The President, Mrs Robinson, set herself a gruelling pace during her almost seven years in office. Her many visits abroad were matched by extensive travel throughout the State and Northern Ireland to attend local functions and meet community groups, establishing a remarkable rapport with people from diverse backgrounds.
Sometimes she fulfilled between 25 and 30 official engagements a week, most of which attracted little or no media coverage nationally.
A glance at her diary for a week in June 1991, six months into her Presidency, provides a sample of her schedule, with engagements ranging from the opening of the Shaw Birthplace Museum in Dublin, receiving a parliamentary delegation from the Soviet Union, opening the Tallaght unemployment centre and attending the gala concert of the American concert and opera singer, Jessye Norman, at the RDS.
The close bond she established with the Irish people was reflected in high satisfaction ratings in successive opinion polls. Her impact internationally was also considerable, and an indication of the level of popularity she was about to achieve came after less than a month in office when readers of Britain's Guardian newspaper voted her Woman of 1990, while she came second to the former British prime minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, in BBC Radio's Today programme's Woman of the Year competition.
During her time, Mrs Robinson referred four Bills passed by the Oireachtas to the Supreme Court to test their constitutionality, following consultation with the Council of State.
Although she enjoyed a generally good working relationship with the governments of the day, there were occasional tensions when it was felt she might be moving beyond her proper role as they perceived it.
In an interview with The Irish Times in July, Mrs Robinson 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".
Her first confrontation was with the then Fianna FailPD government in June 1991 when it refused to allow her to deliver the Dimbleby lecture, in honour of the late broadcaster, Richard Dimbleby, following an invitation from the BBC.
The government insisted that it would have been "without precedent" for the President to give the lecture, but the Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, described the action of the government parties as "begrudging and small-minded".
The same month Mrs Robinson paid her first State visit abroad, when she travelled to Portugal with her husband, Mr Nick Robinson. On return, she was warmly received when she visited Fatima mansions in Dublin's inner city to celebrate the first 10 years of its development group. The blending of the international, national and local with a remarkable degree of success was to set the tone for the remainder of her Presidency.
In the autumn of 1991, Mrs Robinson undertook a 10-day tour of the United States, the first visit by a President since Eamon de Valera attended the funeral of John F. Kennedy in 1963. She was described by Senator Ted Kennedy as a "President for all seasons".
She paid her first official visit to Belfast in February 1992, to meet a wide variety of women's and community groups, stressing that the problems of the North did not justify the taking of life.
When the High Court prevented a 14year-old girl from leaving the State to have an abortion, Mrs Robinson chose a meeting of women's groups in Waterford to express her views. Although she had no role relating to any possible constitutional or legislative changes, she hoped 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".
She addressed the Houses of the Oireachtas in July, the only previous such address having been given by Eamon de Valera in 1969 to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Dail. She spoke of emigration and the unemployed, of the changing role of women and the spread of community organisations.
"I know the violence in Northern Ireland grieves every one of you as elected representatives, just as it grieves me," she said. "I know I speak for you in assuring the people of Northern Ireland, of all traditions, of our deep commitment to dialogue and to friendship. It gives me a chance to say how deeply I appreciate the welcome I received when I went there." Her visit to famine-stricken Somalia in October affected her deeply, and an emotional Mrs Robinson called for a "new vision" on the plight of some 20 million people at risk from food shortages in the Horn of Africa.
She visited relief projects run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Concern and GOAL. Her shock and distress, she said, was a response to "feeling the brittle bones of the young children" she had held in her arms. "As a mother I have to react," she said. "I saw a child sucking its mother's breast and there was nothing there."
She spoke of her horror at feeling limp hands, of seeing "children with flies crawling over their eyes, and mothers looking vacantly, helpless and unable to help them".
Her visit to Australia the following month was a public relations triumph, and her impassioned plea for aid to Somalia yielded results when a crowd of 6,000 people held a spontaneous collection in Sydney.
Two weeks before she came, there were plenty of seats available for the public at her lunch at the National Press Club in Canberra. By the time she had been in Australia for 24 hours the Press Club was ringing those who had booked early, asking them if they would like to sell their tickets back to help meet the demand.
In April 1993, Mrs Robinson joined the Duke of Edinburgh and the then British prime minister, Mr John Major, in Warrington at a service of remembrance, reconciliation and commitment to mark the killing of two young boys in an IRA bomb attack the month before. The next month saw visits to Spain, and to the United States where she had a meeting with President Clinton. Emphasising her interest in the Irish who went abroad, she unveiled a statue commemorating the 12 million immigrants to the US who were processed through Ellis Island, 500,000 of them Irish.
She broke new ground when she visited Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace, becoming the first Irish head of state to pay a courtesy call on a British monarch. She later said that it would give her pleasure to welcome the queen to the Republic.
In June, her decision to shake hands with the president of Sinn Fein, Mr Gerry Adams, during a visit to west Belfast, generated tension between herself and the FF-Labour government, not least the Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring. There was talk of a diplomatic rift between Dublin and London. But the government seemed intent on avoiding a public confrontation with the President, and the then Taoiseach, Mr Albert Reynolds, though he was also reputed to be not too pleased about it, resisted British pressure to ask her to abandon her visit. She was publicly criticised by Mr John Bruton, who said that she should not have met someone the Taoiseach or the Tanaiste would be unwilling to meet.
As the controversy gathered momentum, the government and Aras an Uachtarain moved to end it, with both sides insisting that there was no rift between them. An opinion poll in The Irish Times showed 76 per cent of respondents supporting the President.
In September 1993, Mrs Robinson took off on a round-the-world trip, involving State visits to New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. She took part in celebrating the granting of voting rights to women during the centenary of Women's Suffrage Movement in New Zealand. In India, apart from the State functions in New Delhi, she met Mother Teresa in Calcutta, visited the Taj Mahal and fulfilled a personal ambition of visiting the ashram of Mahatma Gandhi.
In November, Mrs Robinson was the first President to attend an ecumenical service in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, to remember the thousands of Irish people who lost their lives in the first World War.
In December, on the advice of the Government, she had to turn down an invitation to co-chair a high-powered international group set up to advise on the role of the United Nations over the next 50 years. The Government's legal advice indicated that since there was a political or policy aspect to the UN review committee, taking her constitutional role into consideration, it would be inappropriate for her to take on this task. However, it was to emerge that Mrs Robinson had come up with independent legal advice questioning the decision.
Side-by-side with her national and international commitments, she continued her visits to communities and groups throughout the State as well as a tour of the prisons. In May 1994, she visited Wheatfield, in Dublin, describing her tour as an attempt to "be in touch" with the staff and inmates.
During a visit to Zimbabwe in October, she made a bedside visit to a dying AIDS patient who had requested to see the Irish Head of State.
In February 1995, Mrs Robinson made her second address as President to a joint session of the Dail and Seanad, on one of the strongest themes of her Presidency both at home and while addressing the Irish community in far off parts of the globe, that of "cherishing the Irish diaspora".
In her special address to the Oireachtas said that although emigration from Ireland had been experienced over the centuries as a chronicle of sorrow and regret, it was also one of contribution and adaptation to new host societies. "We cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past," she added.
There was reported to be annoyance within the Rainbow government, particularly from Mr Spring, when, in an interview with The Irish Times, she expressed concern about the "genuine fears" of unionists that the Framework Document, drawn up as part of the peace process, could be seen to "undermine" their sense of identity. The government was understood to believe that the remarks were "out of bounds" for a President.
In April, a number of controversies dogged a two-week tour of Latin America, with the President blaming the "very real constraints" on her activities. On her failure to meet the Dominican nuns in a shanty town in Argentina, she said she would have done so if it were possible. October saw her embark on a four-day tour of Rwanda, Zaire and Uganda, a follow-up to a fact-finding mission a year earlier. Visiting refugee camps in Goma, she said that while their physical condition had improved, the underlying problems remained.
The frenetic pace continued throughout last year. In March, she visited South Africa and travelled to Robin island, the former leper colony, military base and political prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years. In May, she was in Paris for L'Imaginaire Irlandais, the six-month Irish cultural festival, stressing that she wanted the French to become familiar with the "cultural renaissance" which had taken place in Ireland in recent years.
In April, she paid a four-day official visit to Britain, where she again met the queen, Prince Charles and Mr John Major, and in June she went to the US, where she pleaded "to save the United Nations as we have it, with all its faults, from the death of a thousand cuts".
All the time there was growing speculation that Mrs Robinson had ambitions to succeed Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General of the United Nations, with strong media support for her in Britain and America. This was not to be, and Mrs Robinson insisted that her focus was on completing her presidential term.
The speculation about the President's future gathered momentum in the early part of this year when it was obvious that she would soon have to indicate if she was interested in a second term. Then in March she announced that with "great reluctance" she had decided not to seek a second term. "I believe I have made my contribution," she said.
The announcement that she was to be the next United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was made in June.
Mrs Robinson has continued to fulfil a busy programme of engagements, including her last official visit as Head of State to her home town of Ballina, Co Mayo, last month, to attend the All-Ireland Fleadh.
She has continued to stimulate debate by touching sensitive issues, as for instance, when she recently asked the audience at the Merriman Summer School in Co Clare to consider their reaction to the proposition that Ireland rejoin the Commonwealth.
Stressing that she was not posing the question as a political issue, but in the context of Irish people's continuing insecurity about their identity, she added: "I think it is a good way of assessing the insecurities that we still have after 75 years - the lack of a firm sense of ourselves, so that we cannot address that question without a great deal of hesitation and emotion and conflicting views and no real clear lines of direction."
Mrs Robinson believes that her successor will inherit a Presidency with less constraints as a result of her extending the conventional limits during her term. She told The Irish Times shortly after the announcement of her new appointment as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: "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."
See also page 14