Catherine McGuinness retired yesterday as a Supreme Court judge after almost half a century in public life, writes Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent
Catherine McGuinness, politician, public servant, lawyer, judge and leading member of the Church of Ireland, seems to embody a number of contradictions. The daughter of a Protestant clergyman, she took a degree in Irish (and French) and married a native speaker and a Catholic; she spent her childhood in Protestant Belfast but was a nationalist and a socialist; a prominent member of the synod of the Church of Ireland, she espoused pluralism and liberal values; as a wife and mother in the 1960s she worked continuously outside the home when few married women did so.
She first came to prominence as a Labour Party activist in the 1960s, when she was a speech writer for Brendan Corish and other leading figures in the party. She wrote a seminal Labour Party pamphlet on education in 1966, advocating revolutionary ideas for the time: comprehensive education of boys and girls together, non-sectarian control, parental participation, a blend of practical and theoretical learning programmes, and an emphasis on cultural subjects such as music, art and drama.
The daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman who was rector of Dunmurry in Belfast, an active member of the church and a self-declared socialist and republican, she championed pluralism and always sought the fullest possible involvement of minorities in Irish public life.
She has also been acutely aware of social inequality, and remarked on the difference between her schooling in Dunmurry, when she mixed with children who expected to leave school and learn a trade, and that which she received in Alexandra School and college in Dublin, where the girls were all middle class.
She, however, attended the Clergy Daughters' School, the special boarding school attached to "Alex" for the daughters of clergy, which was run on a shoe-string, and where the girls had to take turns in the kitchen. She describes how they scoured the playing fields in the winter for twigs with which to light fires to heat the building.
She has always appreciated the quality of the academic education in Alex at the time, where girls were taught honours maths and ran their own societies. She was secretary of the Gaelic society there.
She won a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin, where she took a degree in French and Irish and was a member of the Cumann Gaelach. Before she graduated she married Irish-speaking journalist and broadcaster Proinsias Mac Aonghusa. They have three children.
She resigned from the Labour Party in protest when it expelled Proinsias in 1967. However, she remained highly thought of within the party, and in 1975 the then minister for health and party leader, Brendan Corish, named her the chairwoman of the newly reconstituted National Social Service Council. She was also a member of the Adoption Board.
She began to study law in 1975, partly as a result of her experiences on the Adoption Board, and was called to the bar in 1977 at the age of 42, where she quickly built up a practice as one of the very few barristers specialising in family law.
In 1979 she was elected to one of the Trinity College seats in the Seanad in a byelection caused by the resignation of Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, following a campaign that concentrated on education and the reform of family law.
Throughout the 1980s she campaigned on a variety of social issues, taking the liberal side, opposing the abortion amendment inserted into the Constitution in 1983, and supporting the campaign to remove the constitutional ban on divorce in 1986. She became a senior counsel in 1989.
Among the many committees and public bodies she chaired was the inquiry into the Kilkenny incest case, set up in 1993 to establish why the local health board had not taken action to stop years of rape of his daughter by a Kilkenny man. The girl had had more than 100 contacts with social services. Her report remains one of the cornerstones of child protection policy in Ireland, though some of its key recommendations, such as a constitutional amendment to protect the rights of children, have never been implemented.
In 1994 she was appointed to the Circuit Court and later that year was named as chair of the Forum on Peace and Reconciliation. She was disappointed that the new leader of the Ulster Unionist party, David Trimble, refused to attend. She was appointed to the High Court in 1996.
She was elected to represent her High Court colleagues on the newly-established Courts Service Board in 1999. This body administers the management, administration and funding of the courts, replacing more than a century's administration of the courts directly by a Government department.
In 2000, along with Adrian Hardiman, she was nominated a judge of the Supreme Court. She is best known as a judge for her judgments in family law matters, where she has developed the law relating to marriage, the family and children. In a number of judgments she outlined the contribution made by a woman working full-time in the home to a marriage, and put a monetary value on this contribution.
Her appointment was widely welcomed at the time in legal circles, where she had established a reputation for running an open and unintimidating court, as well as for the production of thoughtful judgments, especially in the family law area. She was regarded as unfailingly courteous, pleasant to deal with and sympathetic to litigants.
Yet her judgments, especially when the Supreme Court was asked to rule on High Court judgments under appeal, could be sharp. In a well-known family law Supreme Court judgment, K v K, she commented on the original High Court judgment: "In giving the decision of the court, a judge should give reasons for the way in which his or her discretion has been exercised in the light of the statutory guidelines. In his judgment in the instant case the learned trial judge has notably failed to do this."
Although she is leaving the Supreme Court, she is not leaving either the legal world or public life, as she will continue to serve as president of the Law Reform Commission.
When her appointment was announced last year, and it was clear it would bring her working life beyond the judicial retirement age of 72, she commented that her children had greeted the news with relief, as they thought she would become impossible if she was forced to hang about the house all day.
Commenting to The Irish Times in 1979 on the fact that she was perceived as a token woman and a token Protestant, she said: "You have to fight to establish that you're part of Irish life and not a token anything; that you've got something to say and are going to say it."
It is unlikely that anyone would dispute she has achieved this.