Robinson

On the morning of Saturday the third of November 1990, in the Royal Dublin Society count-centre at Ballsbridge in south Dublin, Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, forty-six years old, the Trinity College Dublin law professor and former Labour senator, was declared elected as the seventh President of Ireland after a four-way election (Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan; Fine Gael's Austin Currie; Labour's Robinson; and the final transfer that gave her the presidency on the second count) under the PR-STV preferential voting system used for Irish presidential elections. She was the first woman elected to the office, the first non-Fianna Fáil president since 1945, and (as a civil-rights-and-divorce-and-contraception campaigning lawyer of the 1970s) the first Irish president from the progressive-feminist political tradition. The acceptance speech, given at the Mansion House in central Dublin on the evening of the third of November, contained the line that became the emblem of her presidency: Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system, and on this rocking, this Robinson rose to office. The Áras an Uachtaráin (the Phoenix Park presidential residence) lit a candle in the front-window every night of her seven-year presidency, for the Irish emigrants and the Irish diaspora abroad, a symbolic gesture she had announced in the inauguration speech and that became the most-recognised symbol of the Robinson presidency.

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