International role was central theme

IRELAND's international identity and role have been central and growing themes of Mrs Robinson's term as President. They arose naturally from the universalism of her legal concern for human rights and the cosmopolitanism of her education and background.

But she has worked deliberately and successfully to develop and broaden the international role of the Presidency. The more effectively she did so, the more demand there was for her to travel.

The record speaks for itself from her first State visit to Portugal in June 1991, through successive private, public and State visits to the United States, Britain, France, Australia, Japan, India, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Africa and Italy in the following years.

These were among the most noteworthy bilateral trips. They extended the range and function of Ireland's diplomatic and symbolic projection, as well as that of its trade and the modernity that Mrs Robinson came to personify.

On top of that, of course, there have been the very significant humanitarian interventions in the crises in Somalia and Rwanda.

They came to symbolise her determination to use her office as a means of pressurising and shaming the international community, through the United Nations, into taking far more seriously its responsibilities to intervene with aid and rehabilitation.

Relations between the developed and the developing world were a constant theme of her presidency. Her visit to Somalia in October 1992 exemplified these issues.

She went there as the famine crisis, caused by prolonged faction fighting between rival war lords, reached its height. She was able to play a role in brokering a ceasefire between them and then to represent their demands and what needed to be done on the ground to the UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Ghali, whom she visited immediately afterwards in New York.

Unfortunately he was later to dismiss the man she relied on for advice in Somalia, Dr Mahomed Sahnoun, who advocated a bottom up approach to the task of UN mediation. He fell foul of the top brass in New York for criticising the bureaucratic style of UN agencies and their sheer ineffectiveness in the face of such a disaster.

This visit mightily impressed Irish public opinion and played to its generous concern for African states in crisis after the end of the Cold War. Mrs Robinson played a central role in educating Irish people about the growing complexities of such crises - and how they recall our own experience of famine and under development.

The lessons were driven home in her three visits to Rwanda in 1994, 1995 and this year. During these she became a passionate advocate of international involvement and human rights as necessary means of resolving conflict.

In this way she has genuinely extended the understanding of our own history and how it is linked with other states and societies. This theme has been equally characteristic of her concern with Irish identity.

In an interview with Le Monde in May 1992, during a four day State visit to France, she made the strong point that Europe means we no longer only define ourselves in relation to Britain".

This, she said was a very liberating experience after generations of Anglocentricity. It represented a maturing and a broadening of Irish identity, a more adult and responsible role in the world.

Her first address to the Oireachtas in July 1992 developed the theme of Ireland's European identity after the referendum which ratified the Treaty of Maastricht. She underlined how multiple Irish, British and European identities could help to reconcile the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The address bears rereading as an excellent summary of themes which were to become more accepted, even commonplace, in the following years.

There was real substance in what appeared to be largely symbolic rhetoric; but it was easier for her to find political substance in international relations than in the more constrained minutiae of domestic politics - largely because she has been more alive to the political consequences of sovereignty pooling than most politicians and citizens.

The same point applies to the themes set out in her second Oireachtas address, in February 1995, entitled "Cherishing the Irish Diaspora". Her case was that the great Irish narrative of dispossession, emigration and belonging has become, by a certain historical irony, a means of coming to terms with greater diversity and tolerance in Irish society.

We have much to learn from our newly discovered and previously despised diaspora, including how to turn it to advantage in the world of the next century.

This lesson is one that the Irish political class has been slow to learn. But the argument that it is a huge resource, and not a historical burden, will probably be her most enduring legacy.