In 1990 Mary Bourke Robinson (née Bourke; born 1944) became the first woman to be elected president of Ireland. She was named United Nations commissioner for human rights in 1997.

Mary Robinson was born in May 1944 in Ballina, County Mayo. Her father, Dr. Aubrey Bourke, was a general practitioner in that area for 50 years. Her mother, Tessa O'Donnell, came from County Donegal.

The only girl in a family of five, she attended Mt. Anville, an exclusive Catholic girls' boarding school in Dublin. Next she studied at Trinity College at a time when the Irish Catholic hierarchy disapproved of Catholics attending that then predominantly Protestant university. She was admitted to the bar in 1967 after having attended the King's Inn. Subsequently she went to Harvard where she earned a Masters in Law. In 1969 she became the youngest professor of law at Trinity College. She married Nicholas Robinson, a Dublin solicitor, and...