By David Hennessy
There was a standing ovation at a sold out screening of a very special documentary about Ireland’s first female President in Kilburn recently.
Former President Mary Robinson visited the Kiln theatre for a special screening of the documentary about her life, Mrs Robinson on Wednesday 29 January.
Hosted by IFTUK, the screening formed part of the St Brigid’s celebrations and was part of a tour for the film with screenings also taking place in Birmingham and Glasgow.
The film was followed by a Q and A chaired by journalist Anne-Marie Tomchak.
The crowd got to hear Ireland’s first female President talk about her career including her Presidency and subsequent role as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and her passion for combatting the climate crisis.
Asked what she herself took away from the film Mrs Robinson said: “I think Aoife Kelleher, the director, really did a great job I would almost say on poor material but I’m not allowed to.
“She did a job of capturing what was happening in a way that I really liked, and she rightly covered my mistakes and Bride (Rosney) was insistent on that as well.
“I think that’s important, showing your vulnerability.
“Nobody is perfect.
“We all make mistakes.
“I made big ones and they’re covered well, and I’m glad of that.
“I do feel that it does show how Ireland opened up and moved forward but it also showed the kind of issues we were coping with and are still coping with.
“I’m hoping that young people, in particular, in this audience and others will feel energised by the film, energised to make a difference.
“There was I, a girl among four brothers, two medical doctor parents: Nothing political in our family, nothing that would say what I might do and I didn’t know what I was going to do.
“A lot of it was support from others, particularly my parents initially, telling me that I had the same opportunity as my brothers. It wasn’t true.
“I was going to make it true if I could.
“And just going forward you don’t get elected as president of Ireland without a huge amount of support, not just from women, though the support of Mná na hÉireann was very significant, but also from men and from young men.
“I just hope that the impact is to make a difference.
“It is true that I’m very committed now to the climate and nature issue because it’s such a crisis, and these next few years are so important.
“The five years up to 2030 are vital to put us in a different place globally and that’s why we have this project Dandelion.”
Mary Robinson said of the film: “The truth is I didn’t really want the film to be made.
“A very dear friend, Bride Rosney: That special friend who tells you the things you need to know, not the things you want to hear.
“She said to me, ‘You’ve had a good life. People need inspiration. We need to tell that story. I’ll make it possible for you. I’ll do everything’.
“And she did. She brought me to the interviews. She did all the linkings with Aoife Kelleher, the wonderful director, and Loosehorse (Productions), the wonderful producers.
“I didn’t do anything except just go along.
“And just after the film was finished, literally we’d seen the final cut of it, she slipped away in her sleep at the age of 74 and the film is dedicated to her.
“She’s in it, as you saw, protecting me from my own mistakes.
“But Bride, I think, knew that we all need inspiration.
“I was part of a wide number of people who fought for rights in Ireland.
“It does tell the story of how Ireland did struggle and we, I think, achieved a lot at a time when, sadly, a country that inspired me a lot, the United States, is in much more difficulty especially for women’s rights in recent times and now, particularly with the Trump presidency, is kind of going backwards.
“So it’s not guaranteed that you hold on to what you have.
“You have to have eternal vigilance.”
Mary Robinson admits in the film that leaving her Presidency early to take her job with the UN was a mistake.
“Stepping down early from the Presidency, because I was under pressure from Kofi Annan to come earlier (was a mistake).
“I thought that Kofi Annan mightn’t wait for me, might appoint somebody else.
“To be perfectly honest, I had no other option.
“When you’ve been president for seven years, you can’t go back and practice law.
“I was offered a professorship to teach in the United States. I didn’t want to do that and I did want to do this job.
“I was very keen to get the job and I realised there was a very big campaign going on for the new president.
“It was all the news and I felt almost nobody would notice if I leave a bit early but actually they did and they were right.
“I had committed for seven years. I should have stayed those seven years.
“So for lots of reasons, it was a mistake.”
Asked about the inspiration for her climate mission Mary said: “I have to admit that I came very late to understanding the impact of climate change, and I do make that clear.
“I never made any speech about it in my seven years as President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 and then when I became high commissioner, another part of the UN was dealing with it.
“And it was really when I was working in Africa in 2003 on economic and social rights, rights to food, education, health, etc that I realised the impacts were already there.
“They were devastated.
“They had no insurance, they had no plan B and the rainy seasons weren’t coming.
“Women were saying to me, ‘Is God punishing us?’
“That’s how they were trying to explain it.
“This is outside our experience: Long periods of drought, flash flooding destroying the school and the village over and over again in the various countries which is why I came to climate justice.
“But probably the moment when I understood another important part of it, climate and nature, was when I was in Greenland.
“I was lucky enough in the summer of 2019 to get a gift of a scientific expedition to Greenland and on the second last day, we were taken on a boat to a small place with quite primitive huts.
“We were told, ‘Now, go out on your own. Go out on your own and just listen to the glacier’.
“And as I sat there, and this was August 2019, I realised the sun was very, very hot and I hadn’t brought my sun lotion and it was beginning to burn me in Greenland.
“It was 26, 27 degrees and I could hear this iceberg and this glacier and it was like the noise of thunder and then every now and again, it was like gunshots.
“I started to cry.
“I was on my own and I realised I was crying because this shouldn’t be happening.
“This is what we were doing to nature.
“And I’ve never felt so profoundly affected.
“And I think we need to absolutely think about regenerating nature, the biodiversity, the extinction of species that we’re responsible for.
“We really have to have a very holistic approach now to how we go forward.
“And that was a gift to me, a gift of simply crying with nature because I felt it in my soul and my heart.
“We have to step up and I’m very keen that women leaders at all levels would step up in particular and give leadership.
“But it’s not women only, it’s women leading.
“We don’t have enough women’s leadership in our world which is one of the problems.
“Actually, I do feel very strongly that we need a climate justice movement and that women need to lead this movement, because we have the right way of approaching.
“Women’s leadership is non-hierarchical.
“We don’t think of the big man, the autocratic figure which is so popular nowadays and you know who I’m talking about.
“And we talk about collaboration, listening, problem solving.
“Everybody’s voice matters in this.
“We need to work together on this, collaborate.
“This is the kind of leadership we actually need so I’m very keen that we have a movement.
“I’m a co founder of Project Dandelion.
“I learned the power of symbols.
“I learned it as president of Ireland from simply putting a light in the window in Áras an Uachtaráin.
“I did that because I had learned as a senator that we didn’t care about our immigrants.
“I’d been to various immigrant centres in the US and in Canada and in the UK in particular and we didn’t actually have any policies of care up to 1990.
“I wanted to symbolise this but I didn’t know, in symbolizing this, that the light would take on a life of its own.
“That light is like magic.
“It worked 24/7 for the seven years and it created a sense of belonging, a sense of a diaspora, a sense of caring and the policies followed, we’ve got very good policies now as a result of that and some of the magic.
“So here we have the Dandelion, which I considered when I was growing up as a weed.
“The dandelion is a beautiful flower.
“It grows on all continents. It is very resilient. You can’t get rid of the damn thing if you want to.
“It’s also got deep roots that go into the soil and regenerate the soil and farmers are learning this.
“It’s the perfect symbol of magic, of reminding us of an important lesson which I learned when I sat listening to the iceberg: We are actually nature. We are the same. We are nature. We’re not separate from nature and that dandelion can guide us into somehow having a movement that helps us to see that we’re on the cusp of a much better world.
“We don’t think about that world enough.
“That world would be powered by renewable energy, it will be much fairer, much healthier, much safer and it will also make a huge difference in developing countries where they don’t have access to electricity but they have the capacity if they had the investment.
“It’s just shifting the money from fossil fuel into clean energy.
“It’s hard but it’s actually very doable and the science and nature tells us we have to do it.
“You can’t negotiate with science and nature, we actually have to do it or we will face a world where we will have more and more of these destructive, highly costly storms, highly costly hurricanes, highly costly droughts, highly costly wildfires.
“That’s the future unless we move in the other direction.
“I was lucky enough and the film covered the establishment of the elders, and it was great to be part of that.
“And is great to be part of that wonderful group of human beings.
“Our first chair was Archbishop Tutu, and I learned so much from him.
“We were together in New York, it must be about 20 years ago now, in front of young people.
“It was a social good conference and we were being moderated by a journalist.
“And Archbishop Tutu, when he was in front of young people, would tell them how great they were, how much he believed in them, how much he loved them, etc.
“She (the journalist) said, ‘Archbishop Tutu, why are you such an optimist?’
“He looked at her and he actually shook his head.
“He said, ‘Oh no, I’m not an optimist. I’m a prisoner of hope’.
“And I’ve thought about it a lot recently.
“The glass may not be half full, there may be very little in it but what you do is you work with what’s there.
“You collaborate to make it better.
“In other words, hope is action.
“Hope is taking the steps you can take and we all can take steps, every step matters.”
A question from the audience asked Mrs Robinson to remember her reaction to being elected back in 1990.
“Huge emotion, huge disbelief initially, to be honest.
“I was told, ‘You will be President tomorrow’.
“And I didn’t believe it.
“The emotion was unbelievable and I still remember what everybody said to me, ‘When you were elected, I cried’, just that depth of emotion that showed that something had changed and Ireland had changed, and I was just sort of symbolic somehow in this.
“I had done something.
“I had been elected but actually, there were so many other forces that were part of this that were showing in Ireland and I’m very proud of how Ireland went on, and I acknowledged on the film.
“I was very proud of how young people took on the same sex marriage, took on the removal of prohibition on abortion in the in that referendum in the Constitution,
“No country is perfect but Ireland has achieved a lot.
“Our relations with Britain were fractured a bit by Brexit but they’re coming back again.
“I’m very glad to see both governments are very keen that they will come back and be much better.
“I’m very happy about that.”
She added: “So my reflection when I was president, when I was actually elected, was, ‘My goodness, this is a real opening up of Ireland that somebody with my background of fighting for issues of human rights, LGBT issues, all these issues could be elected is a sign that Ireland has moved forward and a symptom of what I was really thinking about in my inauguration address.
“I did say that I hope to work at the local level, at the national level but also maybe at the international level.
“I had no idea what might happen and I remember just being very concerned on that day as to how I was going to fulfill what I was pledged to do.”
A question from the audience asked why there is not more pusback against Trump
“Well judges have stopped a lot of what has been proposed.
“The courts are being used
“If you take the pulling out of the Paris Agreement that happened last time a whole lot of states of the United States, cities in the United States, entrepreneurs and philanthropy and business people in the United States all stepped up and are still stepping up.
“So on one level, you’ve got a dystopian, as you say, bad picture.
“At another level, you’ve got the resistance rto that, and it’s there.
“I’m not saying this is an easy time, it’s not but I am saying there will always be people there who will stand up.”
