate someone at its head who feels confident enough to express herself in the religious language that clearly makes the deepest sense to her. If the answer is yes that in itself might symbolise the emergence of a more tolerant society.