1. Mary Hanafin served as a Teachta Dala for the Dun Laoghaire constituency from 1997 to 2011.
42 Facts About Mary Hanafin
1. 2.
Mary Hanafin is the daughter of Des Hanafin and Mona.
3.
Des Hanafin was a businessman and Fianna Fail councillor, who later served as a Senator at various times for over twenty-five years between 1969 and 2002.
4.
Mary Hanafin's brother John Hanafin was a member of Seanad Eireann from 2002 to 2011.
5.
Mary Hanafin subsequently worked as a secondary school teacher, teaching Irish and History in the Dominican College Sion Hill in Blackrock, Dublin.
6.
Mary Hanafin obtained a diploma in legal studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
7.
Mary Hanafin died suddenly on 17 July 2003, aged 46.
8.
Mary Hanafin was involved in politics from the age of 15.
9.
Mary Hanafin's father Des Hanafin, as well as being a Senator for Fianna Fail, was a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and a staunch opponent of contraception, abortion and divorce.
10.
Mary Hanafin joined Ogra Fianna Fail aged fifteen and spoke at her first Ard Fheis two years later.
11.
Mary Hanafin first became involved in national politics in 1980 when, at the age of twenty-one, she was elected to the Fianna Fail national executive, the party's ruling body.
12.
Mary Hanafin was elected to Dublin City Council at the 1985 local elections for the Rathmines local electoral area, but she unsuccessfully sought election to Dail Eireann at the 1989 general election, standing in the Dublin South-East constituency.
13.
Mary Hanafin lost her seat on Dublin City Council in 1991 and became involved in the running of the Fianna Fail party.
14.
Mary Hanafin is a former president of the National Youth Council of Ireland.
15.
Mary Hanafin was elected to the Dail on her second attempt, at the 1997 general election for the Dun Laoghaire constituency.
16.
In 2000, Mary Hanafin was appointed Minister of State for Children.
17.
Mary Hanafin topped the poll in her constituency at the 2002 general election and was appointed to the position of Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach; a junior ministry, but with special responsibility as Government Chief Whip.
18.
Mary Hanafin was the first woman to hold this position.
19.
Mary Hanafin was appointed as Minister for Education and Science in a cabinet reshuffle in September 2004.
20.
Mary Hanafin abandoned the compilation of school league tables begun by her predecessor Noel Dempsey.
21.
Mary Hanafin prioritised school bus safety following the death of five schoolgirls near Navan, County Meath, in 2005.
22.
Mary Hanafin announced plans for a possible change of entry requirements to third-level medical education.
23.
Mary Hanafin was accused of bias towards private fee-paying schools in her constituency when awarding building grants to them in 2005.
24.
Diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks revealed that in 2005 Mary Hanafin had briefed the American Ambassador to Ireland on government coalition negotiations.
25.
Mary Hanafin criticized her Green Party coalition colleagues saying that they wanted to prioritize "hares, stags and badgers while everyone else in the country is drowning in this economy".
26.
Mary Hanafin, who admitted being friends with O Searcaigh for many years, dismissed the allegations as an "irresponsible piece of journalism".
27.
Mary Hanafin was accused in February 2008 of being oblivious to the plight of parents of children with autism, and of taking an imperious view of their parents' situation, when she decided to engage in a 68-day court battle with two parents who were attempting to obtain appropriate education for their children through the applied behavior analysis method.
28.
On 7 May 2008, Mary Hanafin was appointed as Minister for Social and Family Affairs by new Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
29.
Mary Hanafin abolished an independent agency, Combat Poverty, by subsuming it into the department.
30.
In late May 2009, a newspaper ran a story claiming Mary Hanafin's office had used taxpayer-funded resources to promote Peter O'Brien in correspondence to voters in the ahead of the 2009 local elections.
31.
On 23 March 2010, Mary Hanafin was moved from Social and Family Affairs to the Tourism, Culture and Sport portfolio.
32.
Mary Hanafin appointed a Fianna Fail councillor and friend of Brian Cowen to the board of the Irish Sports Council on her last full day as Tourism, Culture and Sport Minister.
33.
On 22 January 2011, after the resignation of Brian Cowen, Mary Hanafin put her name forward as a candidate for leader of Fianna Fail.
34.
Mary Hanafin was appointed deputy leader on 31 January 2011.
35.
Mary Hanafin briefly withdrew from public life, but in April 2011, the Fianna Fail National Executive co-opted her as one of the five vice-presidents of the party.
36.
In 2014 Mary Hanafin received a master's degree in American Studies at the Clinton Institute in University College Dublin.
37.
Mary Hanafin lost the Dun Laoghaire Fianna Fail selection convention on 28 September 2015, coming second to Cormac Devlin.
38.
Two days after the selection convention, on 30 September 2015, the National Constituencies Committee of Fianna Fail, chaired by Michael Moynihan TD, recommended Mary Hanafin be added to the general election ticket in Dun Laoghaire.
39.
In January 2016, Mary Hanafin announced she was seeking a place on the Fianna Fail Front Bench.
40.
Mary Hanafin's remarks prompted Mary Cowen, wife of former Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to publicly comment that Micheal Martin should "watch his back" around Hanafin.
41.
In December 2018, Mary Hanafin announced her intention to seek the Fianna Fail nomination for the Dublin constituency in the European Parliament.
42.
Mary Hanafin was an unsuccessful candidate for the Dun Laoghaire constituency at the 2020 general election.