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McAleese apologises in Nazi row
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| Contributor | Some say... |
| Last Edited | Some say... Jan 29, 2005 11:02am |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Saturday, January 29, 2005 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | BELFAST (Reuters) - Irish President Mary McAleese has apologised to Protestants in Northern Ireland for remarks in which she appeared to compare anti-Catholic prejudice in the province with the Nazi persecution of Jews.
Her comments, made on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, drew a furious reaction from Protestant politicians in the province, who accused her of vilifying their community.
"What I said, I undoubtedly said clumsily," said McAleese, a Belfast Catholic who was re-elected for a second seven-year term in the largely ceremonial head of state role last year.
"I should have finished out the example and it would have been a much better interview had I done that ... It was never my intention going into it simply to blame one side of the community in Northern Ireland," she told Irish state broadcaster RTE on Friday night.
The comments that provoked the row were made in another RTE interview on Thursday, when McAleese was in Poland representing Ireland at a ceremony marking the liberation of the camp.
"They (the Nazis) gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics," she said then.
Those comments were condemned by Protestant parties in Northern Ireland, with Ian Paisley Jnr of the Democratic Unionist Party saying they were "irrational and insulting". Michael McGimpsey of the Ulster Unionists said they revealed "deep-seated sectarianism".
Northern Ireland's 1998 Good Friday Agreement has largely ended political violence that claimed more than 3,600 lives, but deep divisions remain between Protestant unionists and Catholic Irish nationalists.
McAleese grew up in the Catholic Ardoyne district of north Belfast, a tough neighbourhood at the sharp end of Northern Ireland's three-decade "troubles".
When she first stood for the Presidency of the Irish Republic in 1997 one Dublin com |
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