Liberal crusader with wide CV comes in from fringes

If politicians got a vote for every good cause they supported, then Mary Banotti would be a warm favourite to win the race for the Park. Banotti, once described as left as Fine Gael gets, can boast of a plethora of liberal campaigns in her curriculum vitae. From child abductions to pornography, interpretative centres to genetically modified food, she has crusaded at home and on the Continent. It is her misfortune, however, that so many of her pronouncements are made in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and not in the Dail chamber in Dublin.

It's a long way from the labyrinthine corridors of Strasbourg to the panelled mahogany of Leinster House. Even after 13 years as an MEP, Mary Banotti cannot escape the second-division tag that goes with the parliament.

Never mind that she is held by many colleagues and journalists to be the Republic's best and hardest-working MEP. The Strasbourg parliament is still seen as toothless compared to the power centres of Dublin and Brussels.

Banotti has been on the fringes of politics for a long time now, without ever penetrating its core. Attempts to win Dail and Seanad seats flopped in the 1980s, but she has performed well in three outings in the European elections.

The presidential election now gives her the opportunity to leapfrog a political system that has largely shunned her.

At 58, Banotti is the oldest candidate, and the one with the most political experience. She's also the only candidate from Dublin, where one-third of the electorate live.

And then there's the Collins Card. Banotti's CV starts: "Born 1939. Grandniece of Michael Collins. One daughter." No beating about the bush there, for all the talk of not dealing in civil war politics. One Fine Gael TD reckons Michael Collins, or rather Warner Brothers's rose-tinted depiction of him, was worth an extra 4 per cent to the party in the recent general election. Banotti will be aiming to build upon this.

Banotti, the single mother, the former nurse and social worker, is a very human, approachable politician. There is no arrogance in her manner, even if she isn't slow to blow her own trumpet on occasions. One of her supporters in the party says she is "of the people. She's a plain and simple woman who worked her way up without getting any handouts".

"She was battered by the winds of life, but survived. Because of her life experiences, she has developed qualities that few other people have," he says.

The then Mary O'Mahony was working as an aid volunteer in Africa when she met and married an Italian doctor, Giovanni Banotti. The couple lived in Rome for four years before the marriage broke up. Her husband obtained a divorce in the Italian courts and has remarried.

BANOTTI returned to Ireland in the mid-1970s to raise her daughter, Tania, at a time when social acceptance of single mothers was low. The bond between mother and daughter is clearly very strong, and Banotti finds it hard to get through any conversation without expressing her pride in Tania, who is currently working for the UN in the Gaza Strip.

Born in Clontarf, Banotti now lives in Ringsend. Her father was a bank employee and some-time actor (something of a family tradition - an aunt played Grandmother in the RTE series Wanderly Wagon) who died when Mary was 10.

With six young children to feed, her mother packed her eldest daughter off to boarding school in the Dominican convent in Wicklow.

Banotti joined the exodus from Ireland in the late 1950s when she went to London to train as a nurse. After four years there, she moved to Canada and the US before going to Kenya as an aid worker.

After the trauma of her marriage breakup, she returned to Dublin and threw herself into social causes. She co-founded Women's Aid and was chairwoman of the Rutland Centre for Drug Abuse. A stint giving welfare advice on RTE proved a useful springboard for a political career.

She was a surprise choice to contest a byelection in Dublin Central in 1983, but performed badly. In the following year, however, she was elected to the European Parliament. Even on her first day there, when she was censured for speaking Irish, Banotti showed a knack for eking out the meagre possibilities for publicity that Strasbourg offers.

Arguably her first task now will be to get the Fine Gael machine working for her. One supporter admits that many of his colleagues are "humming and hawing" about their candidate.

Banotti is seen as the choice of the leadership: she's a stranger to many TDs and her stature in the party partly derives from the popularity and power of her sister, Nora Owen.

It was Banotti herself who threw her hat in the ring when she rang John Bruton in the spring to express an interest in the job. At the time, Fine Gael was hoping that one of its big guns, Garret FitzGerald or Peter Barry, would emerge as candidates.

When this didn't happen, Banotti's supporters pushed her case within the party and Bruton eventually rowed in behind her. But, when the leadership tried to rush through her selection by giving the party just three days to nominate candidates over the summer holiday period, TDs revolted.

Avril Doyle emerged to spoil Banotti's hopes of a clear run and TDs voted to postpone a decision for a month. At last week's meeting, Banotti won the vote by a narrow margin - the party refuses to say by how much.

Her campaign offices are currently in Fine Gael headquarters but a move to separate offices is due soon. The arm's length approach being taken is apparent in the appointment of a party director of elections, Phil Hogan, and Banotti's personal director, Colm Brophy.

Insiders suggest her best prospects will arise when the outbreak of niceness induced by four female candidates wears off. "She's a tough cookie, who can fight her corner," says a supporter. "Can the others?"