McAleese speech sold out the majority of the Irish public

I suspect I am not the only Irish citizen who found President Mary McAleese’s performance in Saudi Arabia last week bizarre.

Perhaps it was the way the media reported McAleese’s comments, but when she said at a press conference that she ‘‘represented Ireland, a country which abhorred the publication of the cartoons’’, she was not speaking for me. Nor, I suspect, for thousands of others.

I will return to what the president said ...