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Prior to her appearance at a glittering event hosted by the Embassy of Ireland at the Four Seasons Hotel, the President was welcomed in Victoria by the Honourable Iona Campagnolo, the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. After her arrival in Vancouver, she made a courtesy visit to City Hall to shake hands with Mayor Larry Campbell. The following day she held a brief meeting with the other Campbell, Premier Gordon Campbell. The Celtic Connection had an opportunity to sit down with the President for an exclusive interview on the afternoon of May 27. On this tour, the President was accompanied by a trade delegation consisting of 29 Irish aeronautical and technological companies and I asked if this aspect of her tour has been successful. She said, “the trade aspect has been extraordinarily successful. We had a business breakfast this morning and there were 300 people at that event expressing an interest in doing business with Ireland. “The trip has a number of aspects and the trade element is one. We think British Columbia is a very synergistic partner for Ireland given the scale of it, the size of it, where your industry strengths are, particularly in the digital, hi-tech sectors. “This is an area which synchronizes very well with modern Ireland’s industrial ambitions and current industrial strengths and successes. We need to globalize and British Columbia wants to globalize its trade, we are both heavily trade dependent, we are both very successful in the sphere of trade and bringing prosperity to the widest number of our people, but we want to keep that prosperity going. “We see tremendous opportunities and already there are significant partnerships between British Columbia and Ireland and we want to build on those and develop on these as far as possible. “So the feedback from everyone who has been on the trade delegation has been first-class. They are really pleased. We were talking to Premier Campbell earlier today, and he is very strongly of the view that the cultural compatibility and the trade compatibility are very important seed beds of future co-operation. “The other side of the coin, of course, is the opportunity to touch base with our Irish community here in Vancouver. I have been on a state visit before to Canada but didn’t get a chance to get as far as Vancouver I regret to say. I wish I had now as it is so exquisitely beautiful, I wish I had got here a lot earlier. “I was very conscious for quite some time now that this was really a community that I wanted to meet and they are really wonderful people. We had a wonderful reception with them last night and I met the Irish Women’s Network today who are mighty feisty women. “So, it’s been very important from that point of view as there is a great connectedness in the Irish family worldwide and we work hard to keep that connectedness. It is part of our Irish psyche I think, and it was very important to those people that the Irish President made a visit and thought about them and re-established those connections in this generation. The President holds strong views regarding the role of women in society and I asked President McAleese about the role of women in the Irish peace process. She said, “women are good at community and one of the big strengths underpinning the peace process has been the number of small community initiatives that started very often with women taking risks across the sectarian divide. “Just deciding that they were fed up living in a segregated area, they were fed up with segregated life styles, they were fed up with being ignorant of one another, and so they started to look for common ground. “Whether it was creating creches together, developing community care initiatives. Very often this was in poor communities where unemployment is rife. In nine times out of 10 of these initiatives, you will find women dominating the decision to start such community initiative. “A lot of those projects interestingly funded by organizations like the Ireland Funds of which Canada is a significant contributor. Indeed, we are very grateful to the Canadian government in very recent times raising the amount of money it has contributed to that.” The Canadian Government recently increased its contribution from CDN $300,000 to $2 million and President McAleese said, “that funding was the start of many projects which sprang up around the country, initially very tentatively. Then people saw how cross-community succeeded and that led to others to try to do the same and it went from one small patch to almost like a patchwork quilt and it started to join up. “There is no doubt in my mind at all that we have women to thank very considerably for the success of those initiatives which created a level of trust and a level of cross-community contact on which the more formal peace process was able to rest. Yes, women have played an enormously significant role.” The President said that the express will of the people of Ireland, both north and south, is for peace and there is no will or mood or support for a reversion to any kind of violence. The Good Friday Agreement created the political space in which the trust could grow to build a better dynamic and she emphasized that was always going to take time. “There has been disappointments along the way,” she said. “For instance, at Christmas we thought we were very close to making a deal between the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland and Sinn Fein. That fell apart at the time. I don’t think that is lost. I think what we know from that is how far people are prepared to go. “In the meantime, we have had some considerable activity on the part of the IRA which is most unacceptable for an organization that is meant to be on cease-fire. And an organization which committed itself to trying to construct an alternative political strategy. “Politics are obviously working. They created the space through their cease-fire that would allow politics to work. The logic of their own position is that they should decommission their weapons and fold up their tents as an active organization. “That organization is currently in a debate about its future. I hope the outcome of that will be the logic of their own position and the will of the people north and south is that they would end the armed tradition in Irish politics. “That is what we’re waiting to happen and I think that when that happens the landscape will change profoundly and we should see the process start to galvanize at the political level.” President McAleese spoke about the passion she brings to her position saying, “I have a real joy in the work that I do. It’s time locked as you know. I was elected for seven years and then I was very fortunate to be re-elected again for a second period of seven years. “None of us know the day or the hour when that opportunity will be taken away from us so you use the day that you have, the hour that you have, the moment that you have. You fill up that time as if you were blowing up a balloon to the furthest reaches that you can and you give it your all in every moment and every minute. I think that’s what I try to do with the job. I don’t notice the time going by. I’m in the role seven and a half years now and I cannot believe how the time has flown. “You take an event like last night or an event like today with the Irish Women’s Network, you are meeting people whose stories are remarkable. I know what Ireland was like prior to us creating this wonderful new successful Ireland. It was a place that exported our people. People were our greatest export and emigration was no picnic. “These people had to insert themselves into unfamiliar territory and make a life for themselves, make a community for themselves. They very often had to work in tough jobs and so they are the most remarkable people and I am privileged to hear to their stories.”
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