McAleese cancels Shankill visit

She later said she was “deeply sorry” for the offense her “clumsy” remarks had caused and added that some Catholic parents were just as guilty, but many unionists were not mollified.
Shankill community worker Baroness May Blood said the president made the right decision in canceling the visit.
“If I was advising the president, I would say let the dog lie for a while,” she said. “Then perhaps invite people down to her home in Dublin, which she has done before, or perhaps meet other people and try to build these bridges. I’m sure Mary McAleese has the skills to do it, but it will take a bit of time on the Shankill.”
Loyalists had threatened street protests against the president if she visited the Shankill, despite her apology.
In an RTE interview on Jan. 28, on the eve of her attendance at the 60th anniversary commemorations to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, President McAleese, referring to the Nazis, said, “They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews. In the same way, for example, that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics.”
McAleese had been due to go to Edenbrooke Primary School during a visit to Belfast on Thursday, Feb. 24. Unionist politicians had called on her to call off the visit in the wake of the controversy.
A joint statement from the DUP, Ulster Unionists and Progressive Unionists said the apology had not undone the offense.
“There was a great deal of anger among people who live locally at Mary McAleese’s words,” said the DUP’s West Belfast MP, Diane Dodds.
The Ulster Unionist councilor for the area, Chris McGimpsey, said McAleese would be welcomed back to the Shankill Road in the future, but the time was not right.
“I think to have come now would not have been a sensible approach,” he said. “I don’t feel it would have helped the cause of reconciliation which she has involved herself in over the past seven years.
McAleese had made the comments before attending ceremonies marking 60 years since Auschwitz was liberated. However, she later said she regretted her remarks and that sectarianism was a “shared problem.”
She said she was “personally absolutely devastated” by the furor, that her critics had been “absolutely right,” and acknowledged she had been clumsy and had hurt people.
Meanwhile, speaking in the European Parliament at Strasbourg in France on Monday, the DUP’s Jim Allister called the president’s remarks “shameful, vicious and vindictive.”
“In the name of the peace loving majority in Northern Ireland, I take this opportunity, in this international forum, to refute and reject this vile attack upon my people,” he said.