She's also a real pain in the neck of the patriarchal church Patriarchy and is a strong advocate for giving women a bigger role in the church and the priesthood. The Pope is visiting Ireland soon, and she seems to be planning to just ignore the whole visit as a sort of snub. BFD.
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She also crossed a big religious divide in Ireland and took communion at the Protestant Cathedral, that'd be as symbolic for many as Trump praying at a mosque, or maybe actually praying meaningfully at all really. She's now a canon in that church, because why not.
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She served for 14 years. Before her, we had Mary Robinson for 7 years. The President of Ireland has been a women for a majority of my life, and I'm old. Robinson was the *also* the lead representative for the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, after Mary McAleese.
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She greatly expanded the modern soft power of the Presidency. She addressed the Parliament and used it as a sort of bully pulpit. She made women's right and equality a central issue, and she used diplomatic visits to highlight humanitarian issues.
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She resigned a few months before the end of her term to go and become the UN high commissioner for human rights. This week she and her old pal Hillary Clinton spoke at Trinity in Dublin.
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Again though, Robinson would be well to the left of Bernie Sanders. Though it's very hard to map Irish politics as left-right; the political alignments are much more nuanced and impacted by history.
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Oh Robinson was also a strong campaigner against the 8th amendment, which prohibited abortion and was recently appealed. She was against it *at the time*. This was not broadly popular.
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Big take-away: 30 years of Irish Presidents have been progressive in significant ways, supporters of the little guy, compassionate, and extremely popular in office.
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A not insignificant factor is how Irish elections work. We use a ranked system. This prevents "wasting" votes, discourages divisive two-partyism, and promotes broader sort of compromise position taking.
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Not one of those presidents was elected with a simple majority of first preference votes. Mary Robinson, widely regarded as our best president ever, didn't even a plurality of first preference votes!
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Instead they were elected based on "transfers": 2nd and 3rd preference votes from voters whose 1st and then 2nd choices were eliminated.
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We've had divisive candidates, Dana Scalon comes to mind, a former star (she sang for Ireland at the Eurovision) who ran on a platform of strong support for "traditional values". She got 2.9% of the vote.
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