Mary Robinson - Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice

Bloomsbury USA
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First U.S. edition published 2013
This electronic edition published 2013

Mary Robinson, 2012

Image credits: Family Archives: 1, 2, 3/above right Peter M. Robinson, 4/Nick Robinson, 6 above, 7 above/Nick Robinson. Additional Sources: Thierry Boccon-Gibod/The Elders: 15 above left. Photothque de La Commission Des Communauts Europennes, Bruxelles: 5 above. Corbis: 14 centre right/ Juda Ngwenya. Getty Images: 16 above right/Attila Kisbenedek. The Irish Times: 6 above right/Jack McManus, 8 below, 9 above/Pat Langan, 10 above/Frank Miller, 11 above/Eric Luke. Jennifer McCarthy: 15 below. Jeff Moore/The Elders: 16 below. LOsservatore Romano/Servizio Fotografico: 5 below, 12 below. Press Association Images: 10 below/Martin Keene, 14 below right/Johnny Green, 15 above right. Reuters: 13 above/Pascal Volery, 14 above. Rex Features: 16 above left. Mick Slevin: 9 below. Derek Speirs: 11 below. Courtesy of the White House: 12 above, 14 below left. Henry Wills/Western People: 7 below, 8 above.

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ISBN: ePub: 978-0-8027-1210-3

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To Rory, Amy, Otto, and Kira

Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to homeso close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Eleanor Roosevelt, at the United Nations,
New York, 27 March 1958

I was born and spent my early years in the West of Ireland in just such a place: Ballina, then a town of some six thousand inhabitants, in north County Mayoa small town in a small country on the western periphery of Europe. It had its strong local history and legend, and was, naturally, the centre of the universe for me as a young child. When, later, I first read those famous words of Eleanor Roosevelt, in my boarding school library, I felt a frisson of excitement as I identified Ballina with the small places she spoke of, put side by side with the grand ideals of the Universal Declaration. Looking out the library window, I saw her words as a window into a new world, where concerted citizen action would ensure that everybody mattered. We are all shaped by our early influences, many of which we absorb without being conscious of or fully understanding them.

Mine was a privileged family living in a community that had its share of grinding poverty but also a cohesion stemming from peoples faith and involvement in the life of the parish. My parents were both doctors. Aubrey de Vere Bourke, my father, was raised in a house called Amana, the home of his parents, Henry Charles Bourke and Eleanor Bourke ne Macaulay. HC and Nellie to their friends, they were known by their children as the Pater and the Mater. Amana looked down on the Ridge Pool, celebrated as a stretch of the River Moy that had made Ballina famous for its salmon fishing.

Like his six siblings, my father had been educated in England. He had boarded at the Jesuit school Mount St. Marys, and had taken his medical degree at Edinburgh University. As a young doctor, he worked in London before taking up an internship in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin. The Coombe catered for the very poorest in Dublin, people living in tenements of the kind found in Sean OCasey plays. My father often talked about the intense poverty: rats in the homes of patients he visited, the overcrowding. At the Coombe Hospital he met another doctor, Tessa ODonnell.

Tessa ODonnell, my mother, was from Carndonagh, County Donegal, on the Inishowen Peninsula at the northernmost tip of Ireland. Her parents, Hubert and Winifred ODonnell, were shopkeepers and early supporters of the credit union movement. A family of high achievers, they succeeded in putting five of their children through university, four of them becoming doctors.

My mother studied her medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). She liked to joke that it had taken her so long to qualify because she had been in no hurry, enjoying the social scene, captaining the UCD hockey and tennis teams, and preparing the teas for the rugby club. I am not sure how many years were involved, but certainly she knew a great many people, mainly living in Dublin, whom we would meet on visits there. Before finding a position at the Coombe, she had worked as a temporary replacement doctor on one of the islands off the coast of Donegal, Aranmore, where she served a community living in terrible poverty that lacked any other kind of medical support.

By all accounts, Tessa ODonnell fell head over heels in love with Aubrey Bourke and was the moving party in their relationship. Being some years older than he, she drew him out of himself. Aubrey was born in the year 1914. Tessa was not forthcoming about her age. She used to tell us that she was born the year the Titanic sank, 1912, but we now know that she was born in 1908. Aubrey was handsome and athletic but quite reserved; he had trained for the priesthood with the Jesuitshe never spoke of why it did not work outbefore turning to study medicine. Where Aubrey was serious and reserved, Tessa was extroverted and fun.

They married in Dublin on 18 January 1940. Bishop Naughton, who may also have married HC Bourke and Nellie Macaulay a generation earlier, officiated at their wedding, which took place at University Church on St. Stephens Green. My fathers brother Roddy was the best man, and my mothers sister, Florrie, was the maid of honour. Although my father later made it out to be a small weddingthese were austere times early in World War IIit was, according to my uncle Roddy, a big affair, with a wedding breakfast in the Shelbourne Hotel and photographs in the newspapers.

When the newlyweds returned to Mayo, my grandfather HC felt that my fathers best prospects would be to emigrate (as his siblings had done or would do). My fathers eldest brother, Paget, was already doing well in the colonial service and would later become a chief justice and be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Another brother, Hal, was a doctor in England. Roddy would emigrate to Australia, and the youngest, Dennis, would end up in Brazil. Even the two sisters, Ivy and Dorothy, who became nuns, went to India and England respectively. However, my father was adamant that having been educated outside Ireland, of which he was appreciative, he was going to remain in the town of Ballina and practice medicine from there, as his maternal grandfather, Roger Macaulay, had done.