28 Mary Robinson

When Mary Robinson ran for the presidency of Ireland in 1990, she sold herself as someone who wanted to restore national self-confidence and create healing between various entities on the island: Protestants and Catholics, of course; men and women; country and city.

As an arch-feminist, born the daughter of two Mayo doctors, she was somewhat behind the eight ball to begin. She had endeared herself to unionist opinion by taking a stance on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning from the Labour Party in protest. Other than making southern Catholics more suspicious of her, this had no effect on anything. And now she hoped to persuade an electorate comprising 95 per cent Catholics to make her President of the Republic.

Robinson was respected but not particularly likable. She had been a prominent lawyer, involved in numerous high-profile cases involving ‘women’s issues’. People thought her somewhat strident in a posh sort of way. She came across as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy rather than as a daughter of Mayo. She spoke in a slightly fruity accent, and dressed like a nun in mufti, nodding all the time as she spoke. She had a stern outward appearance. There wasn’t much crack to her. The fact that she looked and sounded like pure-bred Dublin 4 pretty much ruled out her chances of garnering votes anywhere else.

Robinson said that she wanted to ‘change’ Ireland, but change it into something that, she implied, it wished to become. She sought to reassure people that she was not some left-wing Trojan horse, some fire-eating feminist dragon who, if she won, would seek to claim a famous victory over ‘the forces of conservatism’. One of the senior Labour Party people involved in her campaign afterwards described it as being like a train with lots of different carriages filled with different kinds of people. The trick was not to let people in any one carriage know who was in the others. To have any hope of being elected, she would have to gain votes not just from the left-liberal constituency, but from across the spectrum, all over the country.

More than six months before the campaign would rightly begin, Robinson began her work in Allihies in west Cork, and afterwards travelled the length and breadth of Ireland trying to overcome her disadvantages and persuade ‘ordinary’ Irish people to vote for her. She did not slap any backs, but she clasped the sweaty hand of middle Ireland. She forced a smile and kissed babies. Her rhetoric was inclusive and almost warm. She said that there did not have to be winners or losers, there did not have to be sides. By fighting against the perceived conservative forces in Irish society, she had come to appreciate the nature of those forces: that they were not merely the preserve of a diehard minority, but an essential part of the equilibrium of the society. Conservatism and liberalism, she explained, were not for her exterior forces, but intrinsic parts of herself, of her own experience and outlook, just as they were parts of all Irish people. ‘I’m a Catholic from Mayo,’ she said. ‘So there’s nothing about that Ireland that I don’t know. So it’s me. I understand it from within and I want to develop it on, but in a way that one would want to develop oneself, almost. I don’t repudiate as much as want to coax along into a different mould.’

Afterwards, there were assiduous efforts to reinterpret her victory as emblematic of a narrow range of orthodoxies. When the writers came over from Time and Vanity Fair, they were facilitated by Robinson proponents in writing simplistic analyses of what was going on. The country, which just four years earlier had rejected divorce, the world was told, had had a sudden and dramatic change of heart. The ‘old’ Ireland was in retreat. The Irish were now ready to join the modern world.

What this ignored was that most of the people on the Robinson train espoused a multiplicity of complex and often contradictory views about everything. Some of them, for example, had no problem with divorce but abhorred abortion. Some of them were simply sick of the old tribal politics. Some of them were female chauvinists. Some of them were men who thought that electing a woman President would be a nice exercise in window-dressing. And so on.

The rinsed-down reason we elected Robinson was that we suddenly became drunk on the possibility that we could. In truth, her election was more of a gesture than a symbol. She won at a time when people were beginning to think it might be fun to overturn the party political bandwagons. Robinson succeeded in presenting herself as unthreatening to a sufficiency of people to enable her to sneak past the post on the second count. We had no idea what it might mean, or how on earth it could be deemed to mean anything, but somehow we decided that it was better to do it than not do it. In this sense, her election was emblematic of the modernizing-cum-liberalizing ethic with which she had come to be identified, representing a form of change which was purely reactive, which has no real announcement to make but simply wanted to denounce what already existed.

Having promised to reinvent the presidency, Robinson appeared to use it as a platform for her own advancement and greater glory. The very fact that she had been elected was enough, it seemed. Nearing the end of her term of office, she pulled plant to take up a big job in the UN. So much for her desire to reinvigorate the self-confidence of the Irish people.

In the end, the Irish people were left wondering what, other than the career of Mary Robinson, it had all been about. What had changed other than that the person going around opening gymkhanas was a woman rather than a man. It wasn’t just that the whole thing had been an elaborate con-trick to get Robinson elected, but that it had been an elaborate con-trick that created an impression of ‘change’ and ‘progress’, when really nothing much was changing or progressing at all.

If this was not sufficient to display Mrs Robinson in her true colours, an episode that occurred some three years later would put an end to any remaining doubts. Robinson, now United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking on International Women’s Day. By now she had been replaced as President by another woman, Mary McAleese, an entirely different class of individual by any standard.

‘Apparently,’ Robinson told her receptive audience of like-minded sisters, ‘there are small boys in Ireland who are complaining to their mothers, “Why can’t I grow up to be President?” That seems to me to be an excellent experience for small boys in Ireland.’

Finally, it was all laid bare. The grandiose rhetoric of inclusiveness had fallen away and we were left with the spectacle of one of the pettiest chauvinists the nation had ever nurtured gloating because, as a result of her glorious endeavours, little boys could no longer hope to become the first citizen of the Republic. Sisters, what a triumph!

In Robinson’s defence, it might be said that the remark was an attempt at a joke by someone with no sense of humour. But no – underlying her words was a deeply disquieting hostility – even managing to exceed the standard everyday feminist rancour towards males. By virtue of being specifically directed at young boys, her words attained a new level of unwomanly malevolence.

Of course, deep down, very few of those who voted for her expected Robinson to be otherwise. None of it really meant anything. She had become the incarnation of values that we were instructed we had to adopt but in which most sensible people saw very little value. We liked the idea of having a President who represented ‘liberal’ ideas without having the right to express, still less implement, them. We welcomed her necessary fudges and enforced silences, because they allowed us to have the name of modernity without having to work out what it might actually mean – in concrete Irish terms. She represented our unspoken desire to be perceived as liberal without surrendering the fabric of our existing society to a process of unravelling for which there seemed to be few rules or principles. In short, Mary Robinson did not turn the first sod on a new highway to the future: she cut the tape on a cul-de-sac into which we pulled to have a look at the map. And we’re still there.