Review
A fitting salute to the Belfast-born first lady of Ireland, says Sean McMahon.
- First Citizen
- O'Brien Press
First Citizen
Ireland has been fortunate in its presidents, particularly in its two latest ones.
Both women were/are extremely clever, the first Mary characterised by adamantine brilliance and the other softer, more radiant with laughter. (In many photographs, both public and personal, the subject is wreathed in smiles or helpless with mirth.) She has found it easier to be a president for all of the people of Ireland because of a childhood and maturity in the once peaceful and tolerant Belfast made hideous by deliberately fostered sectarian hatred, the confident career as an academic on both sides of the border, as television presenter and neophyte politician.
The story of her ascent to the highest titular office in the land is almost like a modern fairytale, as the wide-eyed, bespectacled, grinning graduate on p.71 morphs through several avatars into the queen of Áras an Uachtaráin (if that is not a contradiction) on the later pages. O’Brien Press have done an appropriately elegant job with weighty boards, the artiest of paper and superbly reproduced pix, the cheesy strap on the back page: ‘From Ardoyne to the Áras’ the only serious flaw in taste.
Patsy McGarry, as a working journalist has excellent access to the facts about the occasional protocol risks the president ran but his instinct for the ‘good story’ sometimes unbalances the necessary serious account. Mary, Mary could be quite contrary but like her predecessor she has redefined the nature of the office.
Sean McMahon