Mary McAleese served as the eighth president of Ireland from 1997 to 2011 and serves as the current President of the Advisory Board for the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.

Prior to her distinguished work as a public servant in Ireland, she held several positions in higher education. McAleese, who was Ireland's second female president and the first president born in Northern Ireland, described the theme of her presidency as “Building Bridges,” which was reflected in her efforts towards reconciliation and peacebuilding with Northern Ireland. An award-winning Catholic academic and author, she holds a licentiate and doctorate in canon law and serves as Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin and Professor of Children, Law, and Religion at the University of Glasgow. She is a member of the Council of Women World Leaders.

McAleese sat down over Zoom with Rebekah Go, the Ansari Institute’s Program and Communication Manager, to talk about McAleese’s invitation to speak at a workshop on religions and sustainability in Hamburg.The following has been edited and abridged for clarity and length.

We had planned to talk about a workshop you attended on “Religions in Transformation to Sustainability – the Role of the Sacred in Human Flourishing” at the New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. But first can you tell me a bit about the New Institute, this particular workshop you were a part of, and how you came to attend it?

The New Institute in Hamburg, set up a few years ago in a kind of quasi-monastic setting, is a very beautiful set of buildings in the center of Hamburg that have been renovated, and every year a number of scholars, somewhere between 20 and 30, will come and live there. They'll have the most beautiful rooms and all of their meals will be taken care of. They'll have a beautiful bar, a beautiful restaurant. They will eat together every meal and they will talk and they'll be from a variety of disciplines. They'll all be top scholars. Most of them will have at least one Ph.D., perhaps two, in a variety of subjects. Then they will bring all their brain power to bear on a single issue for a whole year and at the end of that year between them produce a book of new ideas to help humanity move out of whatever cul-de-sacs it's managed to push itself into.

So it's a wonderful place. I encourage anybody in the Ansari Institute or the Keough School to think of applying. They have people who are Nobel laureates. And it’s intergenerational. You have young scholars really just coming into their stride in their late twenties, scholars in their thirties, their forties, right up to their eighties, who have made huge contributions in their field. And what I love about it is, you wouldn't meet an ego anywhere!

So were you joining them at the end of their time there?

I was joining the scholars at the end of their year. They were pulling all their ideas into this workshop on religions and transformation to sustainability, looking at the role of the sacred and human flourishing. There were wonderful scholars from every conceivable religious perspective, all bringing their best to it. They've been reflecting on this for a year, bear in mind, so the workshop gathers them all together, and then they gather a bunch of outside scholars who are working in discrete areas that have some connection. In other words, at the end of the year, they have a fair idea what additional kind of scholars they want to draw in and draw from. And, of course, there will be a book that will come out of the workshop that we just held in Hamburg. I've already submitted my chapter.

Was there a specific person who invited you?

I have been working over a number of years with a young man called Dr. Ian Hughes, whom I first met when I worked as pro vice-chancellor at the Queens University of Belfast. He was a very young professor of physics and he came to me with ideas for a new type of master's degree which would be designed to create science literacy particularly among journalists. So he brought that idea to me, and between us we set up the first master's course in science literacy for journalists, and it was a joint effort by my University and Dublin City University. We created a whole new kind of discipline.

Then he decided that he was very worried about the state of democracy, about the way in which even the most liberal democracies, with all their protections and checks and balances, were nonetheless wide open to allowing people of very dubious character to the top of political leadership. He went off and he did a Ph.D. in psychology, out of which he wrote a book called Disordered Minds. He looked at how disordered minds manage to escape checks and balances and get into positions of power and leadership where they can – and have historically – done contemporaneously awful damage. He works with a think tank in University College Cork, whose job it is to try to bring fresh thinking to the things that prevent human flourishing, and he is also an advisor to our government on education matters. So he's really very high achieving. But, like all of the people I met at Hamburg, the humility of them is extraordinary. There isn't among them a hubristic or egotistical person. They are true scholars.

He invited another colleague not too far from you – Loyola University in Chicago, Miguel Diaz, who was formerly a U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. He is a very well-known theologian, but, more importantly, someone who has almost single-handedly created this wonderful new science of queer theology starting with the writings of St. John of the Cross, on which he is an authority, and then looking more recently at liberation theology and how it can open up to queer theology.

What did you take away from that time in Hamburg?

I went to Hamburg to talk about the role of the sacred in human flourishing and the extent to which the major religious institutions in the world could be part of a global, transcendent, overarching drive to focus on the sacred that all of these religions recognize, and to try and extract from that principles that are capable of being universally held. Putting aside all doctrinal differences, putting aside all historic vanities, putting aside all the times that they are not talking to each other and are living inside their own bubbles. Trying to say, “look, humanity is threatened at the moment. The very sciences that have helped us advance enormously are also capable of killing us. The very progress that we have made and that has brought great benefits to humanity is also killing the earth. So to protect humanity and to protect the earth, can we look again at the question of the sacredness of humanity and the sacredness of the earth?”

So all the religious denominations were represented, and the non-religious (because we firmly believe that even the non-religious, those who are atheistic or agnostic, will also hold a sense of the sacred). The first thing for us to do in Hamburg was to acknowledge that out of over seven billion people, the vast majority are aligned with one of the major religions. They will be Christian, they will be Muslim, they will be Hindu, they will be Buddhist, they will be Jewish. They will have had some kind of formation in a religious tradition. Some of it will be strong and some of it will be weak.

Then each of the major religious traditions has at least one document that is very helpful in this regard, that is setting an agenda that says, “we who are Buddhists, we who are Jews, we who are Muslims, we who are Christians, we who are Catholics, or Protestants, we believe in the sacredness of the earth. We believe that each of us has a responsibility for the protection of that sacredness. We also believe in the sacredness of humanity, and we believe we have a responsibility towards that human person, individually and collectively, and that the two are interlinked: that respect for the human person, the sacredness of that human person and the responsibility for it, links profoundly to respect for the earth and the sacredness of the earth.”

So what we were doing was looking for ways in which we could engage with those religious actors in what they have already said or done in their deeply held texts. Whether in the Qur’an, the Bible, the Talmud, or whatever. We were looking and drawing on that scholarship to create a body of thinking that joins us all in a universal acceptance of our responsibility for the sacredness of the human person, the sacredness of the earth; and that would in turn drive us to action and help humanity flourish. Because one of the worries we had going into the workshop is that if you look at how religions traditionally engage with these issues, they do have a tendency to be more comfortable reaching out to the world and saying to the world of politicians or technocrats, “here's how you should behave.” And what we are saying in Hamburg is, “yes, fine, but do not put your hopes in technology. That same technology can strangle us. Put your hope in changes of hearts and minds that lead to changes in praxis and practice and culture, and that means going back into each of your respective religious denominations or affiliations, and saying, ‘let us look internally, let us talk internally about what we can do inside, and by way of outreach, whether it's ecumenical or interfaith. And let us not just be the people who seem to be comfortable standing on pulpits, preaching outwards to the world. But let's look inwards and draw from our traditions and our thinking and indeed our dynamism.’”

It is a new language which we are calling the “politics of the sacred.” I was able to use a lot of Thomas Legrand’s work that I was actually introduced to at the Ansari Institute’s Annual Book Prize on Religion and the World event in February. Thomas talks about the “politics of being.” I introduced the Hamburg people to Legrand's work. They had never heard of him and I was so pleased because his work was completely in harmony with where we were going in Hamburg. Boy, were they glad to be introduced to his work. So I was so glad that I had that chance to meet him at Notre Dame, to be introduced to Thomas Legrand and his work The Politics of Being. He's opened up so many avenues of thinking for me.

I want to take this conversation in a different direction for a moment. I don't know if you've noticed over in Ireland, but here in the U.S. we have had a rather tumultuous week. [Editor’s Note: this interview was conducted within days of the assasination attempt on Donald Trump.] We are having a hard time finding a way to talk to each other across different viewpoints. You come from a country that has had similar challenges. Do you have any advice?

Yes, and I learned it from the good American Senator George Mitchell. Senator George Mitchell came as President Clinton’s special advisor to Northern Ireland early in what we now call the peace process. This was when we did not have the Good Friday Agreement, which we now have between all the warring parties in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland I grew up in was a conflict zone where war raged. There were murders and killings on a daily basis – at my front door. We were the victims of that, my own family and friends.

That was a politics that was raw and rude and sectarian, and even misogynistic and nasty. And these were all Christians, God help us! And if you were to look at how they dealt with each other, there was a meanness in politics. There was a nastiness. And of course it outcropped in appalling violence. And then today's violence would be the seed of tomorrow's violence. Nobody really got the chance for the wounds to be healed; they were always being reopened. Of course they didn't talk to each other. Any attempts at talking to each other broke down very quickly because both sides had a very hubristic sense of themselves, and had a sense of themselves as victims and viewed the other as the creator of their victimhood. So the scope for intelligent and respectful dialogue was very limited, to put it mildly. Then along came George Mitchell.

George Mitchell, in my view, is a saint. He actually deserves to be canonized. He came to Ireland and he talked to all the players over and over and over. What he was trying to hear from them, particularly in private, was if there was the remotest, even the tiniest, space for compromise. Because if you were listening to them on the outside, there was not. Everything was hard edged. So he talked and talked and put questions to them, trying to see, are there any frayed ends he could pull? And it took him a while. He thought he was coming for three months and he was here for six years. And one of the things that he did, which was so unlike our politics, was he never lost his cool. He always remained calm; he was always genial; he was always gentlemanly. Even when he had tough things to say, he always said it in an utterly respectful, calm manner.

We were kind of like, “where does this guy come from? What planet does he come from? We've never met anybody like this before.” Then people started to realize – and he pointed out to them actually – if you cut out the nasty language and deal with each other respectfully, at the very least, you won't make things worse. That's the first thing. That's the backstop. You'll stop making things worse, if you just try to be decent with each other. He was always meeting individually, not in groups, because the group was always the place where breakdowns happened. But eventually he got them into each other's orbit, and he was able to go from one to the other and say, “I hear from you that there might be a little bit of movement here.” And eventually people who had held out for a hundred percent of everything – which was self-defeating – agreed that 90% of something was better than 100% of nothing. So George Mitchell taught us the value of what I would call respectful discourse across the most poisonous toxic politics.

So here we are 26 years after the Good Friday Agreement and we have two parties in a shared government who used to hate each other and still don't like each other very much, and honestly they talk in respectful terms about each other. They travel to events together. They talk nicely about each other, even while saying tough things about each other's politics. They encourage each other. I have lived long enough to see the miracle that comes from dialogue and discussion, but that dialogue and discussion has to be underpinned by respect and an agreement that you won't walk away from each other, that you will not lose friends.

I think people are terribly scared. My son lives in the States and I have an awful lot of relatives there. I know people are afraid of losing the friendship of family and friends whose politics are not theirs. We are not educated in how to bridge this toxic chasm. We're not educated in it. We weren't in Northern Ireland.

I have to say, I come from a church that is always talking about evangelism and the Protestant churches in Northern Ireland are very proselytism driven and evangelism driven. It is not a good mix. Because they engage with you for the purpose of converting you. “I want to make you me, and when you are me and you accept my politics and my religion, we will all be happy.” Well, that is not a decent way to behave. That is outrageously unsympathetic to people's human rights, to their conscience, to their opinions, their beliefs, their right to believe whatever they want to believe. So when I was the President of Ireland I said from the very beginning, I have no interest in proselytism. I have no interest in evangelism. I am not inviting people to my home, the President's home, for a photo opportunity. I want to build friendships. I want to build a culture of good neighborliness. I want us to be able to talk hard, talk as friends, and walk away from tough discussions still being friends. We did that. It's been very successful. It is doable.

It strikes me that America is just on the edge of that crater. You can fall into the toxic crater of fragmented relations and it's going to take people of great courage to say let's talk. And let's talk first about our kids, because this is what I'd always say when people of opposing views came to visit. I don't want to talk politics with you because that could lead to breakdown. Could we talk about our kids? Could we talk about the kind of future you want for them? How do you think we could get there? What kind of things do you think stop us from getting there? And how do you think our relationships could help to create the stepping stones for our children to that future? How can we, just through befriending one another, create those stepping stones that our children could safely walk on and show that, to quote Seamus Heaney, “a further shore is reachable from here.”

I know that it has been a terrible time in America – the awful shooting of Donald Trump and Joe Biden under the kind of pressure that he's under. There comes a point in all of this where I am glad that I was reared in a tradition where, when you reach a precipice that you haven't got a bridge across and there's a block behind you that you have no bridge back to, that's when you pray. So I'm always glad that I learned how to pray.

Thank goodness, yes. Amen.

Originally published by Rebekah Go at ansari.nd.edu on August 16, 2024.