The President, Mrs Robinson, believes that her successor will inherit a presidency with less constraints as a result of her extending the limits during her seven-year term.
"It will be good that there will be a new person with a new vision, a different style and with the full resources of the office which I think now have been fleshed out under the constitutional framework," she said here yesterday in an interview with The Irish Times.
The President was speaking in the penthouse suite of a Manhattan hotel where she spent most of the day receiving the senior UN officials she will be dealing with when she takes up the post of High Commissioner of Human Rights in September.
She said she had seen some of the reactions to her announcement on Thursday that she would be resigning on September 12th. She particularly appreciated the letter from the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in which he referred to the role of her husband Nick and family.
"That's something I have always recognised and it is nice to see it publicly recognised." She said it had been "a very, very difficult decision not to seek a second term and I agonised for months".
She had been aware of "a lot of wishes from people that I should continue". There had been "a great deal of content" in the job of president and it was "an engagement that had a lot of pull for me".
She has a busy schedule of engagements for the last weeks of her presidency after a short break "in our sanctuary in Mayo".
She intends to "enjoy" these engagements - "when you are doing things for the last time, they have a special quality".
Talking about the presidency, she said she had not been interested so much in "enlarging powers" but "I was always very aware that the best way to fulfil the office of president is to stay within the Constitution and perhaps apply a bit of lateral thinking as to how you are relevant to people's lives".
When she took up office "there were a number of what they said were precedents which had no particular basis and I had the equipment as a constitutional lawyer to know that boundaries had been set which weren't really the constitutional framework", she said.
Having "a directly-elected, non-executive presidency should be relevant to people's lives, not in a particular power sense but in a different way," she said.
The President said: "I may have made mistakes, but if I did, they were intended to be . . ." Here she stopped and then went on: "I was the one who wished to be faithful to the Constitution. That was the oath I took".
She said that "inevitably there will be times when there are disagreements" with the government of the day over powers of the presidency, but these "will be resolved in private and will remain private".
Asked about the refusal of the Fianna Fail Labour coalition to allow her co-chair a commission advising on the reform of the United Nations, Mrs Robinson said: "The initial reason was that it would not be compatible with the Constitution. I sought my own advice and it confirmed my own particular view that there would not be that kind of problem.
"But then there was a different reason put forward that it might not be desirable to have a report of an advisory committee with my name as chairman - the Robinson report if you like - which might have matters in it that a future Irish Government would not subscribe to.
"I did not necessarily agree with that viewpoint but it was a valid viewpoint of the government and I accepted it."