When President Robinson announced she was not seeking a second term in office, colleagues and commentators long used to acknowledging the success of her term could only wonder at her appeal. 7"Her influence and her place in the public imagination are in great disproportion to her constitutional role," according to an editorial in The Irish Times. "Her popularity defies many of the laws of elected office.
"Her formula for success has run counter to everything which most of the Irish political establishment took for granted until she won the highest office in the land."
About her success there can be no doubt. She has won praise from political opponents and one-time critics. Her appointment as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirms her international standing; opinion polls reflect her popularity at home.
But how has she come to be the most popular Irish politician since Parnell? The first woman - and the first candidate who was not supported by Fianna Fail - to occupy the Presidency?
The office, we know, will never be the same. For no matter who occupies it, new standards have been set. But has the Robinson Presidency, which began many months before her election, led - or simply reflected - change in the country at large? And will the phenomenon of the Robinson years come to a close when she leaves office at the end of the week? The question fills commentators with curiosity, and political strategists, inside and outside the parties, with faint stirrings of unease.
For although the Presidency may be above politics, it's never far from the rumble of passing traffic. The system ensures a close, some say too close, connection with the parties and partisan interests. Even when it was the preserve of Fianna Fail, elections told us more about the state of the nation than many commentators now seem to appreciate.
There are few doubts about the importance of the Robinson years. What commentators and strategists worry about is their precise significance: what they tell us about ourselves, our attitudes to each other and the organisation of our affairs.
We must search for clues; ask when and how President Robinson came to office; what she promised and what she did; and, just as important given the nature of the Presidency, how it was done.
The 1990 campaign followed a turbulent decade which had begun with three general elections in 18 months and a series of running battles for control of Fianna Fail. It was to continue with two bitterly contested referendums on abortion and divorce, and it ended with a procession of scandals that have yet to be fully explored.
The 1980s was a greedy decade, in a world dominated by the ideas of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In Ireland, it was a particularly threatening time for women, on whose fear and uncertainty the opponents of reform played with merciless zeal.
The smoke from referendum battles still hung over politics when Mrs Robinson, who'd taken part in the 1983 campaign on abortion, accepted Dick Spring's invitation to run for the Presidency.
A Fianna Fail backbencher, John Browne, said she'd soon be running abortion referral clinics in Aras an Uachtarain; and a member of the Cabinet, Padraig Flynn, accused her of reconstructing herself as a family woman for the campaign.
Mr Flynn was to apologise and withdraw his comment. But Fianna Fail persisted with a red scare, pointing to her Labour and Workers' Party (now Democratic Left) support. Fears of red rule were more energetically stoked when it seemed that Brian Lenihan's campaign had been undermined by the news that he'd tried to persuade President Hillery not to dissolve the Dail in 1982.
Some seasoned observers still suspect that, far from damaging Lenihan's campaign, his subsequent dismissal as Tanaiste by Charles Haughey, in response to criticism by coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, turned out to be a help. Much as the wild-eyed attacks on Mrs Robinson won support from some who'd been sitting nervously on the fence.
But there was no denying that those who voted for Mrs Robinson knew who and what they were voting for. She'd promised to be the voice of the people who hadn't been heard; and she was. Her record was well known, as a lawyer, teacher and politician, and on issues from Northern affairs to human rights, from social divisions to contraception, divorce and abortion.
She was far from being the political novice that some imagined but she'd been made stronger by the campaign. As she told Hot Press: "I'll be able to look Charlie Haughey in the eye and tell him to back off because I've been directly elected by the people and he hasn't."
It's well to remember not only that she was elected, but how: more than 612,000 people voted for her. This was more than Eamon de Valera managed at his best (fewer than 560,000 in a two-man race).
And though his share of the vote was higher (56.3 per cent at best) hers, at just under 39 per cent, was within a whisker of Fianna Fail's first preferences in the 1992 and 1997 general elections.
Michael O'Regan will write in this series in more detail of her years in office. Fintan O'Toole has already written about what he considers to be the most unlikely aspect of her Presidency: "The way in which a political persona forged in the white heat of some of the most bitterly divisive campaigns of recent decades has come, somehow, to represent in the Republic of Ireland, a national consensus."
We saw last week a national consensus of a different kind achieved with dramatic suddenness in Britain. And it was appropriate that one of Mary Robinson's public functions in the last week of her Presidency should have been to mourn Diana, the Princess of Wales.
President and princess both had the courage of their convictions; and in their different ways often succeeded by doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. The comparison shouldn't be taken too far, but it seems that both enjoyed the benefit of a non-threatening appeal in offices which, until their arrival, had been considered remote and unconnected with the cares of everyday life.
It has been said of Mrs Robinson that she was given an uncritical press. The truth is that the media often lost sight of her in the crowds who had not been chosen for the cameras or arranged like the furniture. Many of the events she attended were covered simply by local papers; some were not covered at all.
But to those which were given publicity, she contributed a message of Ireland which was fresh and vibrant; there was no doubt about where she stood, or where we stood, in a lop-sided world.
It has also been said that she caught the tide of change seven years ago - a tide which, two years later, was to sweep into the Dail a bigger contingent of Labour deputies than we had ever elected. What worries party strategists now is the possibility that, with a severe reduction in Labour's support this year and Mrs Robinson about to depart, the tide has turned.
Fianna Fail - however shakily - holds power with the help of the Progressive Democrats. Fine Gael is by far the strongest party in opposition. The coalition governments of the past five years have achieved many of the reforms the left campaigned for: the questions of divorce, contraception and homosexuality have been settled or well advanced; the Freedom of Information Act is on the statute books and ethical issues have, at least, begun to be resolved.
But there is a great deal of unfinished business which cannot be ignored, although the Robinson years are coming to an end. Strong, clear voices are needed to speak on Northern Ireland, unemployment, poverty and social division, discrimination against travellers and refugees, drugs and homelessness and the desperate need to encourage development at home and abroad.
As for the Presidency, those who would like to roll back the advances of the last seven years must be challenged. The office never fully fitted the dismissive description of a grey area in a remote region of politics, inhabited only by old men removed by age, convention and constitutional limits from the busy centre of affairs.
The office had indeed been occupied for 35 years by three elderly men - Douglas Hyde, Sean T. O'Kelly and Eamon de Valera - two of whom, O'Kelly and de Valera, served for 14 years each. All were being rewarded for long and loyal service to the Irish people.
But after 1973, when Erskine Childers was elected, the long periods of boredom to which we had become accustomed were punctuated by moments of high excitement, and in 1976, by a sudden sense of crisis.
The Presidency had never been as remote from politics as some commentators suggested. O'Kelly, one of the founders of Fianna Fail, had to depend in 1945 on the transfers of Pat McCartan, an old republican who had travelled to Russia after the revolution to win recognition for the Provisional Government here. McCartan's 212,000 votes foreshadowed the arrival of a new party, Clann na Poblachta, which was to play a central part in the formation of the first inter-party government in 1948.
De Valera's decision to stand in 1959 signalled the beginning of the end of a political ice age: Sean Lemass was to take over as Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach. But the party had hopes of more radical change: it linked Dev's candidacy with a proposal to abandon PR in general elections.
The electorate gave the candidate a handsome majority over Fine Gael's Sean MacEoin, the blacksmith of Ballinalee, but with a degree of sophistication that was to win the respect of commentators, refused to replace PR. (A second attempt to switch from PR was more emphatically rejected in 1968.)
The thaw continued. De Valera's decision to seek a second term was greeted with impatience, but this was 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising; it would be the last hurrah for the generation which had taken part in it.
Fine Gael had to be persuaded to put up a fight. Tom O'Higgins became its candidate precisely because he was not a 1916 man and, although the country echoed with anniversary celebrations, managed to reduce Dev's majority to 10,700 or one per cent.
Mr O'Higgins's campaign was remarkable for two other reasons. The first was that RTE didn't cover it. The second was O'Higgins's new and, to some, surprising view of the role of the President.
RTE chose not to cover the Fine Gael campaign because Dev wasn't campaigning and the station felt obliged to maintain a balance. It was a curious decision: Dev, after all, was taking part in anniversary celebrations and such customary presidential functions as attendance at All-Ireland hurling and football finals.
As for O'Higgins's view of the Presidency, he wrote of it in his autobiography, A Double Life: "I did my best to picture the kind of Ireland I would like to see, having regard to areas of deprivation and want as these existed at the time, and urging a greater zeal for social justice and reform. . ."
O'Higgins knew that to many, this probably sounded revolutionary, a threat to interfere in the government's affairs. His response might well have been used by Mrs Robinson to explain her own approach:
"Because the President in his own person is meant to symbolise national aims and ideals, his attitude in all these matters is bound to have a profound influence on the attitude of the whole country, and on that in turn of the government."
Dev's refusal to campaign may have helped defeat O'Higgins in 1966, although the old man claimed that he'd have fared better if there had been a more vigorous contest. In 1973, O'Higgins was beaten by Erskine Childers, who took full advantage of new ways of appealing to the electorate.
Not that his campaign impressed either colleagues or commentators. Many in Fianna Fail thought him remote and naive and found his patrician style off-putting. Journalists travelling in his campaign coach called it Wanderly Wagon.
Colleagues and commentators were wrong. Childers's appeal succeeded beyond all expectations. His speeches were like fireside chats, designed to encourage civic pride. The hard chaws couldn't imagine anyone falling for this kind of guff. The people loved it.
And when Childers died after a year in office, the queues of mourners stretched from the city centre to Dublin Castle where his body lay in state.
Parties which had fought a general election, a presidential election and a crucial by-election in quick succession were desperate to avoid another expensive outing.
They thought they'd found an agreed candidate, Mrs Rita Childers, but fumbled the offer and were forced to settle on another. This was Cearbhall O Dalaigh, a judge who had only lately joined the European Court of Justice after a distinguished career at home.
He was a Fianna Fail man and, according to Stephen Collins in The Cosgrave Legacy, "exuberant, opinionated, a bit of a show-off and quick to stand on his dignity". Just the man for a row with the taciturn Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, whom he suspected of not taking the Presidency seriously enough.
The row happened in October 1976, almost two years after President O Dalaigh's arrival in office, when the Minister for Defence, Paddy Donegan, reacted to one of his decisions by calling him "a thundering disgrace".
The decision had been to refer to the Supreme Court a piece of emergency legislation introduced by the Fine Gael-Labour coalition in the aftermath of the murder of the British ambassador, Christopher EwartBiggs. The criticism was delivered at a function in an Army barracks in Mullingar.
Public opinion was largely on O Dalaigh's side, especially when Cosgrave stubbornly refused to sack Donegan and, as Des O'Malley said, made "a half-hearted attempt to half disapprove" of what the Minister had said.
O Dalaigh resigned, the Government was badly shaken, and the Presidency suffered as never before. Donegan's resignation scarcely mattered: the damage had been done.
It fell to another agreed candidate, Paddy Hillery, to bridge the gap between O Dalaigh's departure and the arrival of Mary Robinson - a gap, it's now strange to relate, of 14 years. Like O Dalaigh, Dr Hillery had been set on a career with a European institution when the call came: he'd played a central part in the negotiation of EC membership and, on Ireland's accession, joined the European Commission.
He was reluctant to return, but the party insisted. The office was badly in need of renewal and Dr Hillery was given the task of doing what he could. And what he was expected to do, by and large, was to stay put.
The 14-year gap he filled was one of the reasons for the poor view of the Presidency before 1990. It was not his fault: he had neither a mandate nor the advantage of having prepared a programme. He was out of luck when the first term ended in 1983.
The Republic had just had three elections in a row, one in 1981, two in 1982. It was a mundane consideration, but the parties had neither the funds nor the stomach for a fight. And Fianna Fail was just settling into opposition after its running battles on leadership.
Dr Hillery's most awkward moment, however, had come in 1979 when, immediately after the visit of Pope John Paul, he felt obliged to deny a rash of rumours about his marriage. It was an embarrassing occasion for the President and for the political correspondents who went to Aras an Uachtarain to hear his denial.
Had she not been the formidable politician she is, Mrs Robinson would still have brought certain advantages to the office: she was not an elder, like de Valera; not trapped in opposition, as O'Higgins had been. She served longer than Childers, in a happier relationship with governments than O Dalaigh.
But she is a formidable politician. And she has been an exemplary President. She has served this country well; and anyone, or any party, trying to roll back the advances she has made will not be forgiven.