The nomination of Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness to the Supreme Court is a popular move in legal circles. The High Court judge is known for her open and unintimidating manner and her thoughtful judgments. She is regarded as unfailingly courteous, pleasant to deal with and sympathetic to litigants.
Judge McGuinness (66) has played a major part in public life since the early 1960s when she was a prominent member of the Labour Party along with her husband, the journalist and writer Mr Proinsias Mac Aonghusa.
She was an unusually late starter at the Law Library, having worked as a teacher, freelance writer and parliamentary officer with the Labour Party before becoming a barrister.
At the Bar, she arguably did more than any other lawyer to highlight family law issues, and was involved in a number of landmark cases.
Because family law cases cannot be reported, perhaps she was seen as something of an unknown quantity when appointed a Circuit Court judge in 1994. There she continued her involvement in family law, an area which was rapidly expanding.
She has often expressed the view, privately, that a certain amount of reporting of in-camera family law cases would be a good idea to show the reality of family life in the State.
She has also been a liberal voice on many social controversies. She told the annual Social Studies Conference in Kilkenny in the early 1990s that the Protestant churches took too negative an approach towards mixed marriages.
On her appointment to the High Court in 1996, she developed a reputation for fairness and balance.
A Northern Protestant born in 1934, Ms Justice McGuinness was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin, before taking a degree in modern languages, French and Irish, in Trinity College.
She spent a large part of her childhood in Belfast, where her father, Canon Robert Ellis, was a Church of Ireland rector.
She served on a number of State boards in the 1970s, including the Adoption Board. She studied in the King's Inns as a mature student and qualified as a barrister in 1977, aged 42. She was appointed a senior counsel in 1989.
There were very few women in law when she began. She has recounted how she met a woman colleague, now the High Court judge Ms Justice Mella Carroll, in the ladies' tiny changing rooms. "She said: `don't let them tell you you can't succeed because you're a woman.' I've always remembered her words." Judge McGuinness was chairwoman of the Kilkenny Incest Inquiry in 1993, and the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. She was elected to the Seanad for the University of Dublin constituency three times.
She has three children, two sons and one daughter, and enjoys choral singing.