Maurice Manning said she was very good-looking. Shane Ross said she was very good-looking and very bright. (Senators are authorities on these matters.) Shane Ross also said that half the male directors on the boards of which she is a member (Smurfits, the Bank of Ireland, Campbell Bewley and the RTE Authority) are charmed by her and the other half are in love with her.
The only request she made concerning the interview was that we would talk about the voluntary sector, in which she repeatedly said she was a " passionate believer". It sounded very dull. What's a nice girl like you doing in the voluntary sector? . . . I did not have the nerve to ask.
She is tall, slim, dark, elegant. She has a posh accent, which, I assume, she acquired at the Loreto Convent on Stephen's Green and which later got polished in Oxford and Cambridge. I didn't have the nerve to ask her about that either.
The interview took place in a consultation room at the sleek, featureless offices of Arthur Cox, solicitors, on Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. She was dressed in a pale cream suit and was very composed for the first 23 minutes and 23 seconds. Sitting upright on a chair, fingers delicately arched together (I haven't seen anybody do it so well since Dick Spring left public life). She was less composed and crouched on her chair for much of the remainder of the interview (over an hour and a quarter).
This was because she was discomfited and then irritated by questions about the apparent contradiction between her stated "purposes" in life and her corporate involvements. She resumed her composure when getting on to the voluntary sector stuff - there was no stopping her. Sorry.
I started by asking her to tell all about herself. Her answer came to 4,210 words, apart from a few meek words of interjection by me simply asking her to clarify a few points. Allowing for 180 words per minute, this comes to the 23 minutes and 23 seconds.
She was born in 1950 and lived in Donnybrook. Along with her four sisters she first went to Muckross convent and then they all transferred to Loreto on St Stephen's Green. There she "excelled in debating" and got her Leaving Certificate when she was still 16. She then went straight into UCD in Earlsfort Terrace in 1964 and, having considered doing medicine, did law instead.
She got "first place and first class honours" in the final exam and then, incongruously, started teaching maths in a secondary school. She was encouraged by the late John Kelly (former Fine Gael minister and brilliant law lecturer) to go to Oxford. She got a scholarship and studied employment law, even though the Oxford professors were unimpressed as it was "the sort of subject that any chap on the staff of the Guardian could write about".
She then got a job lecturing in law at UCD but, after five years, by which time she was only 28, she went to Cambridge to do a doctorate. She became the first woman to join the (teaching) fellowship at Christ's College - she remembers "buying a white linen suit, an Irish linen suit, even though I had to put an academic gown over it, making this sort of gesture, as it were". She was there for eight years.
She returned to Ireland to practise as a solicitor - along the way she had done an apprenticeship at Arthur Cox and had qualified. Instead of joining one of the big firms of solicitors, she set up in practice on her own in 1985/86, specialising primarily in employment law. Last year she became a partner in one of the big firms, Arthur Cox. She is married to Patrick Ussher; they have one child.
(I agreed to let her see the interview prior to publication to ensure that I had quoted her correctly and that I had edited it fairly. She made minor changes and added that she hoped to interview me some day "to assess your poise, dress sense, grooming, weltanschauung . . . etc!")
