She has helped us to re-imagine Ireland

WHEN she was elected in 1990, it was hard to believe that Mary Robinson was President. In November, when she steps down, it will be hard to believe that the President is not Mary Robinson.

An office that seemed to be the wrong shape for a woman, an intellectual and a passionate campaigner, has been so transformed, that it is hard to imagine it fitting anyone else. And yet, what will he left behind will not just be an empty space. For, in the course of seven years, Mary Robinson has given us, to fill the gap that will be left by her going, an image of our better selves.

She has helped us to reimagine Ireland.

Like every other President before her, Mary Robinson tried to be a symbol of the nation. The difference is that their Ireland was a place, while hers was a people. The place that her predecessors tried to embody was familiar and comfortable, a set of official institutions and accepted attitudes, The President belonged with the Army, the flag and the National Anthem as a reassuring presence in the midst of change and uncertainty.

The people that she managed to represent, on the other hand, were scattered, diverse, sometimes invisible to one another, often at odds. They were women and men, straight and gay, settled and nomadic, able bodied and disabled members of all religions and none. They lived in Ireland and abroad, in small townlands and vast housing estates. Their place in the world was not simple they looked now to Europe, now to America, now to Africa.

And, when they looked across the Border or across the Irish Sea, they saw not alien territories, places to be annexed or feared, but other people to be understood and respected.

It is easy enough to be the first kind of President, to rise above politics by taking refuge in the bland reassurance that we are all, by virtue of being Irish, attached to the same things. It is hard to be the second kind, to be above politics without becoming distant from the real human struggles that lie behind them. Mary Robinson's extraordinary achievement has been to do just that.

She has not done it by avoiding the often bitterly controversial issues - poverty, racism, women's rights and human rights the relationships between Protestants and Catholics, between Ireland and England - over the past seven years. Instead, she has tried, to suggest the terms in which we can discuss them that everyone has a right to be heard and that respect for difference is the precondition for dialogue.

It is true, of course, that she could not have attained the almost unprecedented degree of popularity and admiration that she now enjoys if she had been wielding what is regarded as real political power, making hard choices about resources and priorities. But it is also true that she has discovered and liberated a different kind of power - the force of recognition.

In an age when politics can seem ever more distant, a kind of virtual reality that exists only on the television screen she has shown the importance of a personal presence. By turning up to events, by visiting all sorts of communities, by inviting all kinds of people to Aras an Uachtarain, she has redefined what matters.

Whether it be a prison in Rwanda or an emigrant centre in Boston, bomb site in Manchester or a FAS project in Mayo, she has tried, simply by being there, to, direct our gaze towards other realities. In this sense she has been a sign as well as a symbol - an arrow pointing to the things that, if we are to be a pluralist democracy, we must see and understand.

Talking to Charlie Bird on RTE, yesterday, Mary Robinson remarked that one of the things she will remember from her period in office is the smell of fresh paint in the halls and community centres that she has visited week in, week out over the past seven years. Wherever she goes, it is an appropriate memory to take away with her".

In anticipation of her presence, people all over Ireland have given a new gloss, fresher and less forbidding, to their public spaces. When she leaves, we will find that the places that symbolise our communities are brighter, smarter and more welcoming than they used to be.

And we may reflect that though she didn't do the painting, she provided the excuse for us to apply more vibrant colours to our ideas of what it means to be Irish.