The appointment of the President, Mrs Robinson, to the vacant post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was not unexpected. The President has benefited from an intensive lobbying campaign mounted on her behalf by Irish diplomats. This campaign comparable in scale to that which preceded the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985 highlighted Mrs Robinson's record on human rights and her independent voice in international affairs. The Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring, is correct when he said last night that the diplomats faced an easy task: the high international regard for Mrs Robinson and her world standing always appeared likely to give her a decisive edge.
The President's task in her new role is a formidable one. In truth, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, established four years ago to lift the UN profile on human rights issues, has still to carve out a strong identity for itself in international affairs. The office has gained a substantial increase in its budget and personnel but it has still to realise its potential.
For Mrs Robinson all of this must carry familiar echoes of the presidency of Ireland, whose role and influence was similarly underdeveloped when she took office seven years ago. Mrs Robinson clearly has the energy and the vision to reinvigorate the human rights posts in the same way. But, as someone with no experience of managing a large multi national organisation, she will be on a steep learning curve at least during the initial period.
Mrs Robinson also faces the challenge of setting an international human rights agenda at a time when there is a deep and fundamental division between the First and the Third Worlds about the parameters of any such policy. The Western emphasis may be on individual human rights like free speech and freedom from torture. But the non Western focus is on more collective human rights, notably the right of all persons to secure social and economic development.
Mrs Robinson will have to tread carefully as she attempts to straddle this divide. That said, it is very much to her credit that she is so widely regarded as an honest broker on human rights issues; as someone who is not in thrall to any of the major power blocs and as someone who has forged her own independent voice on issues like hunger and deprivation.
The UN secretary general, Mr Kofi Annan, is already anxious that Mrs Robinson should vacate the Aras and take up the vacant post in September: a time table probably not welcomed by the main political parties who were expecting a more leisurely run in to a presidential election in November.
But the difficulties involved in bringing the election forward should not be exaggerated. The presidential commission - comprised of the Chief Justice, the Ceann Comhairle of the Dail and the Cathaoirleach of the Seanad - is well capable of discharging the responsibilities of the president for an interim period. The political parties may now face the sensitive and - in some cases - the awkward task of nominating a candidate for the post of Uachtaran na hEireann. Mrs Robinsons task is the rather more formidable one of building a bridge between the developed and the developing world.