Mary Robinson

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the former President of Ireland and UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

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A professional life defined by public service at the very highest level.

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She appears the epitome of the cool headed pragmatist, and yet she is also something of an enigma.

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A committed Catholic who fought hard to legalise contraception and divorce an elected head of state with both a noble bearing and a common touch self assured enough to believe she can make the world a better place, but comfortable admitting publicly when she gets it wrong.

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As a lawyer she led from the front, championing controversial causes at home in Ireland, then later fiercely defending human rights at the UN.

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She also has a habit of making history. She was Ireland's first female President and the first Irish head of state to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace. She says of her life and work, Over the years I have given many talks and taken part in many discussions on leadership women's leadership, political leadership, business leadership, grassroots leadership, but the element of leadership that really fascinates me is moral leadership, and that seems to me rather

Presenter1:45

Conventional notion, Mary Robinson, for somebody who's not a very conventional person. Explain it a bit more to me.

Presenter1:51

Moral leadership interests me because it's the most difficult, I think. You've got to be speaking out of your own experience that you've lived, and you've got to be listening to those who most need to hear the voice. I've been fortunate enough to be involved in a group called the Elders. I do stress that I'm one of the younger elders, and that is what we engage in. We think about the terrible issues of conflict, discrimination, for example, against women and girls, but there's no big stick, there's no political power. It's all about a kind of moral leadership.

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Are you somebody who has always felt that you have had a strong inner voice with a sense of purpose and, if you like, moral certainty? Not moral certainty, because very often it's questioning. But from a very, very early stage I did have that sense of wanting to be involved in more fairness in the world. I I joke that it's because I was the only girl wedged between four brothers, too older and too younger. So of course I had to be interested in human rights and equality, etc. But in fact, after I decided that it wasn't the appropriate thing for me to become a nun, because I had that vocational sense at the age of seventeen, since then it's been really to use law as an instrument for social change.

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In 1990, when it was first suggested to you that you should run for President of Ireland.

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You say you thought no way. As far as I was then concerned, it was style over substance. I wonder what it was that changed your mind?

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I wasn't attracted because it was an office that was very high, very important with the red carpet, but not actually making a difference in Irish life. Ceremonial, really. Ceremonial. And then it was my husband, Nick, who said, Look, Mary, have you actually read the provisions of the Constitution about the Presidency?

Mary Robinson3:24

Ceremonial, really. Ceremonial, yeah.

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And I went back and I looked and I saw that the President is directly elected and takes an oath to serve the Irish people to the best of his or her ability. And I thought to myself, a President could do so much more. In your first campaign to become President, Mrs. Robinson was your theme tune. That used to be blurred. Never forgive the person who decided that. It's not in your list of eight today. It certainly is not. I heard it over and over again in this presidential bus going round the country. And it lost its charm, but it did apparently achieve some results. It was pretty memorable. And because I had to struggle to marry the man I loved, and we're now forty-two and a half years into that marriage, and I think I know I made the right choice. That's why, even though

Mary Robinson3:52

It's not on your list of eight today, what?

Presenter4:13

Quite a number of my contemporaries were retaining their maiden name, and I might have done that, but it was sealing our love that I was Robinson. I even went further down the voting, because I was a senator at the time, and I went down from Burke, my maiden name, down to Robinson, which is much lower. And those who know about politics know that those with a surname near the top of the alphabet have a slight advantage because people work their way down. That's love for you. We're going to go to your list of eight then. Tell me about the first one we're going to hear this morning, Mary Robinson. What is it?

Mary Robinson4:36

Are you?

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Nineteen ninety was the year of the World Cup.

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And Pavarotti was singing Nesendomi, and it was the sort of song of encouragement and victory.

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So as the first woman president as an outside candidate, when I started I was 100 to 1. Somehow Nesson Dormé was saying, we're going to win.

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Nessen Dorma from Puccini's Turin Dot sung there by Luciano Pavarotti, and the music was played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta. So Mary Robinson, I've been taking a little look at your poll ratings. In June of 1991 you had a poll rating of 82%. By April 1995 you had a poll rating of 92%. What was it you did right?

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I think it's important to recognise that the Presidency is not about the difficult decisions, about taxation or austerity cuts. It is about representing in a way that brings out a strong sense of Irish identity, reaching out to communities in Northern Ireland, representing Ireland abroad, going to places like Somalia in 1992. So there was a sense of being very connected with what people wanted locally and doing them proud, as we would say in Ireland, internationally. Did you meet any resistance from the politicians who sort of sought what she was up to? Quite a bit of resistance at the beginning because this was the first time the Fiona Fall party, main party in Ireland at the time, had not controlled the presidency. And the Taoiseach at the time, Charles Haugy, was a strong personality. And he was trying very hard to rein me in. And I still tried to do things and was being invited to do more and more things. And eventually Charles Haughey came to see me and I was given advance warning that he had with him a legal opinion that I was doing more than the Constitution provided for. So we sat in the room where he would normally brief me. The tea was brought in and then we were left alone and he started to spell out this opinion. But I was a constitutional lawyer and I knew that what I was doing was completely compatible with the Constitution. And Charles Haughey was a bright man, a smart man, and he gradually realised that my arguments were much stronger than his legal opinion. So eventually he threw the opinion on the ground. He said, Ah, that's lawyers, you get what you pay for.

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And after that, I didn't have a problem. There was a period of just a few weeks in 1993 when you met both Her Majesty the Queen at Buckingham Palace and you shook the hand of Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams. Notably, there are no photographs on record of that meeting, but you did it, and it was recorded. Highly symbolic, highly controversial. Were those the things that you wanted to do to express change and transformation in Ireland? Very much so. That invitation to come to Buckingham Palace and have tea with the Queen was extraordinarily important and very impactful in its time. And I was aware that I was going to be going not very long afterwards to West Belfast, Republican West Belfast, to meet the communities. And I knew I would have to meet the political representatives, including Gerry Adams. If I didn't meet Gerry Adams, I actually insulted that community, that I wouldn't meet their leader. And that was a really tough one. The following morning, I had other events still in Northern Ireland that I was looking forward to. And I did, as I had done each morning as President, wash my hair and waited for the hairdresser to arrive. And no hairdresser. She was a loyalist who did not like me going into West Belfast. So much to talk to you about, Mary Robinson, but time, of course, has to be made for the music too. So let's talk about your second disc. I'm afraid there's a Robinson family connection. I have a nephew and his wife who play in the Irish Chamber Orchestra. I was patron of the orchestra when I was President of Ireland, not really for my own music ability, but because it's such a wonderful, engaging, enthusiastic chamber orchestra, and I love this piece.

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Part of the final movement from Haydn's Eighth Symphony, Le Soire, played by the Irish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Gerard Corston. So, Mary Robinson, as you mentioned when we were beginning to chat this morning, you're the only girl of a family of five kids. It gave you a str you were saying a strong sense of justice. How else did that shape you then, being plonk in the middle and the only girl? I think it made me quite competitive, too, because I had to be as good as my brothers and hopefully better. And it made me comfortable in a male world in a way. Misbehaviour, I have read, was met with the warning, don't do that, or dad'll take the knife to you. Now, this needs some explaining. This was a long rubber knife used usually on the hands, but occasionally on the bottom, if it was really very serious, and never with any malice. That did hurt a bit. I mean, it was meant to hurt. But it was always done with such fairness. I was just going to say that, because there you were. I mean, some children do have that very intrinsic strong sense of fairness. It sounds like you were one of them. You never thought, well, that's just not fair. Not really. I felt other things, like the fact that I had to go to bed early with my younger brothers while my two older brothers could stay up, or they could go to the circus at night and I couldn't. There were things like that that I thought would never

Mary Robinson10:52

What is the thing?

Mary Robinson11:03

I was just going to say that because there you were.

Mary Robinson11:09

That's it, sound

Mary Robinson11:10

One of those

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When chastised. Actually, the thing that I found remarkable in both my parents, they were both doctors, was that they imbued in me that I had the same potential, the same opportunities, the same.

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Right to be whatever I wanted to be as my brothers. And that was not the environment that I grew up in in the West of Ireland, because the place of the women was in the home. Girls were instinctively second class. And I remember my father expressing irritation at the question when he would go to a delivery of a baby in the home of a poor farm, and he would come back and he'd say to my mother, I heard that question again to me: Is it a boy, doctor, or a child?

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Tell me more about Harry Burke. He was an important man in your life. He was. My grandfather, he had a great influence on me because I loved going in to talk to him. He was a very thoughtful, retired lawyer, retired through ill health, and he talked a lot about law and justice. And he didn't know how to talk to a child. So he talked to me as if I was an adult, and I loved it at the age of about ten or eleven, twelve. And then he had a signal for when it was time for me to leave him, and that was he would get up and open what we call the laughing cavalier press, and he would take out a box of black magic and offer me one. And that was the key. Take the chocolate and go.

Mary Robinson12:04

Okay.

Presenter12:38

Nice signal, though. Some more music then. Your third? My third was when I was 17 in Paris. I was very influenced by a sister of my father's who was a nun in India. She was working with girls who didn't have anything, didn't have pencils, didn't have books, didn't have soap. My father would send packets of Pamolve green soap, and she would tell the story of the excitement when these were received. I had gone to Paris thinking the best option for me was to follow my aunt and change the world as a nun. And after a year in Paris, I had changed my mind. Well, that'll do it. But the cultural richness, going along to the Odillon and sitting right up in the gods with some friends of mine and listening to this singer that I'd heard about, Edith Piaf, and seeing her come out not at all good-looking, wearing simple black, no jewellery, no nothing, and then she sang.

Mary Robinson13:28

Don't ya da

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Yeah, uh

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Uh

Mary Robinson13:34

No runa regrettor.

Mary Robinson13:39

Nila bea coma

Mary Robinson13:44

Neal Maui.

Mary Robinson13:46

Sam and Yanika

Mary Robinson13:52

Toria Doria No Joana Regretoria.

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Edith Pieff and No Je na regret Rienne. So I wonder, Mary Robinson, as you say, you went from a Catholic boarding school then to this year in Paris. What does a girl learn at finishing school?

Presenter14:10

It was a very good education. There were teachers from the Sorbonne on philosophy, on history. We also were taught by Mademoiselle Anita herself a bit of savoir-faire, that the telephone is a means of communication, not conversation. I remember that one. And that we should wear white gloves on all occasions. And these things were mainly lost on me. But she was a fine woman. So you came home then and you read law at Trinity College, Dublin, and you were elected auditor of the Trinity Law Society. Now.

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I want to talk to you about your inaugural address. It centered on, and I'm quoting here, the dubious special relationship between the State and the Catholic Church. So you are covering areas like contraception, sexuality. Pretty strong stuff for Ireland in nineteen sixty seven. How was it received?

Presenter14:54

It was strong stuff, and I felt very strongly about it. I felt that we needed to open up and not always equate sin and criminality. And I went to a professor of law to seek his advice, and I had a draft of law and morality in Ireland. And I remember him saying to me, No, Mary, I wouldn't go there there. There's no law in that, really.

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And I was very devastated. And it was at that point I realized: no, I really care about this. This is what I want to do. So for me, it was really important to address the need to legalize contraceptives, the need to remove the ban in the Irish Constitution on divorce, and that homosexuality should not be criminalised if it was consenting male adults. Even using all these terms, you know, words like contraception and homosexuality in Ireland in 1967 was in itself incendiary. Did you get a lot of flack?

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Interestingly, there was a moment of complete silence in the examination hall, which was packed when I finished. And then the applause started, and actually there was a lot of applause. And there was no real criticism at the time. But a few years later, when I was elected to the Irish Senate, I was elected on a platform which included legalising family planning through introducing a private members' bill. And when I introduced it in late 1970, early 1971, that's when the heavens opened with being denounced from pulpits by bishops having hate mail that actually affected me. I was 25, going on 26, and I remember walking down the main street in Dublin, Grafton Street, and feeling that people were going to jump out and say, I hate you, you're the devil incarnate. It was really heavy.

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In particular, when the Catholic Archbishop at the time caused a letter to be read out in every diocese in Dublin about the private members' bill and saying that such a measure would be and would remain a curse upon the country. And I remember the Irish press the following morning had a headline, a big headline, a curse upon the country. And after that, Nick burned the letters, the hate mail, which we both regretted shortly afterwards because we both have a strong archival sense, and this was part of Irish social history.

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It's time for your fourth piece of music then, Mary Robinson. Tell us what we're going to hear. My fourth disc is a memory of being very influenced in my time in Harvard by the mood of civil rights in the south of the country, the poverty programmes, and Bob Dylan being in all our ears. And so I love the times they are changing.

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Come gather around people, where are you roam?

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And admit that the waters around you have grown, And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.

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If your time is worth saving

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And you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, Or the times are changing

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Bob Dylan and the times they are a changing. Is it true, Mary Robinson, that you used to be shy?

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Yes, very much so. So much so that I was determined to try and overcome that shyness by debating, and I remember going blank. I remember losing my thread because I was so shy, and I went absolutely blank several times. And so I really did have to train myself, and then I found lecturing was a great help because you had to speak for the best part of an hour and keep

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But even now, when I'm giving a speech, I do have that moment where the adrenaline is beginning to start and I I'll never be not nervous. Tell me how you met the man who was to become your husband.

Presenter18:31

Nick and I were in the same year in Trinity of the four-year course in legal science. I didn't know him very well, though the first year there were three of us who got first-class honours. Then we went out to dinner together. At the time, Nick was dating all the pretty girls in class. He had an unusual income because he had begun to draw cartoons. In fact, he would sit in the back of the class and draw cartoons, and I was sitting near the front and putting my hand up with the answers. But we became good friends. And then on one occasion, I went to a debating competition and I won the individual debating. And whatever it was that he saw at that time afterwards, he kissed me in a completely different way and threw me. And I said, no, no, no, I'm not ready for that. And he said, well, I'll wait. And when I came back from Harvard, I looked him up because I really wanted to get back together. And my parents were not keen on the relationship because they had an ideal for their wonderful daughter, who at this stage was a senator and also a Reed Professor in Trinity. Yes, I'm wondering, when you say I'm going to, I'm thinking about marrying a Protestant cartoonist. Who was known to have had lots of girlfriends. Right. It didn't fit. So we separated. We did a trial separation. At your parents' behest. At my parents' requirement.

Mary Robinson19:31

Yes, I'm waiting for the m

Mary Robinson19:41

That's my

Presenter19:43

And even then, they still were not happy, so I decided it's my life. And it was hard. I wanted my family to be at the wedding, etc. But it was actually important because it sealed a relationship that forty-two and a half years later is strong, and I have never regretted it. You say that at your parents' requirement, I mean, you were a relatively worldly person by that stage. You'd studied at Harvard, you'd been in Paris, you were incredibly well educated, and yet, when your parents said you must separate, you did. Why was that? Well, I was their only daughter. I knew that they loved me, and that part of their problem was perhaps kind of over love. So I thought, well, we can be patient, we can wait, and my parents will come round. And what did Nick think of that? He was actually very good about it. He saw it the same way, partly because he's a cartoonist. He reads people very shrewdly, and he read my parents very shrewdly, that it was over love on their part, not really against him. And once we were married, the problem resolved itself very quickly, because my parents would utterly believe in the sanctity of marriage. And my mother used to joke that he was our favourite son-in-law, since she could only have one. Some music then. Your fifth disc. What is it? My fifth disc is a very Irish tune, a beloved poem Raglan Road, by Paddy Kavanagh. And he captured, I think, some of the complexity of love in this. It's not an easy song if you listen very carefully. It's a very evocative song for me.

Speaker 421:09

On Raglan Road.

Speaker 421:14

Of an autumn day

Speaker 421:18

I saw her first and then you.

Speaker 421:26

That ear dark hair would weave a smell?

Speaker 421:35

That I might one day rule.

Presenter21:41

That was Luke Kelly singing Raglan Road, and I have to say, Mary Robinson, during that you were absolutely taking just huge enjoyment in every word. It seemed to mean a lot to you that particularly. It does mean a lot, and it's a song and a poem uh that represents a kind of deep uh love of Irish culture, actually.

Mary Robinson21:50

It does mean a lot

Presenter21:59

Let's talk for a bit about the nineteen seventies then. You were you were juggling your law practice, you were lecturing in law, you were being a senator, you were the mother of two children by then Tessa and William, and then Aubrey, your third child, made an appearance at right at the beginning of the eighties.

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What on earth was family life like? How did you find the time for it?

Presenter22:18

It was very important to me. I can't say the house was very tidy. Nick was very supportive, and the person who had helped to rear me, whom we called Nanny, Annie Coyne, was a wonderful friend throughout my life. She had gone to England when we had grown up, and she was back on holiday one time when I was down in Mayo, and I approached her and said, you know,

Presenter22:39

Would you like to come back into my life and look after my children with me? And that was wonderful. And then she became very ill, and the cycle completed itself because I nursed her in her illness and washed her. And I it felt right somehow. Can you explain to me a little th this paradox of being I mean, would you consider yourself to be a good Catholic?

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I would say that I'm not somebody who is going to Mass every Sunday because I feel I have to.

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I am deeply spiritual, and I am seeking to understand.

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The way in which so much of the Catholic Church is so authoritarian, not supporting family planning. So there's a great deal that I'm very, very troubled by, but I still believe in the Gospel of Jesus as being the highest standard that we can attain. So many of the photographs that I look at of you, you are surrounded by men.

Presenter23:31

Why do you think there are still so few women at the centre of power in the world?

Presenter23:37

But certainly that was the case. When I was elected to the Irish Senate in 1969, there were six women of the 60 senators, and we were very much in a minority. When it went up to 13 a few elections later, we began to be able to influence the agenda. I believe increasingly in the importance of quotas to bring about a critical mass of women, and then you get the balance. Let's have some music then. We're on your sixth. Tell me about this.

Presenter24:03

This is a song that brings back an extraordinary memory when I was serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. I was in India and I had an afternoon where I wanted to go and visit a

Presenter24:17

Very poor housing area, slum area in the heart of Delhi. And then the person who was in charge of the NGO said to me.

Presenter24:25

Do you mind if the children outside sing for you? And I said, Oh, no, I'd love that. I'd be very happy, please. And I stepped out, and I realized that actually in this narrow laneway there were about eighty children dressed in white, and they rose as I came out and they started to sing in Hindi.

Presenter24:44

We Shall Overcome. And I I still can hardly tell that story without feeling those tears that came. I just you know, seeing them singing it there, We Shall Overcome some day, it was uh very, very moving.

Speaker 424:59

We shall over

Speaker 425:04

We show

Speaker 425:09

We shall go so deep in God.

Speaker 425:24

I do hear

Presenter25:28

That was Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome and memories for you, Mary Robinson, of those children rising up in the dirty back streets in India there to sing to you as you were UN High Commissioner. I I saw you once, you were still President of Ireland at this point on a trip to Somalia, and you were really battling to stay in control of your emotions because what you had seen had moved you to such a degree that you I mean, you're a very controlled, articulate person, but even you seemed not quite able to contain your emotions then. I was.

Mary Robinson25:57

Since then.

Presenter25:59

Very under control, as you say, in a harrowing visit, even speaking to the two warlords that were preventing the food from getting to the feed feeding stations in Baidoa and Mogadishu.

Presenter26:08

But when I came to Nairobi to a big press conference and wanted to tell the story, I felt this overwhelming sense of the suffering and a frustration that we weren't doing more to try to address that issue. And that was what caused me to lose my composure. And I was furious because I was a trained barrister. I was supposed to be telling the world calmly and logically and clearly. And my emotion was coming to the surface. I felt very disappointed in myself afterwards when we went up to the hotel room and Nick was consoling me and saying, no, Mary, it was okay. And then the television was on and they replayed the clip, and then I suddenly realised that it was much more compelling. You left the Presidency of Ireland a little bit early to take up Kofi Annan's offer of the UN High Commissioner job for human rights. And you have said that you think you got that wrong. You should have stayed on longer. Yes, I was under a lot of pressure from Kofi Annan himself. The first High Commissioner had resigned suddenly. And what I underestimated was that the people who elected me elected me to serve my full term, and I owed it to them and should have told Kofi Annan to wait. And how did you find the transition to this new role?

Presenter27:17

Very brutal in many ways, because all of a sudden I was without all the supports that I'd had as president. I was in charge of a small, underfunded office with rather low morale. And then we had this huge mandate that had been increased by a reform package. So, how did you deal with the stress? What did you do? I decided to get up earlier in the morning, come in, work harder, work later, started taking sleeping pills. And by the first Christmas in 1997, I was a wreck. I was exhausted. And my eldest brother, who was a doctor, he sort of took a look at me and he said, Mary, you need to watch it. You're going into breakdown territory. So I.

Mary Robinson27:52

Yeah.

Presenter27:53

threw away the sleeping pills and took an extra week and spent a lot of time walking by the lake and pulled myself together and decided, you know, I've got to get on top of this, I've got to do this job. Let's have some music then. What are we going to hear now?

Presenter28:07

We're going to hear a song by the Treorchie male choir, which is a gift to my husband, who loves Welsh male choirs, and it's Eli Jenkins' Prayer, because it reminds me of Archbishop Tutu in how he tries to be an elder. He sees the goodness in everyone.

Speaker 428:44

Lord.

Presenter28:48

That was Ellie Jenkins' prayer sung by the Triorchie male choir, and that was really for your husband, Nick. During all this time, when you've been on the world stage and at home too, Nick has been by your side, Her Majesty the Queen describes the Duke of Edinburgh as her strength and stay, and it strikes me that maybe you might say the same thing of your husband.

Presenter29:08

Yes, I think so. He has very broad shoulders and he's never felt in any way put out in his male ego by the fact that I've been the main earner and more in the forefront. When you're in a position of head of state, it can be very lonely. And yet there are such funny moments when we fell about laughing about some of the pomp or some of the stories of the day that were very protocoled. We spoke earlier and you explained just how much flack you took in Ireland at the time when you were trying to introduce bills on contraception and its availability. What about, I wonder, when you have to take flack on an international scale? I'm thinking now of your role as UN High Commissioner when you described the war on terror as a disaster. Now that was a very hard line and controversial thing to say, given that, of course, people's sons and some daughters are losing their lives in Iraq. There are people in the security services in Europe and America who are working very hard to keep the world a safer place. It would be easy to interpret that as something of a smack in the face to them. I got some very wise advice from my friend Yvonne Boland, the poet. She actually wanted me to stay on for a second term as President, but she said, well, if you're going to go to that job as High Commissioner, remember, if you become too popular in that job, you're not doing a good job.

Presenter30:23

Her words stayed with me. My last year as High Commissioner for Human Rights was, ironically, exactly a year after the terrible attacks of nine eleven.

Presenter30:32

And I had to deal with that. I remember

Presenter30:34

Going to New York, going to Ground Zero, meeting the grieving families, the volunteers, but understanding that this was profoundly undermining our values and our protection of human rights, and that I would have to address that. I was very keen that we would focus on bringing the perpetrators, al-Qaeda, to justice, and even going into Afghanistan was justified because the Taliban would not surrender them, but it became a much broader war on terror, and I had to speak out about that issue.

Presenter31:02

Do you feel that you have, throughout your decades of endeavour, left the world a better place than you found it?

Presenter31:07

Well, I hope I've made some contribution. And indeed, what encourages me is when young people come up and say, you know, I've been following what you've been doing and it helps me and it inspires me. What I find is that my agenda keeps moving on. I had no idea that in March of twenty thirteen I would get a phone call from the Chief of Staff of the Secretary General asking me would I take on a very heavy responsibility as the special envoy for the Great Lakes and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I couldn't say no because I actually know that problem for nineteen years. I was the first head of state as President of Ireland to go to Rwanda after the genocidal killing in 1994, in September. I will never forget the scenes that I saw. You wrote in your memoirs that you and your husband had returned to Ireland and had bought a plot in the cemetery. Why was it important to you that you know that when your time on earth is finished, that's where you'll be? I regard my home in the west of Ireland as my home. I'm a very rooted person, in fact, despite all the travel. There is a drinking salute. Everybody I think Irish anybody knows slauncha, which is health. But there's another one which is Boss and Aaron.

Presenter32:16

And it means may you be lucky enough to die in Ireland and I feel I'll be lucky enough to die and be buried in this beautiful graveyard.

Presenter32:23

It seems a good time to ask you about your final piece of music, then tell me about this.

Presenter32:28

The Parting Glass is a favourite song of Nick's. He sings it particularly at the end of a convivial evening when either we want to go home or we want our guests to think of going home. And there are many versions of it, but I particularly like the way Liam Clancy sings it. If it's not Nick, then Liam Clancy.

Speaker 432:45

For rosy cheeks and ruby lips, I own she has my heart enthralled.

Speaker 432:58

So fill to me the parting lass

Presenter33:02

The party

Speaker 433:05

Good night, and Jiahe be with you.

Presenter33:06

Light

Presenter33:12

That was Liam Clancy singing The Parting Glass. So we've come to the point, Mary Robinson, where I give you the books. You get the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible to take to the island, and another book of your own. What would you like to take?

Mary Robinson33:20

Dear

Presenter33:24

I'd like to take the Field Anthology of Irish Poetry. I actually launched it when I was President, but there was a row when the anthology was published because women were not sufficiently represented. So there was a further volume of women's poetry. I'd like that as well. I'm afraid I'm going to allow you to have that. I might incite some controversy, but I think it's only right. And a luxury. You're allowed a luxury. Well, I'm very interested in access to energy for the very poorest. It's part of the work of my foundation. And I'm learning that solar power is becoming much more powerful. And I think it would be very comfortable if I on my island could have a solar cooker and fridge combined. Little kitchen, really, is what you're asking for. And one disc. If I had to press you to save just one of these eight discs from the waves, which one would you save? I think it would be Noje nor Regretté Rien. That has me seventeen again. Yes. It's yours, Mary Robinson. Thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter34:35

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