Mary Robinson at 80
Aubrey Malone, who was delivered by Mary Robinson’s GP father and grew up in her home town of Ballina, offers a personal tribute to the former President
It’s hard to believe Mary Robinson will be 80 on the 21st of May. She’s such a dynamo – and shows no signs of slowing down.
She was born in my home town of Ballina, the middle child of five and the only girl. Her father, Aubrey Bourke, was our GP. The Bourkes had a big house on the banks of the Moy. At the moment it’s being turned into the Mary Robinson Resource Centre. This will house Mary’s extensive personal archive of memorabilia. It will be Ireland’s first presidential library and also an educational facility dedicated to gender equality.
Dr. Bourke delivered me as he did all my brothers and sisters. So many children were born at home in those days. I’m said to be named after him. I don’t know if that’s true or not but my father held him in great esteem. Mary also has a brother and a son called Aubrey.
Even though she was Dr Bourke’s only daughter, as she grew up she found she was more interested in playing games like tennis than doing more overtly ‘girly’ things. My aunt was married to a man called Eddie Murphy who was very wealthy. They owned a flour mills. Their house was huge. The grounds behind it had a tennis court. My sisters remember Mary and other members of her family playing on this. My siblings alternated with the Bourkes for those precious games. I was too young to see Mary playing but I played on the court in later years.
I remember Paddy Murphy, Eddie’s son, driving a Mercedes with the registration plate TIZ 1. He was very flashy but also very generous. If memory serves, Paddy paid for the bells of our local cathedral, St. Muredach’s. He also donated to many other causes, as did his father and Mary’s parents. Mary writes in her autobiography about wanting to sit near Paddy when she was going to ‘the pictures’ in the Savoy as a young girl: He was always the one with the big bag of sweets to spread around.
Mary Robinson’s former family home is currently being turned into the Mary Robinson Resource Centre. This will house Mary’s extensive personal archive of memorabilia..
Headstrong
Mary was headstrong as a young girl. In her autobiography she also writes about sneaking into gory horror films in the Estoria, Ballina’s second cinema. Her parents didn’t approve of this. One day her father found out she was at Dracula. He went up to the cinema and asked the manager to turn the house lights up. The film was only half way through but when she was located she had to leave the cinema. Her father wanted her to be watching tamer fare like Roy Rogers films in the Savoy.
Another day, when she was playing too loudly one day in her house, her father became frustrated by the noise. He said, ‘Take your brothers for a walk’ so he could get some peace but little did he know where the ‘walk’ would end up. She took them all the way to Enniscrone, a beach town eight miles away from Ballina. After she got there her problem became: ‘How am I going to get home again?’ She went into a house and asked if she could phone home for a lift. Her father took the call and drove down to Enniscrone for his three children. He didn’t speak all the way home and his expression was stern but she felt he was secretly proud of her enterprising nature.
Mary’s push for justice was bred in her from a young age. Why, she wondered, were her two older brothers allowed stay up late while she had to go to bed at the same time as her two younger ones? Her granny died when she was eight but she was deemed to be too young to go to the funeral. Outraged, she climbed up onto a high wall in her back garden and roared across the Moy at the funeral cortege: ‘Goodbye Granny!’ Her parents were terrified she’d fall off. Mary never gave a thought to the danger of that. Her only thought of giving ‘Granny’ a send-off.
She went to boarding school in Mount Anville. Here again her sense of justice was activated when she started saving money for ‘the black babies’ – Africa’s poorest children. The intention was good but she later came to see the idea of ‘buying’ the babies as racist, which most people do nowadays.
Mary had been an avid reader in Ballina. In Mount Anville her choice of subject matter became more sophisticated. She read books on Michael Davitt, Ghandi, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. As she approached her Leaving Cert year she formed the idea that she wanted to be a Sacred Heart nun but was advised to put this ambition on ‘Hold’ until she was sure. Instead, after she completed secondary school, she was sent to a finishing school in France.
Here she studied famous philosophers and intellectuals – Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Camus. At this time she started to question her religion. Why were only boys allowed to become altar boys? Why did she have to wear a scarf in church when her brothers didn’t? Why were there no women in the higher reaches of the hierarchy? Why was a woman’s place ‘in the home’? Did all women have to get married? Could they not devote themselves to their careers?
Liberal ideas and law
When she returned to Ballina from France it was as a different person. She still had affection for the town, and a great love for her parents, but she’d started to form liberal ideas which were not what they wanted. Her desire to become a nun vanished. Instead she decided she wanted to study Law at Trinity College. She won a scholarship there in 1963.
To attend TCD as a Catholic at that time, one required permission from the archbishop of Dublin. My father had obtained the same permission forty years earlier when he left Ballina to study law there. Mary’s uncle, Paget, had been there too. I often heard my father talking about Paget Bourke. I remember thinking how exotic the name sounded. Mary’s brothers Aubrey and Oliver also attended TCD. There were only three women in her class when she was there. How times have changed since.
Mary’s penchant for radical thinking was further indulged in Trinity. The freewheeling ambience of the ‘swinging sixties’ had come in, and the emergence of iconic figure like Bob Dylan who confirmed her view that the times they were a-changin’.
Harvard fellowship
Mary graduated in 1967. She did a Fellowship at Harvard the following year and became a senator in 1969. Over the next few decades she was a spokesperson on many of the topical issues of the day. She gained a reputation as someone who wouldn’t be talked down to by anyone in a patriarchy. A passion for women’s rights made itself felt now. It became indulged every time she saw one being bullied or mistreated. She was influential in securing the right of women to appear on juries, something that hadn’t been the case up to now.
But she didn’t limit her perspective to women alone. In 1979 she fought for the rights of widowers of politicians to receive pensions. Up until then only widows had.
I worked as a courier for a time in the 1980s. One day I was sent out to this big house on the Sandford Road Dublin . When I knocked on it, who should answer but Mary. I doubted she would have remembered me from Ballina so I didn’t say who I was. I was unrecognizable under a helmet and balaclava anyway. She was dressed in a black trouser suit if I remember correctly. Not many women were wearing trousers then. Now most do. She was before her time in fashion as well as everything else.
She still had her straight black hair then. She was very polite to me, which impressed me. Not all people were to couriers. She gave me some money to go into a travel office in town for two plane tickets. Not for a second did I think I was speaking to the future president of the country.
Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first woman president in 1990 with her mantra ‘The hand that rocked the cradle rocked the system.’
Ireland’s first woman President
Mary became Ireland’s first woman president in 1990 with her mantra ‘The hand that rocked the cradle rocked the system.’ Brian Lenihan, the favourite to win the position, had self-destructed after an infamous call to the ‘Aras’ was exposed in an interview he’d done years before and forgotten about. His elimination paved the way for her to win. She’d been a rank outsider up to that point. People had been saying, ‘Left is not Right for the Park.’
Once elected, she delivered on her promise to expand the brief of the position. Up to now, people said, Ireland’s presidents hadn’t done much except shake hands with visiting golfers. One of Marys friends in the Labour Party even said to her, ‘Mary, you’re too young to retire.’
That wasn’t how she saw the position. She said she’d have no problem standing up to Taoisigh if she differed with governmental policy on any issue. Such brazenness didn’t go down too well with people like Charlie Haughey. They felt she was overstepping her role.
As her presidency went on, Mary became famous globally for many of her statements and actions on behalf of the underprivileged at home and abroad. A candle lighting in the window of the Aras became a symbol of her concern for the Irish diaspora.
In 1992 she visited Somalia, then in the grip of famine. The following year she shook hands with both Queen Elizabeth and Gerry Adams, thereby letting people know that she was open to diverse traditions. Controversy attended some of her more radical policies but by the end of her seven-year tenure in the Park she was scoring up to 90% in popularity polls.
She was criticized in some quarters for not seeking a second term as president in 1997 but her subsequent work as a U.N. High Commissioner more than validated that decision. A highly influential canvasser on every issue from racism to capital punishment to climate change, she continues to press for political and social reform even as she enters her ninth decade.
Last year she stood on the steps of St. Muredach’s Cathedral opposite Joe Biden. Biden’s ancestors also hail from Ballina. She assured everyone they were ‘two presidents who loved the same town.’ Rain hinted as Biden appeared with an umbrella. Rain was always hinting in Ballina. ‘Joe Brolly’ said a newspaper caption.
The last time I saw Mary was when I attended the launch of a book of photographs from the late Western People photographer Henry Wills called In All Kinds of Weather. It was aptly named. Rain, once again, was torrential on the night.
Mary was launching it. Henry had been in my class at Muredach’s. He became a devoted friend to Mary in subsequent years. ‘She always gave me priority over the Dublin photographers,’ Henry told me once, ‘whenever I was in danger of being elbowed aside by them.’ Her loyalty meant a lot to him. She spoke very fondly of him in a speech she gave. Henry, sadly, died some months ago. Mary was said to be deeply upset at his passing.
No matter how far she travels, she will always have a ‘grá’ for Ballina and the people in it. You can take the girl out of the town but you can’t take the town out of the girl.
