Remarks by Professor Mary McAleese

• Date: 01 January 2019

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Remarks by

PROFESSOR MARY MALEESE*

ank you very much indeed to the Hibernian Law Journal for the honour and

the privilege that it is to be here and to share the honour tonight with Catherine

McGuinness, who was a student in Trinity College when I arrived there back in

the 1970s. Ivana Bacik became a student of mine in Trinity College and Yvonne

Scannell, here in the front row, and I were both colleagues back in the day then. So

there is quite a reunion which I am really enjoying. It is lovely to be in this company

and to see so many faces that I recognise in this audience. It means a lot. You would

be surprised how this kind of armation re-energises, and we all need that re-

energisation. is sort of energy in our lives does not come necessarily from inside

but from the armation and the encouragement that other people give you in life

so I want to say a very big thank you. Also, happy ‘Brexit day’.

As Catherine took us through her own career, I was thinking back to where I

started out my life, in a place called Ardoyne in Belfast, which some of you may

have heard of. It was a very tough place to grow up with 70% unemployment, very

dysfunctional in so many ways, and of course by the end of the Troubles, it was

the place that had the highest per capita sectarian deaths in Northern Ireland. I

have just been going through the year 1972 and literally on a weekly basis, a stone’s

throw from my home and my front door, somebody was murdered, somebody

from one or other side of the community. We learned that if a Catholic was shot

today, it would be a Protestant tomorrow. If a Protestant was shot today, it would

be a Catholic tomorrow. What stupidity! What waste! How could we have ever

let that happen? But it did happen, and one of the things that salvaged it, one of

the things that brought us back to some degree of reality and hope, in fact, was the

law. I look now at the role played by the Good Friday Agreement, an international

treaty constructed with good values and principles and constructed by creative

lawyers and politicians. It gives people on all sides the belief that they count, that

as individuals they count, that their identities count, and that there is parity of

esteem. I know we have not had a government in Northern Ireland for the last two

and a half years, just in case you had not noticed – because some people actually

have not!

I was 18 years old when the Troubles broke out on my doorstep. I was the oldest

of 9 kids. My mother and her sisters between them, all of whom lived close by,

had sixty children. ey thought they had to increase, multiply and ll the earth

entirely singlehandedly! And so we were this enormous clan living in a dicult,

conicted environment. As I look across that clan, and how we adapted to those

circumstances, I see sixty dierent adaptations. I thank God that I was a young

* Professor Mary McAleese is a former President of Ireland.