Mary Robinson
The main opposition party, Fine Gael was no well organised. They gambled that former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald would run as its candidate (but for two years he had been saying no), then they asked Peter Barry, who had previously been willing to run but had run out of patience and was no longer interested. The party's third choice was the former civil rights campaigner Austin Currie, a new TD and former minister in Brian Faulkner's power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland from 1973-1974.