She went to a convent boarding school and spent a year in France. She then studied law at Trinity College like her brothers. She continued her studies at Harvard University where she began to appreciate the possibilities offered by practising law…

"It was in 1967, there was great disquiet about the war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. It was a time when the top law graduates from Harvard were going into poverty programmes and not going into Wall Street firms. It was a time of great idealism and questioning about American society, about legal education and I found the confidence of law students and law graduates at the time really impressed me… they were young people who felt they had a role to play and they should be allowed to play it. And that wasn't the perception of young people in Ireland at the time."

She returned to Dublin, deeply affected by the confidence and idealism she had seen in the United States. At the age of 25 she became the youngest professor of law at Trinity College where she lectured whilst practising as a lawyer.