No politician in the history of the State has commanded such respect and popularity

LISTENING to the tributes paid to her by all parties yesterday, Mary Robinson could have been forgiven a wry smile. Was this the woman of whom John Browne TD hinted that if she were elected President there might be abortion referral clinics in Aras an Uachtarain?

Was this the woman of whom, in remarks which he later regretted and apologised for, Padraig Flynn claimed that she "has to have new clothes and her new look and her new hairdo, and she has the new interest in family, being a mother and all that kind of thing. But none of us, you know, none of us who knew Mary Robinson very well in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother"?

The woman who, when she published her first contraception Bill in the 1960s, had her letterbox filled with used condoms? And if it was, what had happened to her?.

The most unlikely aspect of Mary Robinson's Presidency has been 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. At the time of her election, nothing seemed less likely than the idea that this formidable, often haughty campaigner, could become a broadly accepted national symbol.

Yet no politician in the history of the State arguably, no Irish politician since Charles Stewart Parnell at his height in the 1880s - has commanded such wide respect. Even the most potent figures in modern Irish political history - Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins - also created potent animosities. Yet Mary Robinson has achieved approval ratings of over 90 per cent even in the most controversial periods of her Presidency, such as the immediate aftermath of her famous handshake with Gerry Adams in west Belfast before the IRA declared its ceasefire.

She came to the Presidency, after all, at the end of a decade in which the Irish State had been more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War and its aftermath. The 1983 abortion referendum, in which she played a leading part, has been described with only minor exaggeration as, "the second partitioning of Ireland". And in that campaign, moreover, she was emphatically on the losing side.

And it is not as if the issue ceased to be a live one. On the contrary, it has remained on the political agenda all through her Presidency. Mrs Robinson herself as President, intervened in the most dramatic way in the debate on the infamous X case in February 1992, drawing the wrath of anti abortion campaigners for her hope that "we have the courage, which we have not always had, to face up to and look squarely and to say this is a problem we have got to resolve".

By any normal criteria, at least half the population should be glad to see the back of Mary Robinson. Instead, she now seems what ordinary politicians never are irreplaceable.

She has been so popular, though, because she has combined qualities that don't often go together - the intellectual toughness of a determined fighter with the dignity and warmth of a woman who has obviously learned a great deal from the people she has met through her office.

The self assurance, bordering at times on arrogance, has always been there. Not many 25 year olds, barely out of student life, decide, as she did, to run for the Seanad, particularly when they have no political party putting them up to it. Few politicians in an overwhelmingly Catholic country will take on the Hierarchy on the finer points of canon law, as she did in public debates with the Irish bishops.

Few potential parliamentary candidates will fail to organise their supporters for a selection convention because they assume that the delegates will naturally select the obviously outstanding candidate, as she did to her cost when a member of the Labour Party in 1977.

When she told Hot Press magazine during the Presidential election campaign that "I'll be able to look Charlie Haughey [then Taoiseach] in the eye and tell him to aback off because I have been directly elected by the people and he hasn't", she betrayed the kind of pride that the electorate usually makes sure is followed by a fall.

Yet that pride; which forced her to follow a course entirely of her own devising, is crucial to her present standing, both at home and abroad. It is what has made her Presidency work so extraordinarily well, in spite of all its apparent handicaps. Her rigorous independence of mind, usually a recipe for political disaster, has allowed her to give a real meaning to the notion of a figurehead "above politics".

She has been, as President, above politics, not in the bland monarchical sense of someone who stands aside from all controversial - and therefore all important - matters, but in the much more potent sense of someone who has transcended politics.

To transcend something, you have to be deeply involved in it in the first place. What Mary Robinson has managed to do is to given politics a meaning beyond the daily compromise and power play of party contest.

In retrospect, what gives her access to the extraordinary degree of national and international regard she now enjoys is something that can go almost unnoticed amid the myriad causes she has espoused.

What she has articulated above all is, paradoxically, a profound dissatisfaction with the nature of traditional democratic institutions.

This, at a time when democratic politics is at a low ebb and its leaders internationally are held in low esteem, is perhaps her most valuable asset.

For although she was, as a candidate for the Presidency, invented by Dick Spring, it is worth remembering that as long ago as 1979 she was saying things like "More power will have to be devolved among the people, involving everyone in all the different spheres."

This in turn helps to explain the immediacy and the effectiveness of her Presidency. As President she has extended democracy not by in any way undermining the existing institutions of parliament, but by reaching out to those whose presence had not been recognised those institutions.

She has made herself head of a State that has no formal, institutional existence - a State that includes the Irish diaspora in the US, Britain and around the world, that includes the grief of Northern Ireland, not through a territorial claim but through simple human solidarity, and that incorporates the sections of society previously excluded from the polity - travellers, people with disabilities, gay men and lesbians, the unemployed, and, above all, women's groups.

THIS idea of moving beyond the formal State has real meaning beyond the shores of Ireland. She has articulated, especially in relation to the Rwandan holocaust the basic but revolutionary idea that countries can no longer say that how they treat their inhabitants is solely their own business".

She has proposed a third basic principle for the UN to add to those of national sovereignty and international security - "human security". It means, in effect, recognising that the universal human rights declared by the UN must no longer be dependent solely on the will of their governments to respect them.

What is surprising is not that successive Irish governments attempted to place limits on her by stopping her from giving the BBC's Dimbleby Lecture in 1991 for from co chairing the international advisory group on the future of the United Nations in 1993 - but that they have tried it so seldom and so ineffectively.

For what she has done is nothing less than the activation of a previously dormant fourth force in the Irish political system, giving the Presidency a presence almost as weighty as the courts, the houses of parliament and the government itself.

As she has done, so, she also seemed to be on a journey of her own. If she has changed the Presidency, the Presidency has also changed her. The severe self confidence of the human rights lawyer of the 1970s has given way to a different and deeper kind of dignity. The reserve remains but she uses it to show respect for the people she visits rather than to intimidate them.

The genuine warmth she has brought to small communities everywhere, the very undiplomatic outrage she brought to UN headquarters in New York after her visit to a Somalia in 1992, the compassion that has marked her encounters of the many victims of discrimination and violence that she has met, have all revealed an emotional reservoir as deep as her intellectual capacities.

In a sense, what she has done as President, and may go on to do in the UN, is to draw attention to the fact that the State also exists as a diverse society, in all the voluntary associations, all the networks of connection, all the invisible ties of history and memory that bind together a community that is as much imagined as real, but no less powerful for being so.

She has not seized power but forced a recognition of where power is supposed to lie in a democracy with the people. Because of this, the people could hardly dislike her without disliking themselves.