Broadcasting icon Mary Kennedy and former President of Ireland Mary McAleese are standing in their underwear. They are getting ready to shoot their very first shot for this exclusive photoshoot and are hooking themselves into the one of the outfits we have picked. There’s no faffing, no fuss, no airs, no graces – just Spanx and hairspray! We love them for caring not a jot.
The morning started with glam – with makeup and hair and chat – lots of chat from Mary McAleese, who henceforth in this interview will be known as Mary Mc. But, to Mary K, it’s Mary McIreland – that’s how the broadcaster has the former President saved in her phone! Mary K is not long back from New York where she picked up a chest infection. She’s a bit under the weather today but still, she labours through, like the pro that she is.
We’ll let you read the interview to see how their friendship began. But, it’s how it’s wound up that has us here at Barberstown Castle, in the village of Straffan, today. In an exciting new venture, these two titans of their respective domains have joined forces to launch a captivating new podcast series. Called Changing Times – The Allenwood Conversations these two ladies have been sitting down and chatting to people with stories to tell. Their joint black book of contacts is, as you can imagine, unmatchable. So far they’ve gone in depth with former newsreader Anne Doyle; with Mary K’s nephew, singer/songwriter Dermot Kennedy and with Mary Mc’s pal, the new GAA President, Jarlath Burns. Together they are curious, considered and thoughtful interviewers and it makes for gorgeous listening.
Back in their comfy clothes later, we sit and chat about friendship, family, faith, public life, presidential days and knitting.
So, tell us, how did the two of you wind up as friends?
Mary Mc: The same walking group. It started out when we did the Camino together way back in 2008. I brought a group of friends, Mary brought a group of friends and off we went.
Mary K: We have lost two of our walking friends down through the years, both very tragically, but our group is still very tight. This month, twenty of us are off to hike in Bobbio, Italy in the footsteps of St. Columbanus.
What a great circle you have maintained because it can be easy to let friendships fall away.
Mary Mc: We do invest in it, we’re on WhatsApp regularly.
Mary K: There’s a lot of ol’ banter and in fairness that does keep us tight. I think that we are both conscious of nurturing our friendships.
Mary Mc: Life is short, no matter how long our lives are, they are unbelievably short, and one of the great gifts you get in your life if you are lucky, is great friends.
Was it while up trekking a mountain that the two of you decided to do this podcast?
Mary K: My partner Tom is an avid podcast listener. He loves the ones with duos and was very taken with The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. There’s a nice kind of dynamic between the two presenters and he just thought that the dynamic between the two of us would work really well. So, after several cups of tea with Tom and Martin (Mary Mc’s husband) and our producer Enda, we said we’d give it a whirl. It’s very important for both of us that this podcast is happening outside the metropolis, in Kildare, and that our guests come to this beautiful place where Enda has his studio on the Bog of Allen.
Why is that so important to you both?
Mary K: I think there’s always a huge emphasis on Dublin and on that capitalcentric viewpoint. I live in the city, I love the city and I’ll never move but I love rural Ireland. Having worked for so many years on Nationwide I value the riches, the personality, the character that exists all around the island of Ireland.
Mary Mc: I live in rural Roscommon though my husband and I are both city kids. I have nothing against the city at all but there is something about having time for people in the country. Rural Ireland just makes you relax. We live on the banks of the Shannon and we have a wee boat, a tiny boat, and we can’t go anywhere in a hurry in our boat, it’s just not possible. We amble up the river and I like to think what we’re doing in The Allenwood Conversations is kind of like an amble through someone’s life. We’re not chasing politics and we’re not chasing the story of the day. We wanted the podcast to be a place where we had time for whoever it was we were talking to.
Brian Dobson launched the podcast. Dermot Kennedy, your nephew Mark K, was your first guest. GAA President Jarlath Burns, your pal Mary Mc, was the second. And, after this shoot, you’re off to interview Anne Doyle. Your joint black book of contacts is unmatchable. Can we steal it?!
Mary K: Everyone we have contacted so far has been very willing to take part and we’re very grateful for that. We’re both curious people and interested in what makes people tick. But yes, we do have a good ole list of contacts!
Mary Mc: And we’re coming for the people on our contact list! You both have surely been asked every question, every which way by interviewers.
Turning the tables, how are you going about your questioning?
Mary K: We’re not interrogators, we’re just chatting and listening, dying to hear what they want to share. Our role is to let the story flow from them.
Mary Mc: But it’s interesting because all of the people we have done so far have said that the way we have come at the questions has provoked them into saying things that they never have talked about before. Our questions are simple and gentle.
What do your children (between them they have seven children and many grandchildren) think?
Mary Mc: So far, so good! I got mega kudos from my grandson for the Dermot Kennedy interview! He was like, ‘Oh nana, you are a legend’!
Mary K: Actually I was talking to Dermot yesterday and he was saying that he’d never done an interview before where he talked about his values and his beliefs. Definitely, people saw a side to Dermot Kennedy that they hadn’t seen before.
We didn’t know for example how playing football is his happy place; how the world falls quiet when he’s on a pitch. What clears your mind?
Mary K: For me, it would be hiking – Tom and I love hiking. It’s because it’s a physical activity that you don’t have to think about too much. It’s about getting up and down the hill, one foot after another.
Mary Mc: I like hiking too but Mary’s ten steps ahead of me always, she’s like a mountain goat! For me, I like to get to a sort of meditative space in my head and one of the things that does that for me is knitting. When I was President, Martin used to joke that I’d be the first President in a car crash who’d been speared to death by a knitting needle! Because you know the way the cars go really fast around the
bends?! He always had this idea that sooner or later I’d stab myself to death! Or him possibly! But yes, I knitted my way through 14 years in the Áras!
Is it the repetitive nature of knitting that you like?
Mary Mc: It’s a project, it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end and you have to follow the plan to get to the end. I just like having a project, like I love doing jigsaw puzzles, too. I am never idle, if I’m not knitting, I’m sewing. In my house, I have made all the curtains, all the cushions, all the bedcovers. They’re all projects.
You are both apparently ‘retired’ but both are very project-driven in retirement!
Mary K: Yes, I think I do need to have projects. If I don’t have a project, I get a little bit in on myself, a little bit down. It’s also stimulating. And I find it hard to bypass an opportunity. Having said that, I have also got to a stage where I don’t want to be busy all the time because you know, I don’t know how much longer I have left but, what I do know is that I really want to have relationships with my grandchildren. This morning my grandson came into my bedroom and said, ‘Nana, can I get into your bed for a cuddle’. I mean, that’s what life is about.
Mary Mc: I just think you’re a long time dead! I don’t want to be morbid but we’re going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than we lived! I just want to enjoy everything that is out there before I start to go down the rabbit hole of some awful illness!
Talking about kids and family, singer/songwriter Lily Allen came out recently and said that while her children are the best thing that ever happened to her, they absolutely destroyed her career and that the system is broken. You’ve both had prolific careers and you have seven children between you so this was not really your experience, was it?
Mary Mc: My kids never held me back from doing anything. But on the other hand I am very fortunate, I am the eldest of nine kids and Martin’s father came to live with us when my daughter was only four months and he stayed with us for 18 years so we had a built-in babysitter. Also, we could afford other babysitters because we had two jobs until Martin went back to become a full-time student. I was certainly able to structure a life where I had the support that allowed me to pretty much do whatever I wanted. I was just lucky that way.
Mary K: Even though I had a very good co-parenting set-up with my ex-husband, there were jobs I didn’t go after because I didn’t want to be away too much from the kids. There was a full-time job I would have loved in the news department in RTÉ but I chose to stay doing part-time things.Open House was from October to May and you were finished in the afternoon so that worked. And my family were a great support, my sister Deirdre was around, as were my friends.
What age were your children Mary Mc, when you served your two terms as President?
My twins were 13 and my eldest girl was 15. We moved them to Dublin from the comfort of their gorgeous village in Northern Ireland where their granddad lived with them, where their other granny and grandad lived around the corner and where their school was just down the road. That was difficult for them.
Really?
It was, yeah. They didn’t really embrace it wholeheartedly, particularly our youngest daughter, she found it very difficult. Justin, my son, is one of the most curious people in the world and he’s also one of the most sociable so in a house with a staff, an army, civil servants, and people working in the catering side, he just loved it. And there were 99 rooms for him to explore. He had every one of them visited within days. Then there were the Gardai stationed around; he went around and found out who was from Donegal and who was a runner and who could run with his daddy! It was like Disney for Justin! Emma rowed so she immediately decided the best thing to do was to join the local rowing club – so that was terrific. SaraMai on the other hand decided she was just going to be a pure martyr and she just indulged in pure misery for most of the first year! She hated life, hated her parents, hated Dublin and had decided she was going back to Northern Ireland to live with her grandparents.
And were you and Martin humouring this decision?
We were at first because we were being pulled in so many different directions. Then she announced to us that she was going back to her old school and we kind of nodded and said we’d think about it and then one Saturday morning I remember waking up and sitting bolt upright in the bed and giving Martin a dig and I said, ‘What are we thinking, we are the adults around here, it’s not happening, she is not going back’. I went into her bedroom and got her out of bed, the other two had already gone down to the river to row, and I said, ‘You are going to row whether you like it or not’. On the way down I felt terrible because I was never that type of mother but I was just at the end of my tether. The whole way down to the club I prayed and I swear to God somebody was listening because when we got down to the river, there were four handsome fellas, all under 14s and, they had no coxswain, the coxswain hadn’t turned up. I said to the coach, ‘Can you do anything with her?’. And he said, ‘I can’. She got into that boat and that was at 9am and she arrived back to the Áras at 6pm and never mentioned going back to Rostrevor again.
No way!
Yes! And, she became a great rower! She ended up in Oxford studying biochemistry but went there because of the rowing. She would say herself and she has great personal insight, that those moments in her life, made her and strengthened her because we didn’t indulge her.
Presume then you’ve all watched the Apple series and read the book, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (it’s about a rower and biochemist)?!
Mary Mc: Absolutely, loved the book, loved the series! It’s one of Sara’s favourites, sure she’s a biochemist!
Talking about political life: what about Leo Varadkar stepping down as Taoiseach for both professional and personal reasons? Having served two terms as a President, you must appreciate the pressures of public life?
Mary Mc: I do, but to some extent – as President – I was preserved from the worst of it. Leo has been in politics since he was 20 years old. He’s only 45 now. I have known Leo since he was a teenager, his parents were good friends of mine and his father was our family doctor. I am very proud of Leo and I am proud that he had the personal insight to know that this was his time to go and have a life. I think there’s great courage and humility in him. I thought he was just magisterial in what he did. Politics is a dreadfully miserable hard life. And you have to have the kind of passion for it, that allows you to transcend all the stuff that is flung at you.
Mary K: I think people in public life make huge sacrifices. I also acknowledge Leo’s courage in not sacrificing the joy of life for status, power and control. And, I admire Simon Harris for taking up the baton now, a young man, with a young family. Because his life will be even more difficult than it was last week.
Mary K, we know you were in the U.S. for St. Patrick’s Day. We felt that Leo was strong when he spoke to President Biden on Gaza…
Totally. I felt it was the right, Christian thing to do. It can’t go on, it’s wrong, it’s cruel. I thought he was great but he does have that moral fibre.
Mary K, you are off now to uphold your charity commitments with St Vincent De Paul, but thank you for your time.
And thank you VIP for your support.
Mark Mc, let’s talk about your glass-ceiling-smashing years. You were among the first three women to practise law in the North. You were appointed as Trinity College’s Reid Professor of Criminal Law while still in your 20s. You were the second female President ever in office and while there you challenged Pope John Paul II when he offered his hand first to your husband rather than to the President herself. You are a woman that has great courage, where does that courage come from?
It’s a question I’ve often wondered about myself. I am one of 9 kids and we are all very different. Is it because as the firstborn you get all that attention? But mind you in our case it rapidly evaporated because eight more came along! But, I think it’s somewhere in my nature. I have a streak of…[thinking] not stubbornness, but of determination, and as my mum used to always say, she won’t let her bone go with the dog! And I won’t! I was never good at sport but I was good at debating and thinking and putting thinking together. In my school, they didn’t teach philosophy but I went to the headmistress and asked could we be taught philosophy because, from a young age, I was interested in probing questions. I also think being Catholic in Northern Ireland I grew up with a very heightened sense of injustice. And, at an early stage, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer which was non-normative. My father had left school at 14, my mother at 15. He was a barman, she was a hairdresser. They would have loved to have had the chance of education. I got that. I was a good student, I always worked hard and I wasn’t a messer. I come from a long line of non-messers.
As well as being courageous you are also strong. Can anybody win in an argument against you?
All the time! My children and grandchildren were sent to torment me! When Martin’s father lived with us I lost every argument because he’d take the kids’ side all the time. It was like the Court of Appeal that we could never win! I lose every argument about women in the church, regularly, and gay rights in the church, unfortunately.
So you lose arguments. But have you lost your faith?
My faith has kept me going through my life. That’s where my strength comes from, I think. I do have a real deep faith in God. It was through the Catholic Church that I came to know the faith I have. But the governance structure of the Catholic Churchmdrives me really mad because it’s so out of touch and out of time.
Finally Mary Mc, from working-class Belfast to the grand house in the Phoenix Park with its 99 rooms – how did being a President change you?
I think probably what it did, not just for me, but for my family, was it gave us an opportunity for a breadth of insight. Did it change me as a person? It probably did because the range of friendships that grew from the bridge-building helped me to finesse my views and to self-critique. So yes being a President did change me.
