Ireland’s President Beat All Odds to Win : Elections: Robinson is a feminist and a political outsider, and she’s sympathetic to Protestants. Voters chose her anyway.

Mary Robinson, elected Friday as president of Ireland, is by far the most unlikely chief of state the country has ever had.

The president is a woman in a country whose politics are dominated by men; she is a feminist in a land where such activists are often scorned; she is a radical in a conservative society; she is an outsider in activities characterized by cronyism, and she is sympathetic to Protestants of Northern Ireland, who are often detested in the Irish Republic.

Robinson, 46, is also a brilliant attorney, married to a Protestant lawyer and the mother of three, whose candidacy was not taken seriously until a few weeks ago.

About then, the odds-on favorite, veteran Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) party politician Brian Lenihan, 60, came under fire for having lied about his role in an arcane political matter relating to his urging a previous president to appoint his mentor, Charles Haughey, as prime minister.

Until then, Robinson, running as the candidate of the Labor Party--which normally trails behind the conservative Fianna Fail and more liberal Fine Gael (Family of the Irish) parties--was at the wrong end of Irish bookmakers’ 100-to-1 odds.

It was not that she was unknown. As a highly regarded constitutional lawyer, she fought to modernize and liberalize many of Ireland’s church-influenced laws.

A dedicated European in Ireland, she led the way in taking cases on behalf of her clients to the European Court of Human Rights.

During the campaign, she pulled no punches. She supported liberal positions on the difficult and politically loaded issues of divorce, contraception, homosexuality, illegitimacy, adoption, family law, legal aid and the right to information on abortion in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation.

Her candidacy came after a stellar career. Born in County Mayo, she graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with honors in law and French. She was elected to the Senate, the Irish Parliament’s upper house, in a seat allotted to Trinity--the first Catholic elected by the Protestant university.

However, Robinson failed twice in campaigns for election to the House of Representatives, or Dail, partly because, as she readily admits, she is not a comfortable, handshaking politician. Her accent, too, is more cultivated than that usually associated with political success in Ireland.

Although Robinson was thought to have no chance of winning the presidency because she trailed far behind Lenihan and Fine Gael candidate Austin Currie, many Irish voters--particularly women--nevertheless responded to her message: a call for social justice, civil liberties and feminism.

As president, Robinson said after her victory was announced, she will “extend the hand of friendship to Northern Ireland” and “build bridges” to both the Catholic and Protestant communities.

Few observers doubt that Mary Robinson will make the most of her new, seven-year post, however constitutionally limited. The president in many ways is a figurehead in Ireland.

As the Irish Times put it: “She has possibly done more, with words alone, to induce change in Ireland than any other politician.”