A month and a week is a long time in politics. But Mary McAleese isn't in politics. She is the President and so we cannot apply the same rules we would, for example, to a new Taoiseach. With a new Taoiseach we would already have more than one opinion poll to tell us whether or not we like the new boss. We would have statements of policy.

A selection of confrontations in the Dail and opinion pieces declaring the end, or continuation, of the "honeymoon period" would be shaping our perceptions.

Instead we have a figurehead with a far vaguer brief than any TD, someone we reflexively judge by her predecessors, particularly Mary Robinson. Effectively, we are faced with a "compare and contrast" question beloved of secondary school examinations.

But trying to describe a person in terms of their differences and similarities to one other person is a classic example of the unwillingness of the human mind to grasp change, except where - as in the election of Mary Robinson - the change is so radical as to preclude discussion of similarities.

When Mary Robinson became the first woman President it was, quite literally, a defining moment in Irish politics. On the face of it Mary McAleese, as the second woman President, is a version of what has gone before, rather than a definition, but my money is on her defining her time and its issues in a practical, tangible and nationally challenging way.

Mary McAleese knows her own mind. But, more importantly, she is showing signs of knowing the Irish mind.

She does not seem to work hard to avoid being like Mary Robinson. She obviously has so strong a sense of her own individuality that random similarities do not bother her.

Instinct, backed by boundless self-confidence and a genuine ease with people, leads her to do unusual things like knocking on the doors of the lodges around the Aras to get to know her nearest neighbours.

Instinct, backed by boundless self-confidence, undoubtedly led her to the recent decision to take the Eucharist at Christ Church. This has been her first post-electoral flirtation with controversy and is unlikely to have been undertaken by accident.

As was pointed out in this newspaper on Thursday, she chaired the working party that prepared the 1993 Inter-Church Sectarianism document. That document has this to say about her actions:

"Eucharist-sharing is forbidden except in certain special circumstances with episcopal permission." Unequivocal. Not easily forgotten by someone of ardent, and much-mentioned, Catholicism.

Going back to the matter of definitions: there can be no doubt that on this issue Mary McAleese is the living definition of an "informed conscience". Yet she took Communion in a Protestant church.

Shock horror? Not a lot. The Catholic Church made its point. But if the reactions in the letters pages of the newspapers are anything to go by, and we have no other barometer to check, her choice was the one the Irish people wanted her to make.

It moved beyond symbolism to practical demonstration and, in the process, showed the nuanced sophistication that is modern liberal Ireland. People who would accept the church stance managed, simultaneously, to accept that her action was not a slippage from what she stood for, but a positive and dignified move, from a woman taking seriously the oath she swore when she took office.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the issue was her subsequent silence, untypical of a woman who, since her childhood, has had an articulate view on everything and the instinct to share it. In this instance, having done the deed, she retired from the field, leaving the various bishops and theologians to have a go at each other like true Christians at Christmas.

She has had other choices to make. Her first overseas trip was hugely significant. New York, Boston or Washington would have been viable choices, what with the Irish diaspora and a guaranteed positive reaction.

London, perhaps, or one of those "trade" missions to the Far or Near East.

Instead she picked a group of Irish people, part of a demoralised but vital national asset. A group trying to keep the peace in an alien and forgotten desert. As Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Defence Forces she visited our troops in Lebanon.

A degree of informality has so far characterised her behaviour in office. Her security detail has had to deal with something of a culture shock in coping with that informality directly following the strict formality of Mary Robinson.

Attempting to deal with people through an intermediary just wouldn't occur to Mary McAleese. While that makes her more human and accessible, she can never forget that she is the President, not everybody's favourite auntie.

She will have to deal with some desperately formal engagements, when she will be under microscopic scrutiny.

Every nuance, every minute element of protocol will have to be correct. For the next seven years her daily, even hourly, choices will be between instinct and protocol, between the informally human and the appropriately formal.

My own view is that unbending from natural formality is rather easier than constraining the naturally informal, and that Mary McAleese will find some of the necessarily formal part of her task draining. Because the one thing we can be sure of, even after only five weeks, is that now that the artificialities of the election have been removed, Mary McAleese is turbo-charged in the warm instincts department.

When a report of my recent car accident appeared, the President took the time to send me a personal get-well note. Not an official form letter, as a mere acquaintance like myself would have been pleased to receive, seeing it as a kindly registering of one's misfortune. I reread it several times, thinking: "This woman is real. She reacts as a best friend would, even when she isn't your best friend."

She seems to do it to people of all ages, too. Arguably the best example of what this woman is all about comes in the last paragraph of the interview with her in this week's RTE Guide.

The interviewer, Donal O'Donoghue, asked her to sign his niece's autograph book. A signature would have been welcome, a formal greeting acceptable. The new President managed to be brief, intimate and expansive in what she wrote: "To Aine with a big hug."