During the ‘Mary McAleese In Conversation With Ursula Halligan’ event over the weekend, Mary McAleese announced that she will join the Dublin Pride parade for the first time ever this summer.

McAleese and Ursula Halligan spoke to an audience of 250 plus people in Gonzaga College with a conversation about the Roman Catholic Church.

The former President said that she will march with her son Justin and his husband Dr Fionán Donohoe with the theme for this year’s Dublin Pride festival being ‘We Are Family’.

The event, which was organised by lay catholic group We Are Church Ireland, was held as Pope Francis has been accused of being out of touch with Irish society after he claimed that LGBT+ couples could not form real families.

McAleese told Halligan that she will not be attending any World Meeting of Families events led by Pope Francis this August because of the consistent opposition to LGBT+ rights saying:

‘Jesus Christ would be better represented by those celebrating marriage equality than “miserable people in a tiny empire the size of a golf course.”‘

This follows concerns raised by McAleese earlier this year over the marginalisation of the LGBT+ community in the run-up to the Pope’s visit to Ireland.

At the event McAleese describes the happiest day of her life as the day after the 2015 marriage referendum was passed and “a wave of love swept all around Ireland”.

During the event she also endorsed the WAC’s online petition saying, “I’d like to see the Church stop hurting LGBTI people”.

LGBT+ people are described by catholic literature as “objectively disordered” and homosexual sex as “intrinsically evil”.

The petition originally set a target of 500 signatories but as of this Monday afternoon, it has reached over 2,800 signatures.

McAleese also spoke about the Eighth Amendment referendum stating that she voted yes “with a heart and a half”.