When she was still a small and
bookish girl, holed up in the library of a Sacred Heart nuns’ school in
Dublin, Mary Robinson read about towering human-rights figures—Eleanor
Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi—and dreamed of doing something worthwhile with
her life. Before long, and famously, she did: first, as one of
Ireland’s youngest senators and a barrister taking up cases with the
European Court of Human Rights; then, as Ireland’s first female
president, promoting peace in Northern Ireland and reaching out to the
country’s marginalized communities; and, from 1997 to 2002, as the
United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, bearing witness to,
and calling for international action on, vicious conflicts and
widespread suffering in places such as Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor,
and Chechnya.
