When Éamon de Valera was leaving Áras an Uachtaráin in 1973, he sent an invitation to RTÉ staff to come out and visit. Buses lined up and the newsroom emptied as people took their chance to see the Áras and Dev. I stayed behind. Apart from the fact that Dev was about as popular in our house as the Pope in Ballymena, he represented so much of what was wrong with our country.
Dev and his 1937 Constitution, with its “special position” for the Roman Catholic Church and its ban on divorce and contraception, set in stone a confessional Catholic state. Catholics and Protestants were educated separately, socialised separately, and rarely intermarried, largely due to the Catholic insistence that children of mixed marriages be brought up Catholic.
In my school education, being Catholic was seen as more important than being Irish. The tribe was more important than the State. Indeed, the Catholic Church was deeply suspicious of the State. This tribal split had created a fissure in Irish society and weakened people’s sense of citizenship and allegiance to their institutions. So often, when I saw a picture of President De Valera, he was kissing the ring of some Catholic cardinal or archbishop. That told its own story. Our head of State should be a symbol of unity, not division.
Dev’s successor, Erskine Childers, had a much surer sense of an inclusive presidency. A Protestant, he insisted that the service in St Patrick’s Cathedral which preceded his inauguration was interdenominational. In the Áras, which had been stripped of so much evidence of its viceregal past, Childers brought back plaques in the grounds commemorating royal visitors – something of which former Northern Ireland premier Terence O’Neill took note.
As for President Mary Robinson, one of her first decisions was to attend the memorial service in Dublin for the Irish dead of the two world wars. Until then, no Irish president had ever formally respected the 35,000 Irish – Protestant and Catholic – who died fighting in the first World War, or the many thousands who died in the second. Previous presidents had been invited, but the advice from government was that the president did not attend memorial services for the armed forces of other countries. Robinson broke that taboo, and subsequent presidents continued the tradition. Over the decades, the presidency has been used to create greater national unity.
And this is where Heather Humphreys comes in. The great Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler wrote cogently about the price this State paid for not having the dissenter tradition, represented by Irish Protestants, as part of our public debate. It was something for which he excoriated his own community as much as the Catholic one. And sure enough, few Irish Protestants have been elected as TDs or appointed to cabinet.
But now there’s Humphreys: a Presbyterian from the Ulster county of Monaghan, a TD for many years, a Cabinet minister for rural and community development, for social protection and, for a period, justice. She has plenty of experience and comes from a proud tradition. So why didn’t she say more about that in the first debate of the election campaign this week? Why didn’t she make more of the unique role she could play as an Ulster Presbyterian president?
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If we are serious about a united Ireland – or even a shared island – it is vital that we learn to accommodate the nearly one million Protestants in the North. In recent years there has been more and more talk about a Border poll. But people of my generation who lived through the Troubles will quote John Hume’s axiom: the importance of uniting people rather than territory. There is a job of reconciliation to be done with the unionist community in Northern Ireland, whether or not we have a united Ireland.
Heather Humphreys is uniquely placed to lead that effort as president. Other presidents have done their bit to improve relations with the UK and with unionism. Even while the Republic and the UK were both members of the EU, and Irish ministers were regular visitors to London, no Irish president went to the UK. President Hillery, invited to the wedding of Charles and Diana, was advised to refuse. While relations at a political level had normalised, the president was kept at home to be rattled like a nationalist skeleton if the British got too complacent.
Mary Robinson changed that by persuading a very reluctant Charles Haughey to let her attend the opening of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London in 1991. That broke the taboo and led to various visits to Britain and a visit with the Queen. Mary McAleese, a northern nationalist, used her time in the presidency to build relationships with former loyalist paramilitaries. She worked hard at her promise to build bridges. She also welcomed Queen Elizabeth II on her first state visit to Ireland, a role she performed with dignity and warmth. The fact that she was a northern nationalist added extra significance to that moment of Anglo-Irish history. President Higgins carried off his 2013 return visit with aplomb.
Heather Humphreys could play her own role in the history of this island – because of who she is, where she comes from, what she’s done, and because after three decades of relative peace, perhaps the time is right. We’ve had Protestant presidents before, but none with Humphreys’s unique blend of common sense, Monaghan warmth, and her link with northern Presbyterians. The problem is, judging by her performance in this week’s television debate, she doesn’t believe in herself. She was the least convincing of all three candidates as to what her role could be.
At this stage, there’s no avoiding Yeats: you come from “no petty people”. Heather. C’mon.
Olivia O’Leary is a journalist, writer and current-affairs presenter
