It’s rare for a politician to cry on camera because they’re so moved, especially in a legacy-cementing retrospective. But it happens several times in Aoife Kelleher’s feature-length profile of the former Irish president, Mary Robinson. Whether it’s pride in the Irish national identity, sympathy with the disenfranchised or grave fear of how the climate crisis will affect future generations, Robinson is not afraid to let her emotions show and is, indeed, unable to avoid it. In those moments, we see the core of her enduring popularity. As captured by this programme, Robinson is a leader who actually, genuinely cares, about people and principles.
A conventionally structured film – archive clips, journalist talking heads, an interview with Robinson herself – begins with her latter-day incarnation as an environmental campaigner before flipping us back to postwar County Mayo, where Mary Bourke grew up competing with four brothers. Despite being “shy” and a “bookworm”, she was filled with an impulse to “make life more fair”, and sought to implement that via the study of law at Trinity College, Dublin, where she met her future husband, Nicholas Robinson. A spell at Harvard meant she was in the US to witness protests against the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. “What is law when all of this is happening?”, Robinson remembers thinking.
