Robinson denies she received €1m for memoirs

FORMER PRESIDENT Mary Robinson has said reports that she has got a €1 million deal to write her memoirs are incorrect.

Hodder Stoughton and Hachette Ireland, formerly Hodder Headline, secured the rights to Mrs Robinson’s memoirs after a bidding war involving eight other publishers.

The book will also be published in the United States by Bloomsbury USA.

Mrs Robinson’s memoirs will be eagerly read not just in Ireland where she transformed the presidency between 1990 and 1997, but in other parts of the world where she has worked for human rights.

She was the UN high commissioner for human rights under Kofi Annan between 1997 and 2002 and founded her own organisation, Realizing Rights, in 2002.

Speaking yesterday, Mrs Robinson said of reports that she would be receiving €1 million to write the book: “I’m not going to quote the figure [quoted elsewhere] expect to say that it is higher than the real figure. The actual figure is not as high as that.”

Mrs Robinson revealed the book would be a personal memoir rather than a personal manifesto of her beliefs.

She said she has been doing some work on it and would be coming home at the end of the year to work on it.

“I’m very happy that the time has come to tell the more personal story. I have been very lucky and fortunate in my life,” she explained.

“It is going to be very much telling the story of various stages of my own life and what I have learned which I’m hoping will be very supportive of other people working their way through and encourage people to be involved in human rights.”

The book is due out at the end of 2012.

She expressed a hope that it will be a “good read” rather than a controversial one and the working title Everybody Matters will be at the heart of the book.

Breda Purdue of Hachette Ireland said the worldwide bidding war was as a result of Mrs Robinson’s decision to write a book about herself and her life’s journey.

“It is not a tome about human rights. It will be a memoir of an Irish person who is up there with all the greats at the moment. People everywhere are fascinated by her,” she said.

Mrs Robinson was speaking before the launch of the new arts and humanities research institute for Trinity College Dublin.

Speaking at the same launch, Minister of State Conor Lenihan, whose father Brian was defeated by her in the 1990 presidential election, said Mrs Robinson was a woman who “encapsulated many of the values that people treasure about Ireland” being both “profoundly intellectual and profoundly practical”.