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finished with all that, with history and martyrs and fields … being, as I believed, on the brink of daring emancipation.4 Mary Robinson, on her election as the first female President of Ireland in 1990, hailed the women of Ireland in particular – ‘mná na hÉireann’ – who, in choosing a liberal, feminist candidate, ‘instead of rocking the cradle [had] rocked the system’; Irish people, she said, had ‘stepped out from the faded flags of the Civil War and voted for a new Ireland’.5 Some thirty years after O’Brien, Robinson too associates the liberation of Irish women – and
the beginning of the decade Mary Robinson was elected the Republic of Ireland’s first female president and her liberal pluralist perspective, together with a committed attachment to human rights reform and feminist causes, reflected the forward-looking attitudes of a younger generation. This was a decade during which long-running debates on divorce and abortion paved the way for new legislation that weakened the influence of the Catholic Church on matters of state and offered women more control over their private lives.3 This change marked a radical shift in how
Ireland relatively lightly.16 In contrast, Geldof and Bono operate as critical insiders who exploit a consumer appetite for Irish culture both to challenge and mobilise metropolitan audiences to redress the inequalities of globalisation. Both figures may emblematise the ‘new-Irish intersection of money, art and politics’,17 but they also represent dissenting voices. A comparison can be drawn between their central involvement in the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign and the Robinson Presidency. Her election as the first female President of the Republic was regarded as an