Lawyer Elected as Ireland’s First Woman President

Left-wing lawyer Mary Robinson made Irish history Friday, becoming Ireland’s first female head of state after winning the presidential election against all odds.

“The women of Ireland, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system,” she told cheering supporters after defeating sacked Cabinet minister Brian Lenihan in a bitterly fought campaign.

“I don’t know whether to dance or sing. I have done both and hope to do more of both,” she said of a victory that changed the country’s political landscape.

“My election was on the exact first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall,” the libertarian lawyer said. “Something has crumbled away in Ireland, too.”

For the 46-year-old woman who began the campaign as a distant outsider, it was a stunning triumph over the Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) party that has dominated Irish politics for 60 years.

“We were up against the might and the money and the very effective machinery of the greatest political party in this country, and we beat them,” Robinson said.

Heralding a major change in conservative and Catholic Ireland, she campaigned for the equality of women, a greater voice for the dispossessed and liberalization of the country’s Draconian laws on divorce, homosexuality and contraception.

Final official results from the second count--made necessary because neither had a majority in the first round--showed Robinson winning by 86,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast. She ended with 52.8% to 47.2% for Lenihan.

Prime Minister Charles Haughey, whose own future was put at risk by Lenihan’s defeat, said in congratulation, “I would hope that anything untoward, hurtful or wounding that any of us may have said during the course of the election will now be put aside.”

Haughey may face a Fianna Fail mutiny. Last month he sacked Lenihan, his closest ally, from the Cabinet in a last-ditch bid to save his coalition government.

Robinson, a civil rights lawyer, is also a law professor at Trinity College.

A practicing Catholic herself, Robinson is married to a Protestant who was a fellow law student; her parents refused to attend the wedding. She has accused the “patriarchal, male-dominated presence of the Catholic Church” of subjugating women in Ireland.

The Robinsons have two sons and a daughter.