Those using the Irish flag to intimidate or spread the message that “Ireland is for the Irish” are comparable to those who used “no Irish need apply” signs in the UK and the US in the past, Mary McAleese has said.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day in Ireland, where the Irish flag would be used by people like that, but it is all the more reason to say you will not colonise our thinking, you will not colonise our flag,” the former president of Ireland added.
McAleese said racism was being “promoted by people in serious leadership positions” around the world and human rights organisations needed to “stand doubly strong” in response.
“The language of racism, the language of misogyny, the language of rich is good and poor is bad has just taken hold,” she said, adding that social media was helping to spread this further.
READ MORE
“More importantly, people in leadership positions who are able to create audiences, in the past would never have heard that kind of language ... It would have been regarded as completely unacceptable.”
Speaking in an interview with human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher at an event marking 50 years of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), McAleese said she was an ICCL board member campaigning for human rights a couple of decades ago. She said the world today was “not the way I’d hoped it would be” by now.
McAleese was the first Irish president from Northern Ireland, serving two terms from 1997 to 2011. She was also a barrister, a journalist at RTÉ and has taught on the subject of the Northern Ireland peace process, LGBTQ+ rights and other human rights issues at higher educational institutions since 2013.
She said the world was going through a very different time to the “golden moments” when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations were established to protect human rights and prevent war.
“Our lives are very short and amnesia sets in very quickly. Regrettably, I think we’ve come to a point where it’s so easy [to forget],” she said.
It was important, she added, to “understand how fragile this all is” and it would take “momentum, commitment and determination of every generation” to avoid the “gravitational pull of war and stupidity” and other issues.
McAleese also mentioned the European Union, “an extravagantly wonderful, miraculous idea”, which was “imperfect in many ways”. She said the EU is “too vast and wonderful and miraculous a thing to throw away”.
She noted that “Northern Ireland wasn’t even in the discourse” before the 2016 Brexit referendum when politicians were discussing the potential impacts leaving the EU might have for the UK.
McAleese, who has been critical of the Catholic Church in the past, compared artificial intelligence (AI) to the “garbage” and “the artificial information we were fed by Church and State” at the time she was growing up.
She said “all of us on this planet are already victims of artificial information systems”, with some religions having had “thousands of years of a head start of what we’re now calling AI”.
ICCL launched its strategic plan for 2026-2029 at the event.
Its executive director, Joe O’Brien, said the plan would pay “particular attention” to the rise in authoritarian approaches by governments and to rights the ICCL had been “championing” since it was founded in 1976 such as freedom of expression, the right to protest and the right to privacy.
