Mary McAleese was born into a Catholic family Belfast in 1951. She is the eldest of nine children and her family experienced first- hand the sectarian violence which blighted Northern Ireland for decades. As a consequence she became deeply involved in anti-sectarianism and inter-religious reconciliation and was co-author of a report on the Churches response to sectarianism commissioned by the Catholic Church and the Irish Council of Churches (which represents the main  Protestant Churches). She is a barrister and academic lawyer qualified in both civil law and Catholic Church canon law. She was the first female Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Queen’s University Belfast and is currently Professor of Children, Religion and Law at the University of Glasgow. She is Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin.

From 1997 to 2011 she was the 8^th President of Ireland, the first person from Northern Ireland to hold that role. The theme of her Presidency was Building Bridges and throughout her fourteen years in office she worked to heal the fractured politico/sectarian relationships on the island of Ireland and between Ireland and Britain. During her Presidency she invited and hosted HM Queen Elizabeth II on the first state visit to the Irish Republic by a British monarch. After leaving office in 2011 she spent the following year living in a student community in Rome (The Lay Centre) sharing everyday life with Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic Eastern Rite  and Catholic students.

She is chair of the Von Hugel Institute at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge and she chairs the Advisory Board  of the University of Notre Dame’s  Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the foundation of which she championed. She is the author of Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law; The christening contract (Brill 2019). In 2019 she was awarded the Alfons Auer Award in Ethics of the Catholic Faculty of Theology at the University of Tubingen. In 2020 she received the Woman of Courage Award of UNANIMA International at a ceremony in the United Nations HQ, New York.