Ireland’s first woman president Mary Robinson: ‘The world is suffering from too much male leadership’

We see major existential threats — the climate and nature crisis, the nuclear weapons crisis, and the pandemic crisis — because we haven’t learnt the lessons of how to resolve it in a way with equity. We need maximum multilateral, long-term thinking, long-term problem-solving, and we have the opposite. We have fake news, we had an election that was fought on lies, one on amplified lies and it is continuing.

IE: What is the immediate setback you see?

Mary Robinson: There are enormous setbacks already. An organisation like the WHO not getting funds, the closing of USAID which seems to be happening. It is already devastating for all the things that USAID funded. And it is brutal because it is immediate, it is brutal for the staff involved … it’s unbelievably cruel actually.

The most important problem, and problem in a way, is that it’s becoming more difficult to know what is true. And it is becoming more difficult to know what is reliable news in particular.

IE: How do you see developing nations coping?

Mary Robinson: I think we’ll become much more multi-polar, but also quite a fractured world… and certainly for the next few years because the United States will not be seen as a trustworthy ally by its former allies, and its apparent allies like Europe and Japan and Korea — Canada and Mexico in particular.

It may well be beneficial to China because China is very supportive of the UN. China is going very rapidly leading the world on solar wind etc.

The aggressive attitude of the US towards China helps China in its relationship with developing countries — particularly the cutting off of development aid as that was a very strong soft power of the US. Instead of having a soft power it has got a very aggressive bullying power and that’s not nice.

IE: What was the one experience that drew you to climate change?

Mary Robinson: In my seven years as the President from 1990 to 1997, I never made a single speech on climate change. I did speak about the environment. When I became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I did understand it was very serious. I had a portfolio of human rights, gender equality, rights of indigenous people, rights of people with disabilities and I never saw the link. I was too busy working in those large spaces. It was very shocking to me and very humbling when I started working in African countries and saw the absolute connection. It was so undermining the most basic rights to food, water, health and shelter… the long periods of flash floods which destroy a village … Women would tell me: ‘Is God punishing us? This is outside our experience’ . That brought me to climate justice.

IE: How do you define climate injustice?

Mary Robinson: I have identified five layers of injustice — one of which is climate change caused by the rich countries that disproportionately affects the poorest countries, poorest communities, small island states and indigenous people for far longer and very severely and they are not responsible. Second is the gender dimension. Third is the intergenerational injustice – we’re loading future generations with terrible potential climate shocks. Fourth: of the different pathways to development of different regions in the world. My country Ireland, European countries, US, Japan, Korea — we built our economies on fossil fuel and our urgent problem is to wean ourselves off much more rapidly but with just transition for the workers in coal, oil, gas … and reduce our carbon footprint much more than we’re doing. But take poor countries they want to develop and some of their countries have found oil and gas but they’re being deterred from using it. The truth is because the shocks come earlier to developing countries. Fifth is injustice to nature, the loss of biodiversity.

IE: Your election as President was a sign of change in Ireland, you had said…

Mary Robinson: I was the only girl among four brothers. My parents were medical doctors and they told me that I had the same opportunities as the boys, but everything in Irish society told me differently … I could tell … women had to leave the civil service if they got married. There was a kind of patriarchal church-led society.

And so I just had to study law as an instrument for social change. I was lucky enough to get a fellowship to Harvard in the class of 1968. What I brought back with me was something completely contrary to what I saw in Ireland. Young people were actually trying to make a difference. Young people were taking responsibility, trying to give leadership. I came back to Ireland with the sense that young people should be able to make a difference and the difference I decided to make was in 1969. There was an election and the upper House had six university seats. Three of them were from my university, Trinity College, and three from national universities. Both sets of seats tended to be elderly male professors so I challenged that and got elected at the age of 25 years and spent 20 years in the senate… At the same time, I had qualified as a lawyer and I was quite well-known in the country as a progressive lawyer. The labour party nominated me as a candidate in May. I was a complete outsider. It is because of all of that — because somebody like me could be elected. It was so impossible that it showed something had changed in Ireland.

IE: What is the scope of Project Dandelion?

Mary Robinson: It began as an initiative of collected women leaders meeting to discuss the links between food and health and climate change. I managed to reverse things into climate justice and its links to food and health. I said we need a women’s Moonshot (referring to John F Kennedy’s Moonshot speech of 1962 when he called on America to get a man to the moon before the end of the decade).
We came up with ‘dandelion’, which flowers in every continent. It is very resilient, you can’t get rid of it if you think it is a weed, and it’s got long roots, so it regenerates the soil. You can eat or drink every part of the dandelion — there’s no waste. We want to think of Project Dandelion as a huge ecosystem of movements that grow our power from the bottom up to influence politicians to take the hard decisions. At the moment they’re afraid of getting re-elected so they won’t take these decisions in democracy — that’s one of the problems. We have partnerships with 300 organisations globally in different ways. Instead of all working in our silos, we are all amplifying.

IE: How do you see women leaders vis-a-vis male leaders?

Mary Robinson: I think what the world is suffering from is too much male leadership. At all levels. The best leadership is when there is a balance between women and men because we bring different perspectives, different experience. There is a women’s way of leading which would be very helpful in our fractured world with so many problems. We need 50 per cent of the governments to be women-led and that would help all the discussions at global level. Unfortunately, we are actually seeing in these populist autocratic movements and in the US currently, a push-back on all of this. Push-back of women into traditional roles. It’s incredible.

IE: What brought you to India?

Mary Robinson: I met Elaben (SEWA founder Ela Bhatt) when she had come to Ireland in 1992. I was the President and was hosting a conference for women leaders. In 1995, I was on a state visit to India and ended up in Ahmedabad. It was October 2 and I was advised to visit SEWA before visiting the ashram as it was (Mahatama) Gandhi’s birth anniversary. So we talked.

When she died, I was at the COP in Egypt and at her memorial, I really understood how impactful she had been in so many women’s lives. I came back last year to learn more about SEWA and probably will be back next year.

IE: You also visited the Salt pans…

Mary Robinson: I found it extraordinary to hear the story of the salt workers and see the conditions, and that they can only work for a certain period in the year. They were able to move from using bullocks to diesel and now to solar. That was itself very impressive and we saw the impact on women’s lives. ‘The world is suffering from too much male leadership’.