The unfettered joy I felt when Mary Robinson was elected President of Ireland came flooding back to me this morning. I slept in my god daughter’s bed last night while she is working and living away in Vancouver. I left the Piccadilly Line to spend this weekend with my BF on the west coast of Ireland and I found, on the bookshelf, the former president’s biography, written by John Horgan, published in 1997.
Mary Robinson’s election to the presidency was a welcome alternative to decades of political partisanship in the 70 year old Irish State. When I started out on my working life in Ireland in the 1980s, the country was in a parlous state. Taxes were high, jobs were scarce, emigration was commonplace and people were deeply frustrated. The country was trying to wade through a vat of tar and our citizens, informed by education, television, overseas experience and travel began to realise that it did not always have to be like this. Voices from the far right scare mongered about emerging dissenting voices such as Mary Robinson's, and overseeing all this was the Catholic Church who seemingly were in cahoots with the government in keeping citizens under thumb. The 1980s was a decade of much moral debate which followed the even more miserable decade of the 1970s.
There was a so called abortion referendum (lost), a divorce one, (lost), the case of the Kerry babies, and the poor schoolgirl who gave birth and died in childbirth at a grotto in Granard. Reeling in my own 1980s I recall picking up condoms in the Well Woman Centre in Dublin for my married friend living on the west coast. I also remember speaking to the manager of a building society about getting a mortgage. He laughed out loud at me and said that single women could not get mortgages. I moved near the Piccadilly Line towards the end of the decade with a band of others. London offered and delivered liberation from faux morality, fun and opportunity. Ireland carried on in sharp denial of realities led by hucksters of dubious ethical provenance. The words banana and republic spring to mind with the tribunal era still some way off. The 1980s drew to a close and in 1990, Mary Robinson rose from this undiluted mire and was elected, against all the odds, as the President of Ireland. It was so refreshing. I heard it on the Friday night news and hungry for information, I travelled all the way the following morning, on the Piccadilly Line, to West London to a newsagent I knew for certain stocked the Irish Times. I needed to soak up the all the comment and coverage. It was a tweet free zone back then.
The election of Mary Robinson offered new hope for the country. I remember, she declared that she wanted to be a president for all the people of Ireland, not just those who supported a particular party or section. She acknowledged the diaspora and promised to keep a candle lit in the Aras for all emigrants. The biography related an incident from her own life which might have influenced this. In her early 20s, Mary was a student in Harvard and while she enjoyed the intellectual stimulation she was heartsick and homesick. She stumbled upon her local paper “The Western People” in a Boston newsstand and as the biographer reports she soaked up every inch of it.
Although I dwell near the Piccadilly Line, Ireland is always in my soul. In my exile the country became the subject of envy of many tomes around the world as its economy grew at an unprecedented rate and when it crashed spectacularly many spirits and hopes were crushed. Ireland has had to raise taxes, cut incomes and benignly endorse emigration as its brightest graduates, such as my god-daughter, leave in droves in search of work. And there is the wanton waste that is so evident in town after town of unoccupied and unfinished housing developments. These estates are spooky places which apparently attract disaffected young people, alerted through social media such as Facebook. The word here on the by roads is that of demolition. The Ireland of today is in a much more depressed state than that of the 70s or 80s. At least then, we had not known any better. This time around, a greater number of citizens were invited to the party but the ensuing and enduring hangover has been both severely acute and chronic.
Ireland is due for a new President next year as the current incumbent, Mary McAleese’s, term of office comes to an end. Let’s hope that the new President can reinvigorate the mood of the country in the way that Mary Robinson once did.
