Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice
Few would have guessed the tomboy daughter of Dr. Bourke of tiny Ballina in County Mayo, Ireland, would become a trailblazer. But once Mary Bourke decided she didn’t have a religious vocation, she made iconoclastic choices. She studied law at the “wrong” Dublin university (the Protestant one), then headed off to Boston to study at Harvard in the tumultuous Vietnam era. She married a Protestant (political cartoonist, attorney, and, later, preservation-activist Nick Robinson) in front of a judge, not a priest. She built her practice as a barrister around civil rights law, representing clients like abused women and travelers (aka “tinkers”), spent 20 years in the upper house of the Irish legislature and then, in 1990, was elected Ireland’s first female president. Robinson transformed that ceremonial position by joining European Union and United Nations missions to dangerous conflict-ridden areas like Rwanda and Kosovo. There, as in her subsequent service as U.N. high commissioner for human rights and her later work, independently and as a member of Nelson Mandela’s Council of Elders, Robinson has helped define the respect and protection nations owe their citizens. --Mary Carroll