Belfast-born Mary McAleese served two terms as president of Ireland during 1997-2011, the first native of Northern Ireland to hold that office. McAleese’s presidency was marked by her advocacy for peace and reconciliation through regular trips to Northern Ireland and by hosting visitors from the North at her official residence. This fall, McAleese is serving as the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, accompanied by her husband Martin. She recently spoke with Sean Smith of the Boston College Chronicle.Excerpts from that interview follow:
  
Q. I understand you have quite a lot on your plate this fall, in addition to being Burns Scholar.
Well, I’m also studying for my doctoral degree in canon law at Gregorian University in Rome, and doing some work for the European Commission on modernization of the European Union’s higher education sector. So I’ve spent these past several months going from Dublin to Rome to Brussels and now to Boston. This is called “retirement.”

Q. So, what with the studies at Gregorian and the work for the European Commission, why take the appointment at Boston College?
Boston College has a phenomenal reputation in Ireland as a university that has made, and is making, important contributions to Irish life. BC also is a remarkable story of success, going through tough times but then managing to become one of the best universities in the United States.
And I thought the leitmotif of that is where I see the Catholic Church. And maybe there’s something in the air here that I could breathe, perhaps that eternal American optimism.
I have so much respect for BC’s Irish programs, because they have helped Ireland to understand itself better; not just its literature and arts, but its politics, the whole panoply. The faculty members are deeply versed in Ireland. You think you know every nook and cranny, but then you talk with someone like Tom Hachey, Bob O’Neill, Bob Mauro or Robert Savage, and they’ll tell you things you never knew.
And this is what’s missing in our Church: discourse. Listening to people who are doing the work, doing the research, who are seeing other aspects of the situation.

Q. It seems fair to say that “peace and reconciliation” has been a continual theme for your career, political or otherwise. In a world that often seems jaded, cynical and dubious about good intentions, how do you make these words real and substantive?
I can understand the cynicism, because too many things that have looked like peace and reconciliation wind up being photo opportunities. The words sound twee if you’ve never been put in a situation where they are the difference between life and death. I don’t regard peace and reconciliation as nice, soft, soapy words – to me, they are damned hard disciplines.
My husband and I both lost our homes and friends in The Troubles, and knew many others who had similar experiences of suffering. Out of that, you have to decide, “How do I react?” Do I get angry? And if I do, do I just become another conduit for history’s toxic spores of hatred? Or do I, someway or another, try to stop this?
My view was, God put me here for a purpose: to stand my ground and make genuine peace with those from whom we were estranged. You have to invest in building, and maintaining, friendships because we are all neighbors — Loyalist, Republican, Protestant, Catholic — and we aren’t going anywhere. The Good Friday Agreement gave us the political framework for peace and reconciliation, but on a day-to-day basis there is still much work to be done in building up that trust. We build to fill the centuries’ arrears, as the poet John Hewitt said.
As president, I couldn’t be involved in the political part — that’s the prime minister’s job — but I felt I could take on a pastoral mission. So we worked our way through all the onion layers, and talked with those who had been our enemies, who tried to turn us out of our homes, to really listen to them so we could learn what makes them tick. We made it something personal, rather than just a photo opportunity, and built up a connectedness between the office of the President of Ireland and a constituency that never thought it would have any connection at all with that office.
    
Q. What was an example of how you sought to accomplish this?
We focused on two very important historical dates. One was July 12, on which Protestants celebrate William of Orange’s victory in 1690 over King James. We decided we would show respect for that day, even though it was a battle in which Catholics got clobbered. Each year we held a formal, official event to commemorate both the Williamite/Protestant and the Jacobite/Catholic traditions, because we saw it as an opportunity to help people living cheek by jowl see that we are all successors to those traditions, and as neighbors must build a discourse that allows us to live today in a humanly decent and mutually respectful, peaceful way.
The other was 11/11 — Nov. 11 — which is the date the armistice was signed to end World War I. Now, there is a myth that only Unionists and Protestants fought in the Great War, and that the Catholics and Nationalists did not.
I grew up hearing how heroic the Protestant 36th Ulster was, and they were, but I did not hear about the Dubliners who fought alongside them. In all, some 250,000 volunteers from Ireland — mostly Nationalist and Catholic — served in the war, and 50,000 of them never came home. It suited the Irish Nationalist narrative to suppress the idea that Irish were fighting on the side of the British, so their contribution was marginalized or forgotten, and that allowed the Loyalist/Protestant narrative — which said no Catholics or Nationalists were involved – to take root.
So we joined forces with those who had been seeking to change these narratives, to get the truth out there. And we were able to create a space whereby Northern Loyalist paramilitaries could stand at the World War I memorial at Islandbridge in Dublin or at the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Belgium in memory of their relatives who had served, or been killed during the Great War.
These things took effort, and they took consistency, and sometimes courage, because people might not understand why you were doing them. Being from Belfast helped and having grown up as Catholics in Protestant communities helped. We had many Protestant friends who were willing to work with us to effect the reconciliation that had eluded past generations.

Q. Your appointment at BC has coincided with a particularly bitter period of partisanship in US politics, culminating in the federal government shutdown. Do you see any parallels or lessons in comparing the discord you saw in Northern Ireland with what’s going on in the US?
To be perfectly frank, although it was horrendous for the people who lived through it — the people who didn’t get paid, and others who were worried about America’s place in the global economy — I may have been one of the few in the country who took some meager crumb of comfort from this whole episode because it showed us in Ireland that fraught politics are not peculiar to Northern Ireland. There was a lot of tension in Northern Ireland this past summer, and the temper of discussion was generally crabby and contemptuous. So quite a lot of people got very fraught about the situation: “Things are terrible. Maybe the Good Friday Agreement isn’t working?”
My response was, “This is nothing abnormal – look what’s happening in America! And next week, next year, the Americans will find a way through it. Why? Because they have to.” Politics can get ugly and mean, but in the end politics are about getting through the things you need to get through. So please don’t jump up and down every time people have a spat — look at what’s been happening in Germany, when Angela Merkel was trying to form a government, or in Italy.
This is the normalization of political discourse. Yes, we would wish politicians were able to cope with disagreements; yes, we would wish that they wouldn’t fall out over tawdry and stupid things; and yes, we would wish they could handle things differently, and better. But this happens everywhere. It’s a very human phenomenon.
    
The full interview orginally appeared in the Nov. 14, 2013, edition of Boston College Chronicle, published by the Boston College Office of News & Public Affairs.