my name is jamshed bharucha and i am the president of the union and it's truly an honor to introduce the former president of ireland who i assume those of you have come know about and mary robinson, her book which is really quite a revelation. we are very fortunate to have for tonight and just a little bit of that ground about this hall for those of you who might be new to it. the great hall at cooper union was the place where lincoln gave his famous speech. and that began a long history of social justice movements launched or celebrated in this hall including the suffrage act which was the end to the work and the naacp had their first connection there. it was the first to make conference of american leaders led by red fox in this very room in the 19th century at a time when their people were being slaughtered on the planes. there is quite a history here of events that occurred during some critical and turbulent times in irish immigration to the united states as well from 1856 when more than 1000 supporters of the brotherhood met here right up to the eve of the 1916 easter rising. the stage would host such leaders as the irish -- and i was intrigued by some of those and thanks to google i was able to find a "new york times" article from 1887 when the brotherhood assembled in this hall and "the new york times" article is entitled marred by discord. so apparently one of its speakers named richard cassoulet according to "the new york times" quote, the "new york times" is quoted not mccaffrey quote after careful study of irish history he had come to the conclusion that the best way to right the wrongs of the oppressed country was to plant it on in the heart of england. and therein followed cheers and a yell of dynamite. this speaker then attacked another speaker patrick ford whose name was received with hissing and catcalls and he had to be protected by people who were then escorted out of the hall. well, tonight's talk i am sure will be a lot more civil than that but to give you a sense of continuity and history here. it is most fitting that we welcome the honorable mary robinson former president of the republic of ireland and a former u.n. high commissioner for human rights to the cooper union. president -- career has been devoted to the pursuit of fairness in society. as an activist lawyer she defended the causes of women and as a member of every senate promoted the rest of the legislation including the legalization of contraception. president robinson has been the honorary president of oxfam and is a member of of the group of 11 independent world leaders together by nelson mandela to offer their collective influence and experience to support teambuilding. and to help address major causes of the suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. in 2009, president obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom calling her quote and advocate for the hungry, the hunted and the forgotten and ignored. mary robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering but eliminated a better future for our world. this book "everybody matters" my life giving voice really sets out some of the work of our speaker tonight and i will allow her to speak with her own voice so please welcome president mary robinson. [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much for that warm welcome and it's very inspiring to be in a hall that has had so many illustrious speakers particularly a team of social justice and wanting the kinds of changes that will be better for society. i am delighted to be here in the cooper union and i very much appreciate also the sponsorship of nyu which i am very familiar with, a place i have oftentimes visited and enjoyed. i feel there is hope for lots of reasons and i appreciate the fact that you braved to weather, the elements. yesterday was a beautiful tip -- dutiful day and what happened today? what is it in new york that can change dramatically in so quickly? as i say i feel very at home because i had an early experience of learning on human rights, very early and growing up in the west of ireland the only girl wedged between four brothers, two older than me and two younger than me so worse i had to be interested in human rights and equality but also using my elbows and generally exerting myself. as it tried to explain in the book because i think it's good to record what ireland was like at that time, the ireland that i was growing up in was in ireland where girls and women knew their place, place in the home or the nunnery or if they were talented enough they could become writers or artists or musicians. and i was very aware that somehow boys seem to have much more options even though my parents very often repeated that i had the same opportunities that my brother's brothers had in they would support me in that. and after six years at the sacred heart boarding school in dublin, i realized that the options were not really very exciting and most of my contemporaries at the time were talking about what they would do for a year or two before they married. marriage was very much the goal and the objective and parents would help with that and that is what was expected. and i had benefited from various nuns in my background who were doing other things. a great aunt who had been very forceful as a reverend mother in britain and had talked about how she tried to influence education policy in england. i enjoyed talking with her as a teenager and even more so i think my father's older sister i.v.. his two sisters became nuns but his oldest sister had gone to india and had become very involved with the children who are very poor who would not have had an education and all the issues related to that. i felt this was really interesting and worth doing so i decided my best option was to offer myself as a postulant and become a nun soviet the age of 15 i spoke to the reverend mother in the convent and decided i had big calm -- decided to become a nun peerage he looked at me quite truly and said why do you think about it and go away for a year. if you would really like to be a nun we would like to receive you at that time. my parents who were catholics who are very happy with my choice and felt honored that i was going to be a nun thought it was nice to have me for another year so they said nothing was too good for their daughter mary and they would send me to paris for a year. [laughter] and of course that changes everything. i do describe that in some detail in the book. [laughter] and i kind of came under different influence also when i was very young. i had a grandfather who had retired early to get help from the practice of law and the law that he practiced was very much for the peasant and the poor guys against the landlord or the powerful presence. he was pleased to have a young girl 10, 11, 12, 13 who is interested in what he was talking about. it was unusual and he didn't know how to talk to a child so he spoke to me as if i were an adult. and he spoke about law being an instrument for social justice. so once it was an appropriate for me anymore to become a nun and i decided to do law and when to the college in dublin. that is where my two older brothers were our ready studying. they had followed us of our parents and forgot yours and had decided to study medicine. i chose my law and my two younger brothers were also coming to college at the same time so there were five of us together. we were very lucky to get an apartment and a house number 21 westland rd. and it's the house where oscar wilde was born. and the coaches going down the drove would tell other passengers to turn their heads and see all the plaques. actually it was wild house for a while for reasons i go into a little bit in my book, may because of my brothers. i was a good student in the front of the class and in that same year in law school somebody that i became friendly with named nicholas robinson and in that first year three of us got first class honors and nick and myself were among those three. we went out to dinner and got to know each other a little bit better and that then he decided that he had better things to do so he tended to sit in the back of the class and draw cartoons and i stayed in the front of the class and fought to achieve good grades. i also force myself to debate and again i tried to say this very honestly in the book because why i wrote this memoir was to be encouraging, to be encouraging to push yourself a bed in reach her potential. so i pushed myself to stand up and not go blank with shyness and i got better at it so i decided to go forward for auditor of the dublin university law society and i was the first woman or female student to be elected as the auditor of the law society. at this stage i was really interested in law and the instrument of social change. one of the things that bothered me was that in ireland at that time, in the mid-to late 60's there was a totally equation of sin and crime and i felt that this wasn't allowing bats type of space for individual morality and to take into account that there were not catholics in the republic of ireland, christian faith, jewish faith, no faith or whatever and we should be opening up the two minorities and respecting their viewpoints. so in my inaugural address in 1967 on law and morality in ireland i made some modest recommendations. i said we should remove the -- from the constitution and legalize -- and not criminalize adults consenting to hager between adults of the same cannot have suicide is a crime. i remember that the speech had caused quite a bit of interest because of the title law and morality in ireland. it was in the big examination hall at trinity and i delivered it to a slightly law for larger audience believe it or not and there was a moment of silence when i finished and i said and i was kind of worried about you now it was more than a decent applause with no real controversy. i think the feeling was that is what students do and i had been more outspoken maybe then some other students but that's the way it is. and then i was very lucky to get a fellowship to harvard university and that was a wonderful year to be at harvard. the class of 1968 and when i arrived i found that my united states contemporaries were questioning what they believed was an immoral war, the war in vietnam and some of them were escaping the draft. there was a lot of discussiodiscussio n about poverty programs in the south of this country and civil rights movements and some of the people were bravely joining. martin luther king was assassinated in april of 68 and just after i graduated robert canady was also assassinated. this had a huge impact on me. it was a different world. this classic method so instead of the good quality of law teaching and dublin teaching from lectures notes where if you took the notes down and could write and could write fast and gave them back accurately and did quite well but in harvard they kept changing and refiguring the question and that was a very interesting because it encouraged thinking. but most of all what struck me about that year at harvard which was so different from the ireland that i had left and gone back to was that young people were making a difference. they were a actually deciding we can make change. we can do things and we are going to bring our own perspective to the initiative so i came back to ireland in 1968 to practice law and to teach law and as my husband to be nick said at the time, and i was immune to something you recognize he characterized as a political cartoonist is harvard humility. that harvard humility led me the following year in 1959 to question in a parliamentary election wide it was that those who were traditionally elected to university seats in the irish senate were elderly male professors. why was that? why couldn't it be more diverse? and so my friend said well if you want to go forward we will campaign with you and we will see what happens. i was elected to the senate at the age of 25 which meant that i was teaching law but also to influence law and i had a program of course that went back to the knocker of address that i've given in 1967 about law and morality in ireland. the first item on the agenda was to legalize -- and that for me was my harvard analytical strength and was very clear. the law simply was not in conformity with the reality for was happening in ireland. we used to joke that married women must have cycle regulation problems because so many of them would get a doctorate certificate which was the only way they could get -- pills. you could have failed the without any sanction but it was against criminal law to buy one. so clearly this was something that needed to be addressed by a relatively simple bill amending an earlier criminal law of 1935 and two male senators supported me for a private members bill. the normal course is that the bill would be tabled and then it would get an banal than be published on an official senate newspaper. it never got the nod. it was held for a long time and meanwhile i had touched a raw nerve in the irish at the time and i was getting hate hate letters. the then catholic archbishop required that a letter be read in the diocese of dublin and every church and diocese and dublin that said such a measure would be and would remain the curse upon the country and i still remember the irish press headline the following day. the curse upon the country. i was 26 and just married and it was tough and in fact it was really very difficult. i remember feeling very defensive even walking down the street. something would jump out and say you are the devil incarnate and you are a terrible woman and you are doing terrible things. i have been used to being more or less admired and supported and it was her problem and suddenly i was a hate figure. i was written about impede the new nothing about me were saying how terrible it was. and nick saw that i was very affected by these letters tending to go back and read them in horror and be worried. he buried a lot of that correspondence which we both now regret because it was part of a social history in ireland but nobody talked about sexual relations and nobody least evolved the legislators talk about family planning. there was a real fear and antipathy for doing so. we persisted, my two male colleagues and myself did we change from criminal law to health and the next build a private members bill got printed but not adopted and gradually the irish government did take the responsibility nine years later passing a measure and that issue is now of course not controversial at all in ireland. meanwhile i was enjoying teaching law at trinity college. i loved the interaction with students and i was practicing law and because of the opportunity to discuss the united states constitutional law compared with the irish constitutional law i quickly decided that was the area i wanted to focus on and take test cases. there were a lot of issues, issues of equality and discrimination. i would take them in the irish courts and then there was the possibility that these cases could also be taken beyond the irish courts if you didn't get justice in the high court or supreme court in ireland because ireland had ratified the convention on human rights and civil liberties, human rights and fundamental freedoms. that meant you could take a case having exhausted your domestic remedies or maybe uniquely sometimes go direct to strasbourg. the other possibility was to take cases when ireland joined the european union in 1973 and where there were directives on equal pay and equal opportunities. that is where the case would start in the irish courts and it would be a reference of the legal issue to luxembourg. you would go go to luxembourg and argued and then get a ruling of the court in luxembourg which the irish court would be bound to apply. i enjoyed very much those cases. the ones that really stand out and i deal with in some detail in the book because i really found so admiring of the client herself. it was a case involving a woman called josie and rape. she was a -- woman and she claimed that she had an abusive husband who be her and she was was -- he was convicted in the lowest court and given a fine and she alleged he continued to beat her. she wanted to get a judicial separation. remember there was no divorce at that time and to get a judicial separation she would have to go to the high court and that was complex procedure. she went to various lawyers in cork city to see if someone would help her to take her case and no lawyer was willing because there was no question of cost being paid and even if she won her husband would be able to take off because he was also poor working class. she saw an article in an irish newspaper that ireland had ratified the european convention on human rights and it was possible to take a case to strasbourg to the commission on human rights and she wrote a long letter which included a lot of irrelevant material but it had a colonel of truth in it. she was tonight access to the court to protect her family life two values and articles under the european convention and some clever boils in strasbourg decided that there was an issue to be argued so they -- strasbourg provided legal aid to recruit a solicitor to instructed barrister and and i was a fair share to argue this case before the commission of human rights. it was an irony that the legal aid came from strasbourg because the argument was no legal aid in civil cases and ireland at that time. we succeeded before the commission of human rights and in the case went back to strasbourg a year or two later before the court of human rights. it was very heavily argued on the other side by the government of ireland because they could see the implications. if the case succeeded it would mean that ireland would have to introduce a system of civil legal aid and pay lawyers to provide legal aid for civil cases to poor clients. so there was a very vigorous case and eventually partly because we were also supported by the commission, we want on those two articles, articles six and eight of the convention that denied access to justice and it wasn't protecting family life. this made a wonderful speech which the irish newspaper carried in which it said this wasn't just for me. this was for women who were denied justice. why should we put up with being beaten in our homes? it was a very telling wonderful moments and i was particularly touched when i got a letter from one of the key senior councils in ireland at the time whom i admired greatly. he was such a leader and inspirational barrister and great fun as well. he wrote me a handwritten letter congratulating me on a landmark case for irish law. in your early 30s when you are doing cases had no case before before that had preceded in the court in strasbourg so i really enjoyed that. and the irish senate was moving various measures and established a center at trinity college to provide guidance to various sectors of irish life, agriculture, industry, labor on women's issues etc. and to look at the impact of regulation for directors of the european union. we were very happy about that. i had successful elections to the senate. i had tried twice to run and i described this in the book. i clearly wasn't a very good politician and the grassroots level going to the door. i wasn't able to have the kind of conversation and so i didn't succeed in either case. i was reelected to the senate. i have joined the irish label -- labour party for a period and after i decided i wanted to go back to the independent bench to focus on issues related to northern ireland dr. garrison and margaret thatcher had entered into an agreement called the anglo-irish agreement which certainly was a breakthrough in relationships but it was totally abhorred by the whole union of community in northern ireland. i felt something totally opposed by one sector is n