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The former Irish president shares her concerns about Brexit and Europe’s refugee crisis with Lorna Donlon. Mary McAleese, Ireland’s former president, knows what it’s like to flee her home, to be, as she once described it, “a refugee on my own island”. Growing up in the Catholic Ardoyne area of north Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s, she witnessed first-hand the violent sectarianism that ruptured the city, destroying lives and families, and buttressing hatreds and fears that had blighted Northern Ireland for generations.