[1] She was leader of the Progressive Democrats party between 1993 and 2006 and again from 2007 to 2008, resuming the role after her successor, Michael McDowell, lost his seat at the 2007 general election.
[7] In 1976, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economic and Social Studies, and for a brief time was a secondary school teacher at Castleknock College in Dublin.
[10] After the killers of gay man Declan Flynn received suspended sentences, Harney challenged then Minister for Justice Michael Noonan to seek the resignation of the judge.
Following the 1989 general election the Progressive Democrats entered into a coalition government with Fianna Fáil, led at the time by Charles Haughey.
[14] After the 2002 general election Harney led the Progressive Democrats, who had doubled their seats from four to eight, back into coalition with Fianna Fáil, the first time a government had been re-elected since 1969.
[citation needed] In December 2001, Harney controversially used an Air Corps aircraft[16] to travel to County Leitrim to open a friend's off-licence in Manorhamilton; the trip cost €1,500.
Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Harney's own Progressive Democrats supporters were those who expressed most satisfaction, with people in Dublin also feeling most dissatisfaction regionally.
[23] Harney rejected criticisms from Fine Gael during the same month that there had been a 25% increase in people waiting on trolleys in regional hospitals during the past two years; she claimed Health Service Executive statistics showed otherwise.
[25] The same year, in her capacity as Minister for Health, Mary Harney introduced risk equalisation into the Irish healthcare market.
The Progressive Democrats' rules at the time stipulated that the leader of the party must be a TD, and Harney was one of only two remaining TDs; she resumed the leadership in a caretaker capacity.
[32] Alongside her predecessor at the Department of Health, Micheál Martin, and officials at two prominent Dublin fertility clinics, she received a package which included a threatening letter on 29 February 2008.
[35] On 12 November 2010, Harney's ministerial car was pelted with eggs and cheese as she arrived in Nenagh, with protesters referring to the "ongoing downgrading of the [local] hospital".
[37] In a RTÉ Radio 1 interview on 27 November 2008, Fianna Fáil TD Mary O'Rourke described Harney's involvement in the scandal as "a load of hoo-hah".
She was also employed in speaking engagements, saying: "I spoke at a recent surgeons' conference in New York on my experience as a health minister and in Berlin on the Irish pharma sector."
Indian pharma businessman Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, appointed Harney to the board of Biocon, a Bangalore-based company employing 7,000 and expanding in Malaysia.
[40] On 17 April 2016, Harney intervened in government formation talks, claiming the deadlock would damage "Ireland's reputation" in remarks made during her closing address at the three-day Women in Media conference in Ballybunion.
In the same address Harney, who attended with husband Brian Geogheghan, claimed that "when she left public life she made a conscious decision to leave politics behind her".
[42] In November 2001 Harney married Brian Geoghegan, a businessman, in a low-key afternoon ceremony in Dublin, on a day in which she attended to a number of significant political meetings.