THE sun shone on Manchester on Saturday morning. Ia Shambles Square the hustle and bustle of shoppers bore out the defiant message hanging over the bomb damaged building. "Open as Usual". And a fiddler filled the air with the strains of traditional Irish music.
Outside the Town Hall, the Tricolour enjoyed parity of esteem with the Union Jack. Even the leftover banners from Euro 96 were green and orange with a splattering of white.
But there was no need to look for symbolism here. For the "Irishness" of Manchester is one of the first things to strike the visitor the Irish taxi driver at Piccadilly Station, the Armagh woman giving directions at a street corner, the three lads (who'd enjoyed a drink or three already) seeking direction to O'Shea's pub.
The President, Mrs Robinson, had journeyed here first and foremost to demonstrate Irish "friendship and solidarity" with the people of this bomb damaged city. But she also wanted to recall the welcome she'd enjoyed when opening the Irish Heritage Centre here last March, and "that sense of Irish integration."
It was all around her as a succession of "Irish" councillors waited to be introduced at the civic reception, and again when she met the combined forces of the Manchester and Dublin Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
In the immediate, angry aftermath of the bomb attack in which the IRA deployed the largest device ever used in Britain, and more than 200 people were injured there were calls for a City of London style "ring of steel" to be thrown around the centre of Manchester.
But "Irish" civic leaders and others heavily involved in the plans already under way for the reconstruction of the city centre seem to have come round to the view that such a move would grant the republicans a victory.
The determination to deny them that is evidenced by the attitude of the government and local council, traders and public alike. The President's visit on Saturday coincided with the reopening of some 50 shops in part of the devastated Arndale Centre. Normally about 700,000 people visit the centre every week.
And the throngs on Saturday showed the public's resolve to resume normal life. In St Anne's Square, the street entertainers were in their usual pitch, while Costa Coffee Boutique served customers in a marquee surrounded by pot plants.
Newspaper editorials have inevitably invoked memories of the Blitz to describe the community reaction, although one colleague likened Saturday morning's scene to Beirut. People sat in the sunshine, reading papers and sipping coffee, to the accompanying sounds of destruction and reconstruction all around them.
The night before, some 500 people had attended a debate on the city's future organised by the Manchester Evening News in conjunction with other local media. And if local people are excited at the prospect of rebuilding a city centre fit for the new millennium, Mr Michael Heseltine has assured them there is no less excitement in London.
The government has already diverted an additional £21 million from European structural funds to help with rebuilding costs, which are expected to run to some £500 million. An international design competition has already been launched, and a government appointed "City Pride" task force will lead the rebuilding programme, which has been set an ambitious three year deadline.
It can hardly, of course, be a tale of unalloyed joy. There have been many casualties of the IRA bombing, not least among some 300 small shopkeepers and stall holders, many of them uninsured. For some of them, ruin lies amid the wreckage of Manchester's Corn Exchange.
The President met some of them on Saturday. And again she found that "sense of Irish integration". Many of those small traders, like many of the others who mercifully (and still amazingly) escaped death that Saturday three weeks before were of Irish background.
Mrs Robinson was withering in her condemnation of this attack on a civilian population. It was not done "in the name of any Irishness I represent as President of Ireland," she declared.
But perhaps just as eloquent in its way was her tribute to the Lord Mayor and other civic leaders who, on the day of the bombing, found time to go to the Irish Heritage Centre to show their solidarity with their Irish fellow citizens, and to ensure there would be no backlash.