SOON after Mary Robinson was elected President she gave an interview to a religious affairs programme on BBC Radio in Belfast. After a few questions the interviewer could be heard gathering himself to ask what he thought the hard one.
"And would you," he said, "describe yourself as a feminist?" - in the humorously incredulous tone of one inquiring as to whether the interviewee was willing to admit to an eccentricity.
"Yes," she said, simply.
She didn't amplify. She didn't apologise. She just took the word for the generally descriptive word it is, and calmly possessed it. You could say she purged the word, and started it off anew.
The point, after all, of her election was not that she is a woman - Mrs Thatcher is a woman - but that she is a feminist. This means, at the least, a woman consciously alert to gender based discrimination, and where this operates against women, consciously committed to bringing about redress.
It means a woman interested in human and civil rights for those who are denied them - often enough, everywhere on the planet, women.
In that sense, Mrs Robinson's next area of endeavour will follow on not just from the Presidency but from her work before the Presidency, where in formal constitutional cases and in informal help and advice she moved Irish women towards a footing of equality on the basis of the law. It was what she had done for women, and not her being herself a woman, that choked me with tears back then, seven years ago, when she took office.
When I saw her on television from Dublin Castle, being treated at the inauguration of her Presidency with all the respect and honour this State can command, it was for that the tears came rolling down. Not that she was a woman, but that after all the gibes and the sneers and the setbacks, she was a "women's libber" a woman who deliberately had challenged the status quo.
If she had never been President, she still, as a lawyer, made a huge difference to Irish women. So much so that many activists deplored her running for the office.
If she gets in she'll be lost to us, they said, just as Irish people are saying today that she'll be lost to Ireland. But she simply converted one role into a broader one. She could not, from Aras an Uachtarain, do the specific things for women that she had done before. She did something different, and even more valuable. She lent her prestige to the womanly. She enormously broadened the standing of womanliness in her years as President.
She did this in two ways. One was by the valuation she placed on everything local and domestic and home made and un selfimportant, in utter contrast to the values of existing establishments. The other was in the role she gave to feeling.
From the very beginning she used her office as a source of comfort to individuals and as a means of re ordering the agenda of what and who is important in this society or unimportant. She went on Nodhlag na mBan - Women's Christmas - to Mass with women prisoners. That was soon after her inauguration. Another Christmas - Christmas Eve, if I remember correctly - she went to Donegal to stand with the families of the missing fishermen. She was represented at the funeral of Brigid McCole and she had the family with her for Mrs McCole's Month's Mind.
I REMEMBER that when she was in Carrick on Shannon she called to the family of the girl who was murdered. She made contact with the shocked - the flooded out householders in Galway, for instance - and she made innumerable private visits to hospitals, and to campsites, and to homes where there was unhappiness.
She was asserting, on our behalf, the importance of the emotions. She was saying that the State can be emotional too. She went as us and as his family to the Mass, in the Morning Star Hostel, for the family less homeless man found dead on wasteground in winter. She had a genius for knowing where we would wish her to be.
When she broke down, in Somalia, and said that as a mother, her inner sense of justice revolted at what she saw, she was expanding the parameters of what heads of state may say in public. When she broke down again - the only other time - and said nothing, but just turned away - when on a visit to Cork, news of the end of the IRA ceasefire was passed to her, she was expressing our speechless pain, too.
THE ideal of the stiff upper lip has dominated for centuries, as if at the level of diplomats and statesmen and great public representatives the heart had been transcended by a special heartless super race of people who are all control, all mind. She gave the lie to that lie.
It was all the more touching that she showed her feelings because she is, in so many ways, a reserved and formal woman. She actually didn't suit, by temperament and bearing, the cheerful, chaotic style, of many of the little events she chose to attend. Any backslapping politicians would have been better at the required bonhomie.
It was always clear that she was there consciously, and on principle. The principle was an assertion of inclusiveness the need for, which could not have been so vivid to a man, however sympathetic, as it is to a woman. She stood with the tea and sandwich makers so as to make a statement, about the value of the domestic gifts - not because she herself has any apparent empathy with the domestic. And when she cried, we knew her tears were honest.
She wouldn't know how to do I'm overcome that you've given me an Oscar tears. She used the word "love" a lot, and was not ashamed her palpable personal shyness was a guarantee of the word's meaning. May our feminist, President take that care for small people and large feelings into a wider arena - may there be a global destination for her Ireland forged feminism.