February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The president said she was “devastated” by the unionist outcry, especially as she had dedicated the first seven years of her office to building bridges with the unionist community.
Her apology and explanation appear to have mollified most unionists, although loyalist sources have warned her to stay away from the Shankill Road in Belfast and the Orange Order has yet to reinstate a meeting it had cancelled after the original comments, although it welcomed the apology.
The row began after McAleese gave an interview to RTE last Thursday, the eve of her attendance at 60th anniversary commemorations to mark the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. She told the interviewer that anti-Semitism, which had existed for decades, had been built upon by the Nazis. “They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews,” she said.
Continuing, she added, “In the same way, for example, that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different color.”
The words sparked an immediate and ferocious response from unionists. Senior Ulster Unionist Michael McGimpsey accused McAleese of showing “a profound lack of understanding for Jews as well as the people of Northern Ireland.”
He said he felt “extremely insulted,” but as the president of the Irish Republic, McAleese was “a lady who means nothing to me.”
Lord Laird of the UUP accused McAleese of deliberately timing her comments to reduce pressures on the IRA over the Northern Bank raid and, along with UK Unionist Robert McCartney, called for her resignation.
Laird said Protestants in the Republic had been subjected to a process of ethnic cleansing and accused the Irish government of failing to live up to its commitments in the Good Friday agreement on, for example, the Ulster-Scots language.
The DUP North Antrim Assembly member, Ian Paisley Jr., asked: “How dare she attempt to make a comparison between the Protestant community and Nazi fascists? McAleese has to look a little closer to her own community for fascism.
“The timing is sick. Every decent Protestant should be incensed by the comparison. So much for bridge building, Mary. Her comments are designed to insult the integrity of the Protestant community and damn an entire generation.”
Not everyone was so critical of the president, however. The SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, said the outcry was “grossly unfair” and that the president was drawing lessons from the prejudice that led to the Holocaust.
He pointed out that McGimpsey had “explained and excused” loyalist attacks on an apartment block in his constituency where Catholics and minority races had bought property.
“As for Ian Paisley Jr., he rushes to condemn the president but refused to condemn the bigotry of Harryville,” he said, referring to a suburb of Ballymena where loyalists mounted a 21-month-long picket against Catholic Mass-goers.
“Other unionist politicians who rushed to condemn the president could not find it in their hearts to say anything about what was being visited on school children at Holy Cross,” he said, citing the 2001 loyalist picket of the school in Ardoyne.
Durkan added that McAleese “highlights prejudice wherever she finds it.”
Within 24 hours of the comments being broadcast, McAleese said she was “deeply sorry,” adding, “The words I used were clumsy. The last thing I would want to do is to create the impression that sectarianism came from only one side of the community.”
She apologized for any damage done and said she was “absolutely devastated” by the impact her comments were having on unionists and referred to sectarianism is a “shared problem.”
Some unionists accepted the apology. The UUP leader, David Trimble, said, “I’m glad that there has been an apology, because I considered the remarks remarkably ill-judged. It is most unlike her to make a mistake of that nature.”