On November 11, 1997, Mary McAleese was inaugurated as the eighth President of Ireland, and served as President through 2011. She is the second female president of Ireland, and in succeeding Mary Robinson, is the first woman to succeed another woman in the role of president.

Born on June 27, 1951 in Belfast, she is the first President to come from Northern Ireland. She graduated in Law from the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1973 and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1974. In 1975, she was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin and in 1987, she returned to her Alma Mater, Queen’s, to become Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies. She also worked as a journalist and announcer for RTÉ (the Irish national television service) from 1979 to 1981. In 1994, she became the first female Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Queen’s University of Belfast.

In January 2012, Mary McAleese along with her husband were awarded the Tipperary Peace Prize for their work in “promoting peace and reconciliation.” Since leaving office she has been a Burns Scholar at Boston College (2013) and Distinguished Carmel and Martin Naughton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame (2015). In 2016 she was the Distinguished Visiting fellow at St. Mary’s University, London. 

She is Chair of the Von Hugel Institute at St Edmund’s College Cambridge University and Patron of the Bob Hawke Institute, University of South Australia. In 2018, the former president was appointed the newly created Professor of Children, Law and Religion at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.  In 2018, McAleese was awarded a doctorate in canon law (JCD) from Pontifical Gregorian University. In 2019, McAleese was elected as Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin. She is also an executive fellow of the Notre Dame School of Global Affairs and Chair of the Institute for Global Religions.

McAleese is the author of “Reconciled being: Love in chaos” (1997), Building Bridges (2011), Collegiality in the Code of Canon Law (2014), and Here’s the Story: A Memoir (2020).