McAleese Is Ireland’s New President

Mary McAleese, a law professor raised in the warring heart of bloody Belfast, won easy election Friday as Ireland’s first president to hail from British-ruled Northern Ireland.

The 46-year-old McAleese, a staunch Roman Catholic supported by Ireland’s largest political party, comes to the mostly ceremonial post promising to build bridges between north and south on a divided island.

Raised as a minority Catholic in a Protestant section of Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, McAleese said Friday that she hopes to help revive the “sense of mutual affection and generosity” she knew as a child before violence sundered the two communities in the province.

“It would be nice to find our way back to a sense of one community,” she said after an election that drew four female candidates and sent powerful signals of accelerating modernization in this nation of 3.5 million.

McAleese, who is vice chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast, received 45% of the vote in the first-round count to 29% for runner-up Mary Banotti, a liberal member of the European Parliament and the only political veteran in the five-candidate field.

The margin of difference reduced to a formality a second count required to ensure McAleese of an outright majority by redistributing the votes cast for the trailing candidates.

At the end of the second count Friday night, McAleese had 58.7% and Banotti had 41.3%.

Among the other candidates, Rosemary Scallon, better known as a singer stage-named Dana and another native of Northern Ireland, ran a surprisingly strong third with 14%. She had returned to campaign from Alabama, where she is the host of a conservative Catholic television show.

Antinuclear campaigner Adi Roche, who received 7%, and retired police Sgt. Derek Nally, who won 4.7%, lagged badly.

In Thursday’s vote, a brutish day of rain combined with a cabdrivers strike that snarled Dublin to reduce overall turnout to about 48% of 2.7 million voters. In 1990, 64% voted in the election that made Mary Robinson Ireland’s first female chief of state.

McAleese could not vote because she is not a resident of the Irish Republic that she will now serve in a seven-year term as president.

She will nominally need Parliament’s permission to be with her dentist husband and their three children at their home in Northern Ireland because it means visiting a foreign country.

Under the republic’s Constitution, everyone born on the island is Irish, but only those who live in the 26 southern counties are eligible to vote. The six northern counties, where Protestants are a majority, form the British province of Northern Ireland, and people born there vote in British elections.

It takes about two hours to drive from Dublin to Belfast.

McAleese, who has a reputation for being flinty and who once accused Britain of running a police state in Northern Ireland, refrained from raising contentious issues in her six-week campaign.

She preached reconciliation, insisting that her personal views--she opposes divorce and abortion but has lobbied for gay rights and objects to her church’s ban on female priests--were irrelevant to the figurehead post.

She vowed in victory Friday to throw open the presidential palace and make it “the hearth of Ireland.”

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Under Ireland’s parliamentary system of government, a president’s formal powers are restricted to asking the Supreme Court to determine if new laws are constitutional and ruling on a prime minister’s request to dissolve Parliament.

Robinson broke new ground. She proved a crusading moralist who became a high-visibility international symbol of a new Ireland, a country that has historically been ruled by a conservative patriarchy. She resigned a few months early to become the new U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

Leaked Irish government documents during the campaign attempted to portray McAleese as a tacit supporter of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, which has waged violence for three decades seeking reunification of north and south. McAleese strongly denied Sinn Fein links, and the accusations appeared to have no effect on her standing in the polls.