Mary O'Mahony was born the eldest of six daughters in Clontarf, Dublin, in May 1939. Her mother Kitty was a niece of Michael Collins and moved to Dublin after the family home in Woodfield, Co Cork, was burned by the Black and Tans in 1921. Her father Jim, a bank clerk and sometime actor, died when she was 10.
After attending boarding school in the Dominican convent in Wicklow, she left Ireland in the mid-1950s to train as a nurse in London. Four years later, she moved to the United States and lived in New York.
There followed spells in Canada and Kenya, where she worked as an aid worker. She met and married an Italian doctor, Giovanni Banotti. The couple lived in Rhodesia but eventually moved to Rome, where her daughter Tania was born. However, after four years the marriage broke up. Banotti and her daughter returned to Dublin in October 1970.
She got a job as a nurse with Irish Distillers, at the same time throwing herself into numerous social causes. Aside from her involvement with Women's Aid, she was chairperson of the Rutland Centre for Drug Abuse.
A stint on afternoon television on RTE, dispensing social welfare advice, proved a springboard for politics. A favourite "young tiger" of Garret FitzGerald, she was given an outing in the 1983 by-election in Dublin Central to fill George Colley's seat but performed badly.
After failing in a bid for the Seanad, she was elected to the European Parliament in 1984 and retained this seat handily in two subsequent elections. In Strasbourg, she has served for over a decade on the environment, consumer protection and public health committees.
Almost everything in Mary Banotti's political career can be traced back to two, quite unrelated, factors. The first is her status as a grandniece of Collins. From this stems her pride and self-confidence, as well as a sense of destiny. This lineage also explains her lifelong affiliation to Fine Gael.
The second key to Banotti's make-up is her status as a single mother and her return to Ireland at a time when public acceptance of single mothers was still very low.
From her return she threw herself into a variety of feminist activities. She was, for example, a co-founder of Women's Aid, which opened the first refuges for battered women. Her political progress since has been marked by the same mix of social liberalism and Fine Gael politics.
Widely acknowledged as an assiduous and committed MEP, Banotti has thrown herself energetically into European politics and is deeply involved with the work of the Strasbourg parliament. Always better known in Dublin than in the rest of the State, she never threatened before this to become a major figure in Fine Gael.
The decision to run for President was her own; she first made the suggestion in a telephone call to John Bruton in the spring. Since then, she has successfully overcome significant indifference and opposition to her candidacy within Fine Gael and now stands second in the polls to the Fianna Fail/PD candidate, Mary McAleese.
Her candidacy for the Aras won the Fine Gael leadership's support but only when it became apparent that party big guns such as Peter Barry or Garret FitzGerald were not prepared to stand. Even then, backbench TDs put up Avril Doyle as a spoiler candidate when the leadership tried to rush the nomination process over the summer.
After a month's postponement, Banotti won the nomination in a tight vote last month. The party refuses to say what the margin was but some TDs say it may have been as small as one vote.
Last Wednesday, the car in which she was being driven was involved in an accident in Co Tipperary. An elderly woman in the other car involved in the crash was killed; Banotti was shaken but uninjured.
