Symbol Of The New Ireland: MARY ROBINSON

When Mary Robinson was a young girl just out of convent school, her family sent her off to Paris for a year of finishing school. It was there, as an impressionable 17-year-old, that she came to an important realization about her native Ireland. Its historic insularity did not serve to protect its culture, but instead helped keep it in the shadow of the English. "A country like France had such a sense of itself that it could never be diluted," she recalls. "You don't homogenize a culture, you enrich it by diversity of contacts." Only by becoming fully a part of Europe, by broadening its contacts rather than restricting them, could Ireland come into its own. "My view then and now is that there were psychological and cultural reasons why Ireland could be liberated by Europe, allowed to refine its identity within the context of cultural diversity."

Robinson went on to become one of Ireland's foremost international lawyers and a politician known for her secular sophistication. Now as the nation's first woman President, she has become a symbol of its European aspirations, as reflected in its resounding vote of approval last week for the Maastricht treaty and integration into the new European Union. But most important, given the largely ceremonial nature of her office, she has become a symbol of what made that vote possible: Ireland's renewed self-confidence and national pride.

It is midday in Phoenix Park, Dublin, site of the President's house, or Aras an Uachtarain, as the Irish call it. A group of 40 people, most of them fit, elderly, dressed in practical tweeds, have gathered in a gracious 19th century drawing room filled with pale sunlight. They are members of the National Association of Tenants' Organizations, a volunteer group, and have been invited by Robinson for a tour and tea. After a few minutes, a tall, handsome woman, dressed in a bright suit that could be described as benign dress for success, enters and, without fanfare, begins her talk.

She is a natural. Speaking in a vibrant alto voice, she recalls the mansion's past, the various additions made through the centuries, some of them amusingly botched. Seamlessly, she shifts to her family's life within its walls, how her three children enjoy biking through Phoenix Park, how she came to put a light in the family kitchen window -- the Irish symbolic welcome home to those who have emigrated. When the session is over and the President has slipped away as quietly as she arrived, everyone is beaming. A white-haired lady sighs with satisfaction and breathes, "Isn't she someone to be proud of?"

This is a good-news story. There aren't very many of them in politics these days, but the saga of Mary Robinson is the real thing. Irish public life is the stuff of tragedy or bad jokes. The country is haunted by the division between north and south, by the grim persistence of terrorism, by divisive personal issues such as birth control and abortion, and by recurrent scandals. Charles Haughey, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) for nine of the past 13 years, was thrown out of office in January when one scandal too many surfaced.