Mary Robinson(1944–)

Mary Therese Winifred Bourke was born at Victoria House, Ballina in County Mayo on the twenty-first of May 1944, fourth of the five children of Aubrey Bourke, a doctor of the Ballina general practice, and Tessa O'Donnell of Carndonagh in County Donegal. She was schooled at Mount Anville in Dublin and at the Sacred Heart finishing school in Paris, took the BA in legal science at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1967 (President of the Trinity Auditorship Debating Society, the first woman elected to that office), and the LLM at Harvard Law School in 1968. She was called to the Irish Bar in 1967 and to King's Inns in 1973, was appointed Reid Professor of Constitutional and Criminal Law at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1969 in her twenty-fifth year (one of the youngest professors in the history of the university), and held the chair until her election to the Senate of Ireland in 1969.

She sat in the Senate of Ireland 1969 to 1989 for the Trinity College constituency (the three Senate seats representing the graduates of Trinity College Dublin under the 1937 Constitution), made the central single career of her parliamentary work the long pursuit of progressive law reform in Ireland: the legal availability of contraception (her McGee v. Attorney General Supreme Court action of 1973, which she argued at twenty-nine, secured the constitutional right of married couples to import contraceptives), the legal status of children born outside marriage (her Status of Children Act campaign 1980s), the participation of women in jury service (the De Burca v. Attorney General Supreme Court action of 1976), the constitutional recognition of homosexual rights (the Norris v. Attorney General Supreme Court action of 1980, taken further by her successor on the case David Norris to the European Court of Human Rights in 1988), and the abolition of the prohibition on divorce (the constitutional amendment campaign of 1986 to 1995). She was joint Senior Counsel on a substantial number of the major Irish constitutional cases of the 1970s and 1980s.

She stood as the joint Labour and Workers' Party candidate at the November 1990 presidential election against the Fianna Fáil candidate Brian Lenihan and the Fine Gael candidate Austin Currie, ran a campaign that took her on foot to every parish hall in the country, and was elected on the second count on the seventh of November 1990 in her forty-seventh year as the seventh President of Ireland and the first woman to hold the office. Her presidency, December 1990 to September 1997, transformed the office: she put a light in the Áras an Uachtaráin window every Christmas as a beacon to the Irish diaspora, paid the first state visit by an Irish President to the United Kingdom (May 1993, the meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace), shook hands with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin at Clonard Monastery in west Belfast in June 1993 (the first public official handshake of the long peace process), visited Somalia and Rwanda during the famine and genocide of 1992 and 1994 (the first visit by a head of state in either case), and addressed the Houses of the Oireachtas as the institutionally-detached constitutional conscience of the state.

She resigned the presidency two months before the end of her seven-year term to take up appointment by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations Office at Geneva, twelfth of September 1997. She held the office for five years to September 2002, opened sixty country offices of the UNHCR across the long period of the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals and the early years of the war on terror, raised in person with the Chinese government the human-rights position of the Tibetan minority during the official state visit to Beijing in 1998, condemned the Israeli use of force in the Second Intifada in 2000, and steered the Office through the Durban World Conference Against Racism of 2001. She founded on her retirement in 2002 the Mary Robinson Foundation: Climate Justice (2010 to present), the Geneva-based foundation that argues for the legal and constitutional rights of the populations most affected by climate change. She is honorary president of Oxfam International, chair of the Elders (the Mandela-founded body of former heads of state and senior international figures), and remains an active international figure. The Robinson name in modern Irish constitutional history carries the weight of the presidency of 1990 to 1997 and the UN High Commissionership of 1997 to 2002.