The problem concerning the Presidency, it has been observed, has less to do with filling the role of President than with filling the shoes of Mary Robinson, which appears to be the only way we can conceive of proceeding. Because we have never really fully understood what precisely was achieved in making Mrs Robinson our president, we are unclear about how to follow up. We are trying to retrace our own footsteps to 1990, in an attempt to repeat what we did on that occasion. The problem is that electing Mary Robinson was not something we did - it was something that happened. We didn't plan it, and if we had it wouldn't have come out as it did.
It's a little like the Sixties, which happened because nobody was thinking about making anything happen. Nowadays, attempts to repeat the experience by imitating Sixties music, fashion and attitudes result only in embarrassment. The Robinson Presidency, likewise, was recognised, defined and named with the benefit of hindsight. Not surprisingly, it was frequently accorded a degree of significance it neither claimed nor deserved.
Much has been made, for example, of the symbolic nature of Mary Robinson's Presidency. But in truth, her election was more of a gesture than a symbol. She won at a time when people were not simply hoping to overturn the party political bandwagons but were beginning to have a dizzying sense that this might actually be possible.
In her candidacy, she succeeded in presenting herself as unthreatening to enough people to enable her to sneak past the post on the second count. We elected her because we suddenly became drunk on the possibility that we could. She presented an opportunity for subversion which was too good to turn down. In this sense, her election was emblematic of the modernising-cum-liberalising ethic with which she has been identified, and of its negative as much as its positive aspects.
It mirrored the paradox of a form of change which is purely reactive. From the vantage point of its conclusion, the Robinson Presidency, in terms of the public conception of it, amounts to more of a denunciation of what went before than an annunciation of what might follow. Mrs Robinson razed the old to the ground, and moved her hands in such a manner as to suggest what the new might be like. But she did not build it, and neither did we.
The chief excitement of having her as president was that she was not a grey, golfing has-been. It would be untrue to say that she did not transcend this limited role, but she did not transcend it sufficiently to open a new path into the future. For example, at the outset of her Presidency, she pledged that, rather than repudiate the Ireland we were leaving behind, she would lay her emphasis on persuasion, that she would try to coax all of us along the road to a more enlightened place.
In truth, she leaves behind a society even more divided, by wealth, opportunity and outlook than the one she undertook to lead in 1990. This is not a failure on her part, but it does highlight an inadequacy which is not acknowledged in the post-Robinson hyperbole.
In retrospect, it was probably too much to expect that one woman, occupying one slightly derelict institution, could dismantle and reconstruct a whole society in seven years. It might plausibly be argued that, if Mary Robinson fell short, it was by her own high standards, and that what she failed to achieve was little less than the impossible.
But there were things she could have done better. Much has rightly been made of Mrs Robinson's reaching out to minorities. But there are two significant minorities to which she did not reach out: conservatives and adult males. In my everyday life, particularly in the past two to three years, I have come across a degree of low-key dissent from the Robinson deification process. Some of this comes from conservatives, who feel that Mrs Robinson was not as inclusive a president as was being claimed.
Although I acknowledge this point of view, I do not sympathise with it, believing that Mrs Robinson has presaged a future synthesis between liberal and conservative viewpoints in a post-liberal Ireland. The more serious complaint, I believe, comes from men, who have very good reason for claiming that the Robinson Presidency did not reach out to them. As a champion of Mrs Robinson from early on in her 1990 campaign, I have always responded to such criticism by saying that such an embrace would yet be forthcoming. But the Robinson Presidency has passed without any such gesture. And this represents a considerable failure of grace, nerve and imagination. Moreover, since Mrs Robinson was from the outset appropriated by a particularly virulent strain of misandrist seeking to use her Presidency to denigrate men, the failure was not simply one of omission. By neglecting to reach out to men, Mrs Robinson silently acquiesced in such ugly triumphalism.
This failure, I believe, has to do with misplaced notions of change, progress and enlightenment, and with the crudity of our perceptions about what it is we need to deconstruct in order to move forward. One of the reasons we do not know where to go from here is that we do not know where "here" is.
Lacking any coherent notions of true progress, we have fallen all too readily for shorthand versions of the project to be undertaken: the glib notion of our "male, staid, safe and supine" society, as an Irish Times leading article put it last week.
A glance at the suicide figures will confirm that men are now among the most demoralised and alienated minorities in this society, reflecting, I believe, the fact that we/they are now perhaps the most denigrated and discriminated-against of our definable minorities. And yet our dominant ideological model presents the adult male as oppressive and in control.
In the absence of a more sophisticated analysis, our solutions to misdefined problems are likely to accelerate the disease. And this is precisely the problem with filling the shoes of Mary Robinson. The reason nobody quite seems to fit is that we are beginning to experience the first flushes of an awareness that our self-descriptions are far off the mark.
The unthinking consensus is driving us to select as President another woman, another liberal, another token, another non-politician. There has been a sense, this past week, of the political parties trawling around in search of a one-legged lesbian vegetarian, whom the Irish electorate would be required to accept as their President in order to forestall accusations of intractable bog-savagery.
But behind the scenes of the present circus, there is a growing public awareness that the complexity of our situation will not be addressed by mere gestures or kneejerk reactions. For example, although few would dare to say so openly, I know that many men secretly regard the first female Presidency as an unsuccessful experiment, a factor which will make it extremely difficult for any of the women candidates this time. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to elect a grey, golfing has-been, and start all over again.