About the lecture series

In June 2019, former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, formally launched the Queen’s Management School Annual Mary McAleese Diversity Lecture Series during an event at the University. The new lecture series is part of Queen’s Management School’s mission to promote greater equality and diversity in the workplace, particularly with regards to ensuring equality of opportunity and respect for diversity across the University and the wider community.

About Mary McAleese

Mary McAleese, who is a Professor of Children, Law and Religion at the University of Glasgow, discussed female empowerment, same sex marriage, misogyny and homophobia, during the course of the event.

A barrister by profession, she graduated from the School of Law at Queen’s in 1973 and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1974. She was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin the following year and later took up the position of Director of the Institute of Legal Studies at Queen’s in 1987. Professor McAleese became the University’s first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 1994.

Mary McAleese, was elected the 8th President of Ireland in November 1997, succeeding Mary Robinson. She is the second female president of Ireland, the first president from Northern Ireland and served as for two terms until November 2011.

About our Speaker

Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, retired in January 2020 as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the apex court for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. She was educated at Richmond High School for Girls, in North Yorkshire, and Girton College, Cambridge, where she is now Visitor, and called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn.

After graduating, she spent 18 years teaching, researching and writing in Law at the University of Manchester, also practising for a while at the Manchester Bar. She then became a member of the Law Commission, a statutory body which makes proposals for the reform of the Law. Her proudest achievement there was the Children Act 1989.

In 1994, she was appointed a High Court Judge, the first to have made a career as an academic and public servant rather than as a top barrister. In 1999 she was promoted to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and in 2004 became a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in the House of Lords, the first and sadly the only woman ever to hold that office.

In 2009 the ‘Law Lords’ were transformed into Justices of the newly established Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. She became its Deputy President in 2013 and President in 2017. On 24 September 2019, she announced the unanimous decision of the court in the case of R (Miller) v The Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41.