Word: irelanders
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When Mary Robinson was a young girl just out of convent school, her family sent her off to Paris for a year of finishing school. It was there, as an impressionable 17-year-old, that she came to an important realization about her native Ireland. Its historic insularity did not serve to protect its culture, but instead helped keep it in the shadow of the English. "A country like France had such a sense of itself that it could never be diluted," she recalls. "You don't homogenize a culture, you enrich it by diversity of contacts." Only by becoming...
Robinson went on to become one of Ireland's foremost international lawyers and a politician known for her secular sophistication. Now as the nation's first woman President, she has become a symbol of its European aspirations, as reflected in its resounding vote of approval last week for the Maastricht treaty and integration into the new European Union. But most important, given the largely ceremonial nature of her office, she has become a symbol of what made that vote possible: Ireland's renewed self-confidence and national pride...
...pride. By opening up the presidential mansion to virtually any group that wants to come, she has nurtured her countrymen's love for their history. By sailing expertly through 25 or 30 public engagements a week, she | is a highly visible symbol of the national character. By visiting Northern Ireland and encouraging travel between the two states, she embodies the hope that the deadly rancor can be combatted...
Upon returning to Ireland she married fellow lawyer Nicholas Robinson, the son of a Protestant banker and a former political cartoonist for the Irish Times. She took on cases of sexual and employment disadvantage to women. She fought for legalizing birth control and divorce (or "the divorce," as it is known locally). For years she was active in the Labour Party, serving 20 years in the Senate, but her two attempts to run for the more powerful Dail, the lower house of Parliament, ended in defeat. She finally broke with the party because she thought it was intransigent...
...felt it was a way to project that I was serious about the campaign," she says, "and that had its own effect. I saw myself less as the bluestocking and more the person trying to communicate that we have an office here that can represent what is modern about Ireland. I was so keen to get that across that I would have done whatever it took...