Joe Duffy’s mentor at RTÉ was Gay Byrne, so of course when Gay exited this life, it was no surprise to see Joe take over as interviewer of THE MEANING OF LIFE (RTÉ ONE). This week he interviewed EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness.
The setting was Ardee Community School, Ardee being Mairead’s home town. She was from a big family – eight of them round the table, plus an uncle. Sport? Very little of that. When your father makes his living from mixed farming, there was always work – picking fruit, helping with the harvest, farming in general.
Her father was quiet and ‘adored’ her mother. He’d be the hesitant one, she’d be more positive. Their father lived by the Latin motto Labore est Orare’ – to work is to pray. His mother’s guiding dictum was ‘If you give, you will get more in return’.
They were a Catholic family of their time –the rosary, Sunday Mass, confession, communion. After the waves of scandal rocked the Catholic Church, her mother ‘was less inclined to go to Mass’.
At times Dufffy’s lack of follow-up questions was bewildering. For example, Mairead’s father shot himself in the foot (yes, literally, Virginia) in a serious accident; their house – thatched – caught fire and went up in a ball of flames, leaving their mother with serious leg burns. Both of which events sound catastrophic, but Joe bounced on to asking Mairead about going to UCD (‘I was devastated leaving home’). She started studying Science but then moved over to study subjects that led her to journalism, which in turn led her to politics.
She used get very upset when people would deface her election posters, blacking out teeth etc. She also had too many people telling her what to do and what to say, to the point where she “lost buckets of weight’. She was even tempted to abandon politics but mercifully didn’t – “It’s such a huge honour to be elected. But In our house, my work is not the be-all and the end-all. Football is.”
She met the Pope and as she was leaving he asked “Will you pray for me?” Mairead was impressed with this display of ‘vulnerability’. She’s a Catholic : when she loses something the first person addressed is St Anthony. But she doesn’t do confession – why focus on the bad bits and not the good bits?
Does she believe in God? ‘I believe in the force of Nature’ is her answer. Walking with her dog Sam she’ll pray, but not in the old way.
Joe wants to know what she’ll say if she gets to the ‘pearly gates’. She said she didn’t see the afterlife in terms of gates. She believes in an afterlife, but is less worried now about how God looks and so on. “I don’t need all of those answers and I’m not troubled by not having them.’
Mairead McGuinness is an intelligent, highly interesting woman. Joe Duffy is a turgid interviewer.
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