President has lost the sure touch she displayed during her first term

DURING her first term as President, Mary McAleese never put a foot wrong, but in the past year she has fouled up on a number of occasions. Indeed, she seems to be suffering from that dreaded public disease, foot-in-mouth.

Little over a year ago she was speaking in connection with the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz extermination camp. She complained that the Nazis had given “to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics”.

What she said was true, but it was only half of the truth. The full truth would have been to admit that there are also Catholic parents in Northern Ireland who have inculcated in their own children the same kind of irrational hatred of Protestants.

“It was never my intention going into it simply to blame one side of the community in Northern Ireland,” she later explained. But the fact is that she did only blame one side and she gave the bigots on that side of the fence a stick to beat their own drum.

Ian Paisley professes to be a committed Christian, but at times he does not appear to know the meaning of forgiveness, or of love. Put him on the stump and his rabble-rousing instincts break out as he preaches a gospel of hate.

He is not personally bigoted. Unlike many fanatics, he has a very good sense of honour.

A former Irish Press reporter tells the story of being sent to Belfast to interview him one day. He called to Paisley’s home and was invited in and treated most hospitably.

Paisley answered all the questions and at the end of the interview invited the reporter to come to one of his meetings that evening to see how things were run.

The reporter accepted the invitation and just as they were going into the meeting, Paisley told him to stick close and nothing would happen to him.

As the meeting began Paisley announced that his guest was from - and at this point he roared - THE IRISH PRESS, and he proceeded to rant and rave against the de Valera-owned newspaper. It was just an act, and all the people there probably knew it. Paisley has been doing this for over 50 years. He became involved in the Fethard-on-Sea controversy back in 1957, when the Protestant wife of a Catholic man fled to the North from Co Wexford with her children because she did not want them educated in a Catholic school. Local people retaliated by boycotting innocent Protestant business people. Local clergy inflamed matters, as did a number of bishops. The Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, denounced the boycott as misguided.

The estranged couple soon reconciled and educated their children at home. It was an Irish solution to that Irish problem.

At the end of last month, Mary McAleese made a somewhat controversial speech in Cork on the significance of 1916. She went over the top in essentially suggesting that the Easter Rebellion was responsible for our current prosperity.

“With each passing year, post-Rising Ireland reveals itself, and we who are of this strong, independent and high-achieving Ireland would do well to ponder the extent to which today’s freedoms, values, ambitions and success rest on that perilous and militarily doomed undertaking of nine decades ago, and on the words of that Proclamation. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally,” she said, quoting from the Proclamation.

Surely she is not so naive as to believe we cherished the children who were abused in our industrial schools and orphanages. Should we just forget about them again? With the script for that speech, which would have been approved by the Government, the President walked into another controversy.

That, and last year’s Nazi faux pas, afforded Ian Paisley an opportunity to take a swipe at her during his speech at Democratic Unionist Party conference the following weekend.

“I don’t like her because she is dishonest,” he said. “She pretends to love this province and she hates it.”

WHAT do you expect from a pig but a grunt? Nobody in this State was going to believe that attack, but Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern felt he had to confront Paisley in case his silence might be misinterpreted. “I said to him that I, on behalf of the Irish Government, but also on behalf of the Irish people, categorically found his remarks unacceptable, unwarranted and untrue.”

Of course, this was playing right into Paisley’s hands in his own backyard. Paisley has always relished the thought of giving a piece of his mind to any Irish minister, and it was all the better when he could take another sideswipe at our President.

Paisley said he told Ahern “in no uncertain language that when she made remarks about Northern Ireland and called us Unionists Nazis that they were strangely silent.... Look, I said, you’re not refuting anything I said, because you can’t, for I said the truth, and you’ll just have to take it”. He went on to say the Republic was a sectarian State. Much as we may dislike it, we must accept that throughout most of the last century this was a sectarian State in which our gutless politicians essentially allowed the Catholic hierarchy to exercise a political veto on our public affairs.

But, of course, Dermot Ahern was not prepared to accept that. He told Paisley he would not “take lectures on sectarianism” from him.

Sure he might as well have been talking to the wall. It takes two to engage in that kind of puerile argument, and Dermot Ahern should have had more sense. If Paisley is going to behave like a child and throw his rattle out of the pram, ignore him. It’s just an act, but arguing with him allows him to duck his electoral responsibility. Hence the latest talks turned into a farce.

Mary McAleese has got her feet tangled up in her mouth a couple of times since.

She announced in Saudi Arabia that the Irish people abhorred the Danish cartoons. How could they? Most have not seen them. Anyone that I know who has viewed them is perplexed at how anyone could be upset by them. The whole thing is a bogus controversy.

But on Thursday, the President got up on her high horse and defended her remarks. “First of all I am the President of Ireland and that speaks for itself,” she said. “And secondly, before I left Ireland I was fully briefed by the Government as to their view.”

The President’s public speeches are vetted and approved in advance by the Government, which is therefore responsible. She had a very good record in her first term and has real potential to do good, but anyone on a high horse with a foot in her mouth is riding for a fall. She needs to get her feet back on the ground.