She wore a lace shawl on her head and shoulders when she met the Pope for a 30-minute audience, during which she respectfully but forcefully opined that the Catholic Church should consider the ordination of women. Afterwards, she skipped over for a chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury, also in Rome.

She spent 45 minutes with President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and did not shy away from the delicate topic of human rights in his fledgling democracy.

She has met President Bill Clinton three times, lunched with the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, and the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, addressed both houses of Australia's parliament, and stood beside Queen Elizabeth and King Albert as the three unveiled a memorial in Belgium to the Irish dead of the first World War.

In Amman for the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan, her stance beside Mr Clinton, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and virtually every other leader of the modern world never betrayed the fact that, only hours before, her aides had had a serious tete-a-tete with the country's leaders who, though they had invited her, now informed the presidential party that Mrs McAleese would have to huddle with the other women outside, as women were not allowed at the funeral, according to Islamic laws.

Woman or not, the Jordanians were informed, the President of Ireland was not going to be separated from other heads of state. (They relented, and Queen Beatrice of the Netherlands also then attended, bringing the female heads of state quorum to two, with Mrs McAleese the only elected woman.)

But ask her about the significant moments of her trips abroad - there have been 10 visits so far, to the US, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Singapore, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Honduras and Mexico - and you will hear nothing of these moments. You will not hear of the substantive discussions with world leaders or the prestigious lectures delivered at universities.

Rather, you will hear about the 600 Irish soldiers stationed in Lebanon, so moved by her visit and the trouble she took to undertake the difficult journey that they, and she, wept. You will hear about her meeting with Australian descendants of orphan girls shipped from Ireland in the 19th century to be married off against their will. You will hear about a group of Honduran women in a remote village who are struggling for self-sufficiency by rebuilding their homes with cement blocks they create with their own hands.

You will, in other words, hear a series of vignettes about the importance of iconography made flesh, about the impact that one woman trucking around a notion of "belief" (in the sense of its Greek root, "to believe", meaning "to give one's heart to") can have.

If there is, to date, an over-arching theme to her Presidency, an articulated and centralised vision, it remains opaque. Rather than a reflection of an agenda left unattended, this may be Mary McAleese's intentional cosmology. This is no feckless President. It is just that soundbites, even those that might help to define or even clarify her, are unentertaining in her view.

A tapestry, however, is evident from a review of several of the major addresses she has given around the world since her election. She is a strong speaker; the instrument of her emergence, in private talks and in public, is poetry and a spiritual framework that informs nearly all her action and thought. Economic growth is emphasised in one breath, the importance of spiritual values in the next.

She is deeply religious, but hers is a spacious religiosity that is as far from some of the more necrotic aspects of the Catholic Church as one can imagine. She liberally quotes John Hewitt, the Belfast-born atheist. She is fascinated by the novelist Toni Morrison, and has given away 11 copies of Anam Cara, the bestseller by the unconventional theologian John O'Donahue.

She is suspicious if you don't offer some disagreement during discourse. She wonders what you are withholding, what is festering.

On her latest trip abroad this week, I met her delegation in Miami and travelled with them through Honduras and Mexico for eight days. Like many reporters who have covered her visits abroad, I was persuaded by her intellect. Her Latin American audiences were additionally startled by her fluent Spanish.

The cold-eyed academic professor yields to the big sister who is the oldest of nine siblings. At a lunch in Oaxaca, Mexico, observing that I was struggling to find an elegant method of unshrouding a leaf-encased tamale, she grabbed a knife and fork and began cutting up my food, demonstrating how it's done.

"There!" she said when finished.

The book on Mrs McAleese, during a contentious election, was that she was a strident nationalist in sheep's clothing, one who perhaps even harboured support for violence, as her family had experienced terrible sectarian acts during her childhood.

There are, indeed, wounds from that childhood. But they are admitted wounds, not the unadmitted ones the poet Emily Dickinson refers to . . . "A not admitting of the wound/until it grew so wide/That all my life had entered it/And there were troughs beside."

In the admitting of those wounds, Mrs McAleese is seeking to make the idea of reconciliation more than a campaign slogan.

There may still be an absence of theme, but at this stage of her Presidency, such commentary may be mere quibbling. This Presidency is still young. Themes will emerge, designed or evolved. If themes are not more clearly defined, this could be a Presidency hampered by a tantalising underachievement.

More likely, however, it will be more than a merely good or acceptable Presidency. It could become a great Presidency.