The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that her parents, Aubrey and Tessa Bourke, who were medical doctors in Ballina, Co Mayo, had always supported her education.
In an interview with Transcending Boundaries on CNBC Africa, she said: “With four brothers, two older and two younger, of course, I had to learn about gender equality and human rights.
“What my parents kept saying, that had more influence on me: ‘Mary, you have every opportunity your brothers have. You’re bright, you’re doing well in school. You’ve got to believe in yourself. You have every opportunity’. And Irish society was telling me something very different.
“My brothers were altar boys. There was no such thing as an altar girl. We were a very religious Catholic family. My grandparents went to mass daily, we went every week on Sundays. I had to wear this awful scarf in church. I was a girl, and there was no doubt in my mind that there was a difference.
“My father would say he’d just been at a poor home where there was a midwife, but he’d come as the doctor, and then the question from the parents: ‘Doctor, is it a boy or a child?’ Even then, you knew the boy was what mattered. And that was 80 years ago in Ireland.
“So, that brought me to a sense that my parents think I have the same opportunities. I know I don’t, but that’s something to work on. I have this inner sense of justice, and I think that’s what carried me forward for the rest of my life,” she said.
As Ireland’s first female president from 1990 to 1997, who is also the founding member of the Elders, added that her parents were not “pleased” with her marrying Nicholas Robinson.
Ms Robinson met her husband, who is an author, cartoonist and solicitor, while studying Law in Trinity College Dublin.
“My parents were not at all pleased, because, in that year after I came back from Harvard in 1969, I became the Reid Professor of Constitutional and Criminal Law, and I also got elected to the Irish senate for the university.
“All of that meant I was a senator and a professor, and therefore I was on a pedestal with my parents, I think, suffering from what I would call over-love,” she said.
When asked if her parents didn’t want her to marry a cartoonist, she said: “A cartoonist who was known to have dated a lot of women, and he was also a Protestant. That was probably the least significant, but it was a factor,” adding that her parents opposed the marriage and didn’t come to their wedding.
“I was already well-known in my maiden name, Senator Mary Bourke, because I had proposed family planning, and the Archbishop of Dublin had said that this would be a ‘curse upon the country’, which was heavy stuff.
“We got married with all [Nicholas’s] family there, one first cousin came because I needed one family member, and I told my brother who wanted to come: ‘No, stay away. We’ll keep the family together away,’ because I knew, after we married, my parents would be reconciled very quickly, which they were.
“And indeed, my mother used to joke that Nick was her favourite son-in-law. In fact, she could only have one,” she added.
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