Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Mary Robinson
Oration given on 16 July 1999
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon MARY ROBINSON.
It was characteristic of Mary Robinson that her first public engagement on
becoming President of Ireland in November 1990 was to open a conference on
homelessness. Her last official function, when she relinquished the presidency,
in September 1997, was to open a housing project for homeless people. In the
interim, she had put her own individual stamp on not only the presidency, but on
public life in Ireland in general. Even before her election, she travelled the
country addressing small gatherings of people in factories, shopping precincts,
community centres and even in people’s homes. Yet it wasn’t just a case of
showing herself to the electorate: she also listened to the people, heard their
complaints and learned about their concerns and aspirations. From being an
outsider, she emerged from the final round of voting for the presidency with
fifty-three per cent of the vote on a higher-than-average turnout. Over the next
six years she both moulded and reflected the life of a country that was
experiencing an exciting and formative phase of its historical development.
Prior to Mrs Robinson’s election to the presidency, there had even been talk
of abolishing that institution. In any case, it was fairly unusual for there to
be a contested election. But her success in 1990 made Ireland only the second
European country (after Iceland) to elect a woman as head of state. But if
anyone believed that Mary Robinson would rest content to serve as merely a
decorative president they were in for a shock.
Mary Robinson was born in 1944. Graduating from Trinity College, Dublin in
1967, she went on to take her Master-in-Law degree at Harvard. Having been
called to the Bar of the King’s Inn, Dublin, she joined the Middle Temple in
1973. In the meantime, she had become a member of the Irish Senate, a position
she held for twenty years, until 1989. Simultaneously, she pursued her academic
career as a professor and lecturer in, variously, criminal and European
Community law at Trinity College. In 1970, she entered upon a very happy
marriage to Nick Robinson; they have three children.
The dry facts of professional biography cannot do justice to Mrs Robinson’s
manifold achievements both before and after she became President of Ireland.
In 1971, as a Senator, she presented her first Private Member’s bill to the
Upper House, introducing an amendment designed to remove the ban on the sale and
use of contraceptives. Later that year, she presented a bill on adoption. These
were followed by a second adoption bill and the introduction of the Illegitimate
Children (Maintenance and Succession) Act. As a lawyer she was part of a team
that won a case in the Supreme Court establishing the right of women to serve on
juries and a few years later she won a case that forced the state to tax married
couples as two single persons. Another case that she won forced the state to
provide legal aid to those who would otherwise have been denied access to the
courts. And later, in the 1980s, there came a court judgement that ended the
status of illegitimacy in Ireland, a cause that she had first raised in the
Senate in the early 1970s. Two years after that, in 1988, the European Court of
Human Rights ruled that Ireland was in breach of the Human Rights Convention
because of the criminal status of homosexuality there – the legal case was
argued primarily by Mary Robinson.
The same thread of human and civil rights runs through Mary Robinson’s
presidency. But her role extended far beyond that. She successfully projected a
new, modernising image of Ireland internationally, giving immense encouragement
and satisfaction to what she herself called the Irish “diaspora” overseas. At
times sailing very close to the wind in her role as a non-political president,
she nonetheless persisted with her self-defined task of raising the role and
prestige of the presidency. If, for example, she visited the North, Ulster, in
1992, the next year she went to Warrington in Lancashire to join in worship with
John Major and the Duke of Edinburgh at a memorial service for two children
killed by an IRA bomb. She also took tea with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham
Palace and invited her to visit Ireland. Two months later, she shook hands
publicly with Gerry Adams in Belfast, an act that, with hindsight, might be seen
as one of several precursors of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Nor were
these gestures intended merely to suggest an even-handed approach to problems
that have bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations for so long. Each was decided upon
its own merits and each helped to serve the cause of healing hurts and
eradicating misunderstanding.
Mary Robinson carried the same wisdom, lightness of touch, sincerity and
dignity of office to her next appointment, that of United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights, the post that she occupies today. Now the need
for diplomacy is even greater and her visibility on the world’s stage even more
prominent. Yet, undeterred, she has tackled her new responsibilities with
characteristic toughness, panache and vigour.
We are all of us aware of the terrible things that have been happening over
the past several months in the Balkan peninsula. Most of us, one imagines, have
been dismayed and horrified by the images that have leapt out of our screens
night after night, images that evoke some of the most terrible chapters of the
second world war, chapters that we all hoped would never be repeated. But in the
welter of conflicting emotion it was incumbent upon the United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights to cut through that emotion, the propaganda, the
high politics, and somehow to light a beacon for other international
institutions to follow. Thus it was that, in May, Mary Robinson visited Serbia
and Kosovo, after which she reported to the Commission on Human Rights that
Serbian military and police forces and paramilitary units had carried out, with
“chilling determination” a well-planned programme of forcible expulsion of
ethnic Albanians: the evidence of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, she wrote, is
undeniable. But at the same time, she pointed out that there are still questions
to be answered regarding the legality of the Allies’ high-level bombing campaign
in the absence of approval from the Security Council. This is not, it should be
emphasised, an instance of moral equivalency: it is an example of asking the
kinds of crucial questions that must always be asked at times of conflict (or,
indeed, in any situation where people’s rights are being infringed).
Among the attributes of this University are its School of Law and its Human
Rights Centre, which in turn interlock with other disciplines. Mary Robinson
would be worthy of our recognition as a lawyer, as an outstanding president of a
neighbouring country, the Republic of Ireland, and as an international states
person. We honour her today for all those roles, but perhaps, above all, we
honour her as a tireless campaigner for human rights, whether it be the right of
an adolescent girl who has been raped to terminate her unwanted pregnancy, or
the civil and human rights of entire peoples.
Chancellor, I present to you Mary Therese Robinson