Aubrey Malone
Former Irish President Mary Robinson When Mary Robinson was young, she used to look out the window of her home in Victoria Terrace, Ballina, and wonder if she could change the world. Her opportunity to do so came in 1990 when she was elected president of Ireland.
Aoife Kelleher’s documentary, Mrs Robinson (12A), is a timely tribute to her as she recently turned eighty. It’s a comprehensive paean to someone who expanded the office and its former cosmetic status to one where, in her own words, she could go “toe to toe” with the Taoiseach of the day in a paradigm shift.
When I was doing courier work in the late 1980s I was summoned to Mary’s house on the Sandford Road in Ranelagh to run an errand for her. At that time, as a constitutional lawyer, she had her hair straight and was dressed in a trouser suit. She later softened her image.
Mary had a successful presidency but didn’t seek a second term, leaving the office a few weeks early to become a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Kelleher’s documentary pays homage to her as a lightning rod for seismic change.
She’s now a member of Project Dandelion, a women-led Climate Change campaign, and leader of Chair of the Elders, a society founded by Nelson Mandela which advocates for justice on the world’s stage.
Mr Mandela gives her a ringing endorsement in the film. So do people like her friend Richard Branson, Volodymyr Zelensky and even Barack Obama, who credits her as “illuminating a better future for our world.”
We also hear Mary uttering her familiar mantra about women rocking the system instead of the cradle after she assumed the presidential reins.
Her father, Aubrey, was our family doctor. In fact he delivered me. I’m said to be named after him. I didn’t know Mary personally but of course I was aware of her family. They were affluent – not everyone could afford to be sent to a finishing school in France as she did – but unshowy about it.
Like Mary, my father had to get a dispensation from the Church to study Law in TCD. This ban wasn’t lifted until 1970, three years after she graduated. My father was one of the few Catholics in Trinity in the 1920s. He didn’t experience any religious bigotry while living in there. He told me once that his Protestant friends even used to call him for Mass.
When Mary married a Protestant, her parents objected. Another wobble was her misguided meeting with the abducted Dubai Princess Latifa in 2018. During her presidential campaign, an adversarial caption went, ‘Left is Not Right for the Park’.
She’s clashed with the Church on issues like homosexuality, contraception, abortion and divorce. Perhaps ironically, her family home is across the road from St Muredach’s Cathedral, one of the most iconic structures in the town – if not the country.
The house will soon be transformed into a museum-cum-presidential archive – another precedent in her eventful life.