6

Mary Robinson

1944–

 

Irishmen as a whole have often been seen as male chauvinists.  Yet in the past there have been great and influential Irishwomen, such as Queen Maeve, St Bridget, GRACE O'MALLEY [46] and the Daughters of Éireann during the Irish Revolution, such as MAUD GONNE [52] and the COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ [52].  But the rise of the modern women's movement has had its dramatic effects in Ireland, as elsewhere.  One of the fruits of this has been the extraordinary career of Mary Robinson.  In many ways her success has been more in the American style than anything seen in Ireland.

      She was born Mary Bourke into a prominent Mayo family (the Bourkes traced their origins back to the Normans in the twelfth century).  Her family were connected not only to Irish republican politics but also the British establishment.  Her father was a medical man, with a wife ambitious for their children.  Mary was sent to a leading convent school, and having attended a finishing school in Paris, she went on to study law at Trinity College at a time when entry to this Protestant university was forbidden to most Catholics.  Her education was not unusual for girls of her class, but her legal ambitions were.

      She also studied at Harvard, and her experiences in the United States during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War had an important effect on her outlook.

      She became a brilliant master of law at Trinity College, where she eventually was appointed Reid Professor of Law.  Trinity College had long been seen by many nationalists as one of the bastions of British rule in Ireland, but throughout the 1960s had emerged as one of the sources of Irish reform.  She married a Dublin lawyer with artistic interests, who also emerged as a person of influence himself in the heritage conservation field.   She managed to rear her three children away from the spotlight of controversy, which was also an achievement given the nature of modern media scrutiny.

      Her work as a practising lawyer and legal academic quickly brought Mary Robinson to the firing line.  She thought that matters of private conscience, such as homosexuality and contraception, should not be a matter of law.  Her legal practice concentrated largely on constitutional and civil rights matters, and through her success she was able to make changes that legislators had found difficult.  Though Ireland shares a common-law system with the rest of Great Britain, it also has a written constitution, and constitutional cases have become a testing ground for public opinion.

      She became involved in politics on the left wing of the Irish Labour party, but her relations with party politics were not always calm.  She was elected to the Irish Senate as a senator from Trinity College.  During her terms as senator she introduced many bills which attempted to change the social situation in Ireland.  One was for legalizing contraception, but this was dismissed in controversial circumstances, as many Catholics in the country objected to it.  She had promised on her election to use the Senate as a 'forum for new and possibly unpopular views.'

      What these might be were indicated by her support for and involvement in the newly emerging women's movement in Ireland.  However, these issues were, in her view, part of a wider spectrum of rights that had to be developed in Ireland.  These views alienated her from the more traditional and conservative elements of Irish life, which was tied to the fears of the old agricultural life on the land, which had often been insecure.  With changing economic conditions social attitudes changed, and Mary Robinson became a figurehead for changes already under way.  On contraception, for instance, though the church authorities denied it to Catholics, many theologians had already moved on, taking the mass of the faithful with them.

      But Mary Robinson was also committed to the European ideal, and this was one area in which most of her people agreed.  At Trinity College she ran, with her husband, a Centre for European Law.

      Though she had left the party, she was nominated for the office of president of Ireland by Labour Party leader Dick Spring in 1990.  In Ireland the post of president is a nominal, titular post rather than an administrative one, so she had no powers but the force of her own personality.  Previously, the post had been filled by a range of retired politicians and a judge, who had been content to relax in the post.  But the presidential campaign proved to be a watershed in Irish life and politics, dividing one era from another.  In the future, historians will certainly see it as a benchmark date.

      Mary Robinson quickly saw that even though she could not involve herself in party political matters, other social, academic, and cultural areas were wide open to her.  She emerged through the presidency as one of the new vitalizing influences on Ireland.  Her theme of reconciliation was echoed widely, but she also worked with the marginalized and disadvantaged.  She made many visits to Northern Ireland, meeting and shaking hands with GERRY ADAMS [100], for instance.  All over Ireland she concerned herself with those whom society and politics had previously excluded and ignored.  She also made a special point of remembering those who had been forced to emigrate and make up the Irish community worldwide.  A candle was kept burning in a window of the presidential residence in the Phoenix Park in their memory.

      She served only one seven-year term as president before advancing to a prominent post with the United Nations as high commissioner for Human Rights.  This may well turn out to be as important a post on a universal scale as the presidency was on a national scale.  For all that it has done in the past, the United Nations has not always managed to have done enough, caught as it so often was between political rivalries it could not control.

      Now, in a new era, Mary Robinson may be one of those who will give the United Nations new authority in a still badly divided world.  In Mary Robinson the younger generation of Irishwomen have an extraordinary role model, though their mothers had been content to live in a domestic scene, exerting a powerful influence over the formation of Irish life and opinion in that way.  She took herself into a wider world and triumphed.  After Mary Robinson, no post in Ireland, even the offices of the Catholic Church, were thought to exclude a woman.