Unionist protests at McAleese visit are conspicuous by their absence

The emphasis was on homecoming. The President, Mrs McAleese, was yesterday returning to her old school on the Falls Road and her native parish in Ardoyne, calling on Newry and Mourne Council which takes in her second home of Rostrevor, and was guest of honour at a dinner in the legal studies department at Queen's University Belfast, where she was formerly pro-vice chancellor.

It was mainly an occasion for nationalists to greet the President on her first official visit to Northern Ireland. If unionists were furious at her presence in Belfast and Newry, they kept pretty quiet about it.

Indeed, without any untoward fuss, several unionists greeted her. Ann McVicar of the Shankill Women's Centre at a reception in the cross-community Flax Centre in north Belfast said she was "delighted" to welcome her former Ardoyne neighbour to the city.

In Newry, the former Ulster Unionist Party chairman of the council, Mr Danny Kennedy, attended, in the company of some party colleagues, a special function in her honour at the arts centre beside the town hall, and afterwards they amiably chatted.

Mr Kennedy had hosted a reception for her in Newry in 1994 when she became pro-vice chancellor of Queen's. The President, after hearing young people sing Consider Yourself from Oliver hoped she wasn't proving a burden on the council's purse.

Mr Kennedy said it would "re quire a lot of work" before unionists would shed their suspicions of this unapologetic nationalist, "but while Mary McAleese is capable of holding strong views, she is also capable of listening to other views.

"While we were glad to acknowledge her presence here, equally she knows we don't give her our allegiance, but that does not mean we cannot be gracious."

Even the handshake with the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams outside her alma mater, St Dominic's convent on the Falls - not to mention similar greetings with Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly in Ardoyne - did not, at least not yet, trigger the expected unionist hostility.

She had no difficulty with the handshake. "I didn't ask anybody who they were, what they were or what their background was, and that is the kind of world I want to live in," she said.

Nuns, teachers and hundreds of schoolgirls gathered at St Dominic's to welcome the President. "She proves that women, and women from Belfast, can achieve anything they want," enthused 17year-old Angela Hayes.

Mrs McAleese told the large gathering at the Flax Centre one of the highlights of the day was being greeted in Irish at Belfast Airport by the deputy Lord Lieutenant for Belfast, Col Charles Hogg. She was moved by his effort to learn the cupla focal. "It was not a small gesture. It was a very, very big step across a bridge and I hope there will be many more of them. I thank him for his generosity of heart," she said.

She also said building bridges was a "laborious and meticulous" business. She has a long way to go before she or any Irish president will be cavalcading down the Shankill, but nonetheless a few stones towards that day were laid yesterday.