I would have bet she was a Republican, maybe a Georgia GOP legislator: Government Is in Peril as Scandal Rocks Ulster

An affair involving Iris Robinson, a lawmaker, and a much younger man has shocked Northern Ireland and threatens the government of her husband, Peter Robinson, right, shown in 2008.

From The New York Times:

The sex scandal that has transfixed Northern Ireland in recent days has a cinematic echo: a 60-year-old Mrs. Robinson who was caught in an affair with a man who was 19 at the time, and is now at the center of a scandal that threatens to bring down the power-sharing government that has steered the province out of 30 years of sectarian bloodshed.

Predictably, local newspaper headline writers and bloggers have resorted to catchphrases like “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,” borrowed from the song in the 1967 film “The Graduate.” But the storyline unfolding in Belfast has a more serious edge because this Mrs. Robinson, Iris, a stridently moralistic lawmaker, is the wife of the province’s unionist first minister, Peter Robinson, who is now struggling to keep his job.

The revelations come at a critical time, when the mostly Protestant unionists and mostly Catholic republicans are in increasingly bitter discussions about how to put in place one of the last and most difficult pieces of the United States-brokered power-sharing agreement: the transfer of police and justice powers in the province from British officials to the unity government.

The transfer would be a step of historic significance for republicans, who viewed the police as a paramilitary arm of the unionists during the 30 years of “the troubles” that left 3,500 people dead. But it raises alarms among unionists, who fear that their republican partners will not adequately pursue and punish dissident republicans who have rejected the unity government and mounted a deadly campaign of bombings and assassinations in recent months.