Iris Robinson with husband Peter. (AP)

London, Jan. 10: 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 centre of a controversy 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.

Last week, an emotional Mr Robinson told reporters he learned of his wife’s infidelity only on the night last March when she tried to commit suicide over the affair with the young man, who is now 21.

But the sympathy he earned turned to demands for his resignation when a BBC documentary revealed Mrs Robinson had taken $80,000 in secret loans from property developers to finance her lover’s investment in a cafe near Belfast. Neither she nor her husband had reported the loans to the Belfast Assembly or the British Parliament, where the Robinsons each hold dual seats.

For now, Mr Robinson’s survival as First Minister depends on an investigation of the loan deal by an independent counsel.

When Mrs Robinson went public last week with an acknowledgment of her affair, she asked forgiveness of her husband and the public. “I am so, so sorry,” she said.

Her former lover, Kirk McCambley, has given a series of interviews saying the affair began when Mrs Robinson befriended him after his father, who owned a shop in the Belfast neighbourhood where the Robinsons lived, died of cancer. “She was there to help,” he has said.