Anthony Abrahams, the co-host of the Hot I02 FM morning talk show, the Breakfast Club, one day last week summed-up what appears to be the sentiment about Heather Robinson in the opinion-leading classes and among media analysts.

“I wish I had listened to her then….” Abrahams quipped.

He now had a better grasp of the motivations of Robinson, particularly with some of her initiatives like the group she formed in 2000 called Police Support Action Committee (POLSAC), which often put her on the other side of the debate with human rights groups …. and the Breakfast Club hosts.

The then to which Abrahams referred was 1996, mostly between April and June of that year, leading up to Robinson’s resignation from her parliamentary seat for South Central St Catherine.

At the time, Robinson was in a struggle for supremacy in her constituency with Enos Grant, a ruling People’s National Party (PNP) member of the St Catherine Parish Council, whose style of politics and associations she deplored.

She also made a series of statements, in and outside Parliament, denouncing the seedy underbelly of Jamaican politics and its links with criminals and gunmen. She would have no part of it.

At the time she drew attention to Donovan Bennett, who is called “Bulby”, and was by then on the police’s “Most Wanted” list, and who three years earlier had made known to her his intention to be the top gang boss in St Catherine and had sought her support as a new member of Parliament.

In parliamentary remarks less than a month before her resignation, Robinson used the same words as she had a year earlier in the sectoral debate, to declare her position on politicians supporting gang leaders.

She said: “. Mr Speaker, I am a single woman and I don’t intend to give birth to any don. I am not a don maker and I will never be. In that sense, I am truly barren.”

Although the issues she had placed on the table did lead to an announcement by the PNP to establish a committee to seek ways to reduce political divisiveness in South Central St Catherine, Robinson’s speaking somehow didn’t capture the public imagination.

Indeed, the issue was largely ignored by the press, except for the articles in the Observer on the matter. Until last week when she found new relevance in the context of the recent upsurge of violence in St Catherine’s capital of Spanish Town, apparently between the parish’s two politically-aligned gangs. One of those gangs is called Clansman, which is said to be led by the elusive ‘Bulby’, the same person about whom Robinson had spoken out seven years ago.

In a Breakfast Club appearance Wednesday, while her successor, Sharon Hay-Webster and the Jamaica Labour Party’s Olivia “Babsy” Grange of the adjacent Central St Catherine constituency hedged or danced around the issue of the association of gangs and criminals with politics, Robinson was forthright.

She repeated the claim she had made in Parliament about Bulby’s declaration to become the number one don and spoke of the carnage that soon followed.

“A whole ton of persons were killed after that. I believe over 50,” Robinson said.

She added: “And of all those persons, none of them were killed by a JLP person. All of them, the murders, were linked to this one man. He is a known supporter of the People’s National Party. He wanted me to support him in his quest to become the number one don.”

According to Robinson, she refused to hand over government resources to the control of Bulby’s gang. “And so they killed and killed until the last person I buried was on the Sunday before I resigned. I said I would do it no more.”

Before going underground in 1995, having been charged with murder, Bulby was what would be called in strong politically-aligned communities as a “PNP activist”.

Robinson did not say who she had in mind, but branded as guilty, criminal and evil, anyone who has had contact with Bulby and who had not told the police.

“When we all go to bed tonight and when we all face God, let us all make sure that we know what we did while we were all here on earth,” she said – again without saying for whom the barbs were intended.

Hay-Webster and Grange were still on the programme.

Abrahams branded Robinson – a woman with a notoriously prickly personality – as courageous. But that is not likely to be a characterisation used broadly across the political spectrum and in the PNP.

In fact, at the weekend, some PNP sources were suggesting that there was more to Robinson’s resignation from Parliament than was indicated in her statements, although they declined to offer specifics of what these were.

Hay-Webster, it seemed, is likely to be one of those to be in no hurry to embrace Robinson, judging from her response to an Observer editorial critical of her approach to conflicts in her constituency and praising the position adopted by her predecessor.

In what appeared to be a thinly-veiled slap at Robinson, she wrote: “Truth be told, many of us who trumpet angelic behaviour and are regarded as courageous leaders, now clap from the ringside because they cannot stand the head of the battle.”

But Robinson, a long-time PNP member, with a heavy streak of impatience and a good dose of irritability, is nothing if not consistent. Especially when it comes to guns and politics.

For instance, in August 2002 she resigned as the campaign manager for Anthony Hylton, the PNP Western St Thomas candidate for that year’s general election, after a young man showed her a gun – apparently suggesting it could be made available to promote Hylton’s victory.

Robinson would not be enticed back despite Hylton’s own strong declaration that he was against violence in politics and assurances that the man with the gun had no links to the campaign.

“Heather can be very intractable,” said a colleague who has known Robinson for a long time. “Sometimes, it is a strength. She is not easily swayed. But I would say that is also her fundamental weakness. It sometimes leads to inflexibility when flexibility is warranted.”

Another of her traits, those who know her say, and which has been apparent to anyone who has followed her in public life – including her intervention in last week’s Breakfast Club interview – is her outspokenness.

That was clear in the period leading up to her June 1996 resignation from Parliament when she made it known to her party, and anyone who would listen, that she wouldn’t have Enos Lawrence on her team as a local government councillor, although he had already served for five years and was known to have strong contacts in Spanish Town’s inner-city communities. He did not pass her “fit and proper” test.

“I do not believe that he (Lawrence) is a suitable person to represent the people and the party…” Robinson told the Sunday Observer for a story published on April 7, 1996 signalling her intention to resign. “I am not prepared to introduce him to any voter as the PNP’s candidate.”

Robinson’s stance forced the PNP’s National Executive Council (NEC) to seriously, it seemed at the time, acknowledge the problems posed by so-called garrison style politics. A committee headed by regional chairman, K D Knight, was also established to attempt to heal the rift between Robinson and Lawrence. But in the end, Robinson walked away from the constituency, clearly believing that the party had not done enough to remove criminals from the political process or to sanction those with links to criminals and strong-arm men.

Robinson has been in the PNP since the I970s, being among the young people attracted to Michael Manley’s message of democratic socialism and was considered to be on the party’s ‘moderate left’ at a time when it was torn between several tendencies.

In the late 1970s, she worked at the Government’s Agency for Public Information (now Jamaica Information Service) and was part of the island’s media fraternity where ideological debates were rampant. In fact, in the 1980s she was among the most vocal of the moderates during a wrenching battle in the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ) to grab the organisation back from the Marxist-Leninist leadership of the now disbanded Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ).

Robinson was appointed to the Senate in 1992 after Prime Minister P J Patterson took over the leadership of the PNP, but ran in the new South Central St Catherine constituency in the general election of the following year. She was named a parliamentary secretary in the local government ministry in Patterson’s new government, under the then minister, John Junor.

However, Robinson resigned within a year. Insiders claim that she became impatient with the public sector bureaucracy, irritated at the slow pace at which things were done and quarreled with public servants.

After her stint in government, Robinson went back to what she has done professionally since the 1980s, selling insurance. Last year, when her name creept into the press as a possible replacement for Maxine Henry-Wilson as PNP general-secretary, she made clear that she had no such ambitions and was content with the job she did.

But after last week’s stand, and her seeming willingness to stare down the badmen, and to sweep away the remnants of violence from politics, Robinson could find herself being thrust into new areas.

She told the Breakfast Club hosts: “I am not courageous. I keep on joking with my friends that if it is that everybody is going to run and leave Jamaica, then I am not going to run and leave it. There is nowhere else I want to live in this world. Nowhere. And those of us who want to live nowhere else must make up our minds about this country.”