MCALEESE, MARY

born June 27, 1951, Belfast, N.Ire. ne Mary Patricia Leneghan president of Ireland (Uachtarn na hireann) from 1997. Raised on the edge of the nationalist Ardoyne area of Belfast, Northern Ireland, from which her family was forced to flee in the early 1970s because of paramilitary violence, McAleese attended the Queen's University of Belfast and qualified as a barrister at the Inns of Court of Northern Ireland in 1974. She served as Reid professor of criminal law, criminology, and penology at Trinity College in Dublin in 197579 and 198187, and she also worked as a journalist and announcer for RT (the Irish national television service) in 197981. In 1987 she became director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen's University, and she was named its first Roman Catholic pro vice-chancellor in 1994. An unapologetic and nationalist Catholic with conservative views on abortion and divorce, she was a member of the Catholic church's delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984 but was also critical of the church hierarchy on a number of issues. She ran unsuccessfully as a candidate of the Fianna Fil party in 1987 for a parliamentary constituency in Dublin and was surprisingly selected ahead of Albert Reynolds, prime minister (taoiseach) of Ireland from 1992 to 1994, to be the Fianna Fil candidate for the 1997 presidential election. Following an occasionally scurrilous campaign in which she was accused of sympathizing with Sinn Fin, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), she won by a record margin to become the country's first president from Northern Ireland. Michael Marsh