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She was a key figure in an era when Ireland was becoming less socially conservative. Its ‘Celtic tiger’ economy also began to take off from the mid-1990s. Later she became United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002. 2/7

Robinson was born as Mary Bourke in Ballina, County Mayo, the daughter of two medical doctors, and studied law at Trinity College Dublin and Harvard. She married solicitor Nicholas Robinson in 1970. She sat in the Seanad (upper chamber of parliament) 1969-89. 3/7

She declared at the outset that her goals were ‘to open up Ireland and separate Catholic teaching from aspects of the criminal law and therefore reform the law on contraceptives, legalise homosexuality and change the constitutional ban on divorce’. 4/7