MARY ROBINSON visited places, almost daily, where politicians are normally not especially welcome.
Yet the people in these places - estates in which only a handful of residents would consider voting in a general election - prepared for her visits with genuine enthusiasm.
This, they knew, was no politician coming to feign interest in matters about which he or she knew nothing in the hope of getting a handful of votes out of it.
Mary Robinson knew what she was talking about when she visited women's groups, community development projects, travellers projects or any of a myriad other places she went to that no president had ever gone to before.
She knew what she was talking about because long before the Presidency beckoned, she was taking cases, as a constitutional lawyer, on behalf of women, travellers and other disregarded people seeking to establish their entitlements on the basis of their rights.
She did so as one of the best lawyers of her time and at a time when she could have been feathering her nest to that degree of sumptuousness to which perhaps only her profession can aspire.
So when Mary Robinson came to call, she came as one who had won her spurs fighting on behalf of people of no privilege, many of whom had never heard of her at the time.
The thing that was extraordinary about her visits was that in themselves, they became her means of empowering those whose existence the State's power brokers and the State's establishment scarcely noticed.
In housing estates, flat complexes and parish halls all over the Republic, women's groups forge the future. They are not necessarily set up or thought of as women's groups but by and large it is women who make them work and often it is only women who make them work.
BECAUSE their work is to do with such things as creating better communities and better families, with empowering themselves and with giving children a future, it is of no interest to those whose daily preoccupation is with power, privilege and status.
To them, these are women passing the time and no more than that. They have not noticed that these women are at work forging a future and that their work will make it a better future than it would otherwise be.
What Mary Robinson did, simply by being there, was to say this is important, this matters - and because she had proven her commitment long before there was the remotest possibility she would be President, she was believed where many another would not be believed.
The value of the extra strength which that alone gave to women's groups and community development groups was immeasurable in two senses: first in the sense that it cannot, by definition, be measured and second in the sense that, its effects are likely to be profound.
Our society has a habit of seeing, many people as not worth bothering about, people to be contained if they cannot be ignored, but Mary Robinson knew that those who do not ordinarily sit at the top table are as important as those who do and may, in the long run, do more to bring about changes the society needs.
But she was not divisive and that was a notable aspect of her Presidency. She did not set one group up against another. She was welcomed everywhere and by all classes of people and she went everywhere and spoke to all classes of people.
Nobody saw her as a representative of another class - a far cry from how the more distant Presidency cultivated by some of her predecessors was viewed.
She united town and country too and was as likely to be found in a community centre surrounded by green fields as in a posh hotel surrounded by flunkies.
Such relentless visiting could, of course, become a joke - but it didn't. This reporter cannot recall hearing, since the beginning of her Presidency, a single slighting remark about her hectic schedule.
It was as if a honeymoon period began on the first day she was elected and has continued right up to the present.
THAT this applied in even the most politically alienated of communities is one of the great achievements of her Presidency. When this reporter asked a man in one of the inner city areas once why the people didn't vote in elections, he replied: "People around here would think they were insulting themselves if they went out and voted.
Such people do not seem to feel that they have a stake or a welcome in the wider society. For many years we did not care that they were ravaged by drugs and unemployment.
This phenomenon of growing alienation - where the news is irrelevant, where what the newspapers print is irrelevant, where the attitude of the wider society seems to swing between maximum indifference and zero tolerance - seems, to this outsider at any rate, to be very firmly rooted in the many, many areas where it is to be found.
Yet in such areas you will find any number of people who remember with pride and with pleasure the day Mrs Robinson visited, people who scrubbed and painted and cooked and cleaned so that for the short time she was there, to add the strength of her presence to their work, everything would be as right as it could be.
They will be sorry at her departure. That she is going will matter to them. Those whom she did not get to visit or who did not ark in time, will wish they had invited, her earlier.
But - and this is surely a measure of what she has meant - if she visits again whether as a private citizen or the holder of some high office, her visit will be prepared for with the same diligence and she will be met with the same enthusiasm and pride as if she was still the President.