‘Mary’s focus on creating a just world makes her one of the greatest ever leaders’

As Robinson marks her 80th birthday, we look at the legacy of the trailblazing lawyer who changed role of the presidency forever

Most people had never seen Mary Robinson cry. “It has been a very difficult three days. Very, very difficult,” she said, the timbre of that wellknown authoritative voice quivering with a shock of emotion.

It was 1992 and the president of Ireland was speaking to journalists at a press conference in Nairobi. She had just spent three days witnessing the most desperate horrors in Somalia, a country ravaged by hunger and death.

“I am sorry that I cannot be entirely calm speaking to you, because I have such a sense of what the world must take responsibility for. And by the world, I don’t mean some distant sources. I mean each of us,” she said.

Robinson, arguably one of the most popular world leaders on the planet at the time, had trained the eyes of the world on the inhumanity suffered by Somali people when she persuaded the Irish government to let her become the first foreign leader to visit the country. At the time, out of Somalia’s population of 7.8 million, four million people were either at immediate or serious risk of starvation.

Robinson had witnessed the unspeakable wrath of famine: the chilling silence from babies too weak to cry, the bodies laid out, the overwhelming stench of death. And, against every instinct and wish of some senior civil servants and ministers, she finished the Somalia trip and flew immediately to the United Nations in New York to report in person what she had seen, weeping quietly on the plane at the memories.

It was arguably one of the most defining, fateful moments in her presidency. It put pressure on the UN and the world. It made Ireland’s own government take the issue of development more seriously.

It again proved Robinson’s ability to be a tuning fork for the feelings of the Irish public, who overwhelmingly supported the trip. It fulfilled another one of the promises she had made in her victory speech to the people of Ireland in 1990 to promote the international protection and promotion of human rights. And it would lead Robinson, after she left the Áras in 1997, to a decades-long career devoted to international human rights.

Robinson, who turns 80 today, is still cherished by the Irish aid and humanitarian agencies.

“Mary’s commitment to global justice and her courage in speaking out at the highest levels of power are extraordinary. However, it is Mary’s ability to connect with people – especially women – at the grassroots that really stands out,” said Caoimhe de Barra, the chief executive of Trócaire.

“Mary’s focus on creating a more just world, and her focus on the power of positive change, make her one of the world’s greatest ever leaders.”

Mary Therese Winifred Bourke was born on May 21, 1944. She hailed from a well-known middle-class Catholic family based in Ballina, Co Mayo. She had a privileged upbringing, initially attending a private school in her hometown before going to Mount Anville in Dublin at the age of 10.

She always had a strong moral certitude and sense of social justice, which at one stage led her to aspire to being a nun. She credits her paternal grandfather, a retired lawyer, for inspiring her to see law as a righteous sword and shield for the “little guy” in the world.

Robinson studied law at Trinity, only after her father had sought permission from a bishop for her to attend the Protestant university. She went on to Harvard, where she would become politicised by demonstrations against US involvement in Vietnam. She became the first woman and Catholic to be elected to a Trinity seat in the upper house in 1969, at the age of just 24.

From the Seanad, she would prove to change more than many government ministers could ever dream of.

Robinson would be involved in legal challenges that helped shift Ireland on everything from women on juries, abolishing “illegitimacy”, and pensions and pay equality and to the decriminalisation of homosexuality. She would help her college friend David Norris start the legal process to lift the criminalisation of homosexuality, a law she would get to sign in herself as president some years later.

Her moral certitude was almost academic, rather than ideological. She had a strong sense of where the Constitution should work, and the parts of people’s lives where it had no business interfering. This would sometimes make her unpopular with feminists, who felt she wasn’t enough of a card-carrying women’s rights campaigner – despite the fact that she actually served as a le

‘Robinson’s family had to leave the local church when she was denounced from the altar’

gal adviser for the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement when it launched in the early 1970s. But, as The Irish Times would write in 1982, when it came to Robinson “no one has shouted less and achieved more”.

Early on in her political career, Robinson would feel the wrath of the Catholic church when she tried to introduce a bill that would liberalise contraception. Her family, devout Catholics, had to leave the local church in Ballina when Robinson was denounced from the altar. She would later tell reporters how during that time, condoms or chopped-up garden gloves imitating them, would arrive in the post for her on a “daily basis”.

In one legal case that started in the late 1980s, she helped a group of students, including a young Ivana Bacik, to fight against an anti-abortion group that was trying to prosecute them for sharing information on abortion.

“Robinson has made an extraordinary contribution to bringing about progress in Irish society, on women’s rights, on equality for all; on making us a more inclusive, pluralist and welcoming country,” said Ms Bacik, now the Labour Party leader.

In 1985 she resigned from Labour on a point of principle over the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which she argued had not consulted unionists enough. Robinson, who was not a natural politician, also ran unsuccessfully for the Dáil twice. By the end of the 1980s, she was married with three children and seemed content to leave politics behind to exclusively pursue an international law career. Then it all changed.

It was almost 9pm on a cold November night outside a school in Bray. A young woman was running, carrying one small child in her arms while pushing another in a buggy. “Is it closed?” she asked those standing outside, in panic. “Is the polling closed?” The canvassers stood outside the school, which was serving as a polling station for the 1990 presidential election, knew without asking exactly for whom that mother was in such a rush to vote.

That story, recalled in Fergus Finlay’s definitive book on the Robinson campaign, helps articulate what a phenomenon Robinson was.

Mr Finlay recalls now how he really appreciated only in hindsight “how very dark” Ireland was in the 1980s. “The Kerry Babies scandal, the Ann Lovett scandal …” he said. “We had absolutely no awareness of just how dark a country Ireland still was. That was the change. That was the change that Mary Robinson made. And I find it sometimes hard to put into words, but nothing was ever quite the same again.”

On election day, some women were crying in the RDS – telling journalists they’d never got to vote for someone who won before. Suddenly, being Irish could mean something different. To read the news reports from the time is to nearly read about a country that was going from monochrome to vibrant colour.

Since the inception of the Irish presidency, the Áras had effectively served as a retirement home for Fianna Fáil grandees who would win the presidency uncontested – until Labour decided to push for an election in 1990, which would prove one of the most important decisions ever taken in Irish politics.

Robinson was dismissed by the media as a no-hoper. (She would go on to have a 94pc approval rate as president.) As a candidate, she spent seven months travelling 25,000 miles across the country in a campaign that turned into a romance, as Robinson fell in love with Ireland and Ireland fell in love with her.

The cold, aloof lawyer transformed into a compassionate woman who would cross every divide, and help dismantle civil war politics in the process. She had also had a makeover. Dublin stylist Alan Bruton was enlisted to style Robinson, creating her iconic soft body wave haircut and a fresh wardrobe of Irish designers. It was very successful.

“I’ll put it to you this way,” Mr Bruton said, “when it came to the next election, we did them all.” Robinson is still a client to this day. “The only perm we’ve

‘Her popularity with people seemed to drive Fianna Fáil reckless with desperation’

done in here in 10 years.”

Her popularity with people, particularly women, seemed to drive Fianna Fáil reckless with desperation. She was smeared, most infamously by Pádraig Flynn who made the fatal error of claiming on radio that Robinson had only just taken a “new interest” in her family for the campaign.

Robinson herself seemed to err only once, in a now famous Hot Press interview where she appeared to agree to open an illicit condom stall if elected president. Liam Fay, the journalist who did the interview, explains how it was actually down to a mannerism Robinson had of saying “yes” to indicate she understood a question, rather than that she agreed with it.

Fay recalls how Fianna Fáil was “cocka-hoop”, and remembers seeing a man “in a pin-striped suit leaving the Hot Press office, having bought a big bundle of the relevant issue”. Fay says the hoo-hah “was instructive about what was to come”.

“From the outset of the campaign, she had a very clear and carefully considered idea of how the boundaries of the presidency could be pushed,” he said.

And push it she did. The damp and dusty Áras an Uachtaráin became an open house for the people of Ireland – homeless people, Travellers and lots and lots of women.

Robinson embraced the “fifth province” with a light in her window and strong advocacy for the Irish diaspora. She was the first Irish head of state to meet a British monarch, when she was hosted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993. The same summer, she would shake hands with Gerry Adams in West Belfast, despite fierce criticism.

As UN special envoy on human rights and later as a climate justice campaigner, she would continue to agitate against the powers that be. In Ireland, she changed the role of the presidency forever – transforming the president into a social, moral watchdog directly elected by the Irish people. Most specifically in her case, Mná na hÉireann.

“Who instead of rocking the cradle rocked the system,” Robinson said in her victory speech, over 33 years ago, “and who came out massively to make their mark on the ballot paper, and on a new Ireland.”