In a Dublin hotel this week, 24 hours after her surprise presidential nomination, Mary McAleese tried hard not to compare herself too much with Mary Robinson. The most obvious contrast is in their backgrounds.
Being a Northerner is profoundly important to McAleese. Her parents came from poor, rural backgrounds and were first-generation city people in Belfast. "I am from a working-class background, which at some stage, by Belfast standards, became middleclass, when my father bought a pub and moved up from being a barman to being a publican. I watched civil war effectively break out on my doorstep at the age of 18."
Even before that she had grown up in a "conflict community" where "my sense of who I was as a person was also shaped by the stereotypes and pigeonholing of people as Catholic, as nationalist. That's one of the reasons why all my life I have resisted very strongly all attempts to place me into other people's handy and sometimes rather lazy labels and pigeonholes."
The peace process comes up frequently in her answers. "We're currently sitting on the cusp of probably the most significant breakthrough in relation to Northern Ireland in the last 70-80 years," she says.
However, she warns that agreed political arrangements will not "in themselves mend lives, they won't make friends of people. I think the best they can hope to do is to set the scene in which people will begin to lessen their suspicions and their fearfulness and begin to allow themselves to build friendships across the somewhat bitter divides."
Her nationalism is of the undogmatic kind. "At its core I am an Irishwoman - simple as that - I love this entire island." When asked if she expects to see a united Ireland in her lifetime, she says she does not have the gift of prophecy.
"What I would like to see is complete peace reigning in Ireland and the dismantling of the language of conflict, the language of mutual contempt."
She told the Fianna Fail meeting this week of her dream that she would be able to continue Mrs Robinson's work in reaching out to the North, and starting over the next seven years the "enormous job" of "reconciling people to each other."
Much of that reaching out will be to Protestants. She says her closest friends are Northern Protestants. She stresses her campaigning work against sectarianism, and her attempt to "understand the sectarian baggage that all of us carry with us". Some years ago she made a conscious decision "to try to listen to the other side, to what unionists were saying", firstly to friends and colleagues, and then to the "more raucous and strident voices" outside her immediate experience.
She became very conscious that each side had "grown up with two entirely different versions of history. We both ended up with a strong sense of our own victimhood, a strong sense that we were martyrs to each other. We have both stood in a kind of perpetual stand-off waiting for the other to apologise."
She recognises that there are unionists - although she believes they are a decreasing number - who respond in an "angry and disrespectful and contemptuous way" to Catholics like her who confidently assert their views and move into professional areas that are seen as traditionally unionist.
She expresses her admiration for the former loyalist paramilitaries of the UDP and the PUP. "The most refreshing thing about them is their absolutely rigorous determination not to talk the language of sectarianism."
In the presidential election, people will be less interested in the North than in her views as someone strongly identified in the Southern mind with the Catholic Church, on the socio-sexual controversies of the past 20 years.
She stresses that although Catholicism is her personal "faith system", if she becomes president her religion would become a purely private matter. Her role then would be to "bring a sense of respect and value to every single person in Ireland". She would "show no favouritism, have no favourites. Essentially my religion would fade into the background simply as a matter of private belief".
When asked for her reaction to the perception that she is the thinking person's Dana, she responds sharply. "Some of these arguments get desperately close to saying that Ireland is such a pluralist society that the idea of having a member of a religious denomination in a position like the Presidency is unthinkable."
PEOPLE who portray her as the standard-bearer of the traditional Catholic right "would probably do well to consider how easy, how lazy, how trite, how redundant it is in Ireland of 1997 to characterise anybody in those kinds of simplistic and inaccurate labels". She welcomes change in the "absolutely certainty that Irish people are embracing the modern world and are able to bridge the movement between tradition and change".
However, she warns that any suggestion that her religious beliefs should "impede" her from going for the job of president comes close to "a sort of secular bigotry" reminiscent of the kind so long condemned in the North.
She is equally scathing of any implication that she might use the Presidency to engage in some kind of religious crusade. She emphasises her extensive knowledge and huge admiration for the Constitution, and goes on: "It is simply not the place for a crusade of any shape or distinction, religious or irreligious, liberal or conservative, and anyone who attempted to use the Presidency for that purpose would be a president who I believe would be impeachable."
She declines to be drawn on the individual controversies. It is not for her to say whether or not she would like to see another abortion referendum: "That is entirely a matter for the people and the government."
She calls the narrow referendum vote in favour of introducing divorce "a sign of the times" but has no view on it one way or the other. "It wasn't a subject that exercised me greatly".
She campaigned with Senator David Norris for homosexual law reform, "a subject very dear to my heart" and "a fundamental human right".
Asked about her views on the Pope's 1969 encyclical against artificial contraception, she says such an issue is "utterly, absolutely irrelevant to the issue of the Presidency."
Prof McAleese sees three key elements in the Presidency. Firstly, there is the president's "very sacred but very narrow remit" in relation to legislation. His or her simple role is to "ensure that when laws are promulgated they are consistent with the wishes of the people as expressed in the Constitution".
In this area she strongly emphasises her own strengths as a constitutional lawyer, someone who "understands very concisely" the "narrow path" the president has to tread. Ireland has never had a constitutional crisis in recent decades because of the presence at the head of the nation of the "constitutional giant" Cearbhaill O Dalaigh; the "consummate parliamentarian Patrick Hillery; and the "very eminent lawyer" Mary Robinson.
The second element, which she hopes to continue, was Mr Robinson's dramatically successful endeavour to bring the "caring, reaching-out side" of the Presidency close to the people.
The third is the Presidency's ambassadorial role. "The image of the person who is president portrays something very profound about Ireland," says McAleese. The image she hopes to portray will be of "a very dynamic Ireland, very energetic, modern, fresh, a young country growing in confidence, in education, in self-understanding, and growing more comfortable in its complexity and diversity."