"What you are dealing with is a new personality in the job," says the President, Mrs McAleese, fending off implicit comparisons with the work rate of her predecessor, Mary Robinson. "You will expect that new personality is going to relate in very different ways. It's not that one way is right or wrong but rather these ways are very different".

Mrs McAleese is very different indeed to her immediate predecessor. Speaking at length for the first time since she entered Aras an Uachtarain just over 100 days ago, she agrees to change the compilation of her public diary, which has drawn her into controversy, confirms that she has dispensed with the "starchy protocol" of the office, and defends her casual mode of dress. She asserts, quite trenchantly, her right to wear trousers on State occasions.

She also outlined her plans to hold public pageants in Aras an Uachtarain on March 17th and July 12th to commemorate, in a mixed gathering of nationalists and unionists, the two big holidays on the island of Ireland.

Sitting in her private library rather than the State rooms, Mrs McAleese denied that it was unprecedented for a President to issue a direct personal rebuttal to an article written by one journalist. She had done so, once before, when Ireland on Sunday reported that she had personally taken her son to hospital.

She admitted she was "very annoyed indeed" by the article a week ago by Nell McCafferty in the Sunday Tribune alleging that her public engagements were few and far between, more like Paddy Hillery's than Mary Robinson's, in her first 100 days.

"There is a certain amount of opinionating and analysing which anybody in public life has to take, but I think what you must not take is pure invention. Where that invention casts people in a bad light, I think it is important to answer it. Above all people, the President should have a great respect for truth and the integrity and professionalism of other people."

She was "appalled at the implications for Paddy Hillery", she says. "I thought that this was insulting and unnecessary but also I knew that it did not stack up."

The President said she has worked very hard, 15-hour days, since she came to office. She has travelled to Galway, the Aran Islands, Roscommon, Mayo, Cork, Meath, Wicklow, the Lebanon, and York and Leeds in the UK. She has been to Northern Ireland twice.

There hadn't been an hour, she says, "when I have not been trying to engage in what the President should do". She pointed to her involvement, in or out of the Aras, with groups or individuals, whether it is bringing in Cian O Tighearnaigh of the ISPCC, Olive Braiden of the Rape Crisis Centre or the Garda Commissioner to talk about their work.

"For a journalist to arrive up on a Thursday, 10 minutes late for a cup of tea I was having with the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, to seek admission to it . . . It was a cup of tea. There were no cameramen present. We simply thought it was quite sensible, and the journalist in question accepted it would not make sense for her to come in.

"Then to ring at 5 o'clock on a Friday looking for the week's diary and then for the story to appear purporting to be a record of my first 100 days in office, based on a diary which only shows those events to which the press are invited, struck me as extraordinarily unfair for a whole lot of reasons. It was about as wrong a story as I have ever read," Mrs McAleese concluded.

Asserting that she would be the first person if there was criticism of her to stand up "white flag in hands and hands up", she repeated that the report was untrue. Furthermore, she was moving house within the Aras that week - from Mrs Robinson's quarters above the State rooms to the house on the west wing formerly inhabited by the Hillerys and de Valeras - and it seemed a good week to concentrate her engagements in Dublin.

The interview moved to the distinction between Mrs McAleese's public diary and what she has called her private diaries. Mrs Robinson's public diary, for example, listed private meetings with groups which the media could not attend. But the public had the right to know that their Head of State was meeting, say, the ISPCC.

"It is actually a nonsense to suggest that every single thing which Mary Robinson did appeared in that diary," Mrs McAleese responded. "There is a realm of work that you do that if you put it up on the machine, the whole country would be laughing at you. Rightly or wrongly, the judgment call was taken when I came into office that the immediate thing to let the media know was those events to which they were invited."

She then conceded that if people wanted to know the names of people who visited the Aras she had no problem with that at all. But there would be groups who would come who would be very sensitive about it, and the fact that it might go on a public diary and be known about would inhibit them coming at all.

"I was elected by the people of Ireland and, in electing me, I sincerely hope that they trust my judgment, and I have to be able to make a judgment about those kinds of things. Is there a time when publicity might be a good and when it might be a bad thing? In some of the instances at the moment, in the work that we are doing, it is just so dainty, so delicate. There will come a day when we will be glad to say what we are doing but not right now."

GK: I am not looking at your diary in publicity terms. You are the public Head of State and people like to know all they can about you. You are entitled to a private life. But are you not doing yourself a disservice by only listing media events on your public diary?

MM: We are not saying we won't because we haven't done it. We can do it from tomorrow. It is not the end of the world. We are more than happy to do it. I think you are probably right about that.

GK: You are telling people that you are doing two things a day. Mary Robinson was doing five. You don't want the media but you are meeting people in your private diary on behalf of the Irish people.

MM: You are absolutely right. This is where we have to put our hands up and say . . . It wasn't a conscious decision to keep things from people. It was a matter of getting information out to the media. You are quite right. The more people know the better.

Mrs McAleese then addressed the private comments by a number of ambassadors about the informality of her Presidency, the dispensing of old protocols and the casualness of the office. Had she altered the formalities?

"This comes from a thing I said to my children the day we moved in here. I said to them, `This is a republic and I was elected first citizen of the Republic but a first citizen among equals. Now how do we show this equality?' "

From the inauguration, she says, she has taken a view that part and parcel of what we are as a people, what is so engaging about us as a people, is short lines of communication, a warmth, a hospitality, an immediacy. So she wanted to create a situation where people would feel immediately welcome. They wouldn't come in feeling very frightened, terribly scared.

"I decided that there has to be a system of protocol here but, where there were things that I thought were getting in the way of open hospitality, that sense of equality, I felt that I would do something about those."

She therefore dispensed with morning dress for the inauguration. It was a very elegant occasion but there wasn't "the starchiness which you sometimes get with morning dress". Then she took advice from the Government, Foreign Affairs and others to ascertain their views.

One particular ambassador told her that the day they presented their credentials in Aras an Uachtarain was the worst day of their lives. They were terrified.

"Now I thought there is something wrong with that. We are the land of welcomes. So I made it my bounden business that from the minute they come through the door, it is a formal occasion, we would look at ways in which we could soften it and make it a more relaxing experience for people."

She has dispensed with morning dress for ambassadors when they present their credentials and allowed them to bring their families. Similarly, having taken advice, she permits judges to be accompanied by their families when they are appointed by the President.

The protocol that the President is the last to arrive at a function and the first to leave has been retained for respect and security reasons.

Had she any concern that she could affect the dignity of the office of the President, above politics, by scaling down the protocol?

That was a good question, she said, because it struck at the question of what gave dignity to the office. She thought there was a certain manner, a certain mode of dress, a certain way of engaging with people. There were certain things which can confer dignity on occasions. "But", she warned, "you can also create pomposity very quickly and it's when you move into a kind of grey starchiness that people tend to get scared."

"I don't think anyone should be nervous coming to see me. I don't think that anyone should be frightened of me as a person. Yet, I have had situations where people have been terribly nervous and they have gone away saying, `thank goodness, that was easy'. That is concerned dignity. That is showing people that sense of equality that I feel with them. After all, I am first among equals."

What she was trying to do, she added, was to create an environment, from the house out, where everybody felt valued, supported and their professionalism affirmed. She held a communal dinner with family, aides and staff on Christmas Day.

"What I did not want to happen as we sat down to dinner was to have a sort of upstairs/ downstairs feel to it because those people are professional people and they are my equal," she explained.

GK: There is a lot of talk about your casual mode of dress. Some people have reservations about a woman Head of State wearing trousers on formal, State occasions. Are you aware of this?

MM: I haven't heard much of it, no. They haven't written to me about it.

GK: It's a big talking point.

MM: Is it? That's typical of Ireland. Why wouldn't they just write to you and say so? Isn't it great that they have things like that to talk about? I think that I have three trouser suits to my name, but people think that when you wear them that that's all you ever wear.

Mrs McAleese thinks trouser suits are very smart, very modern, very much today's dress for a modern, smart, professional woman. "I like to think that I am reasonably professional and I have absolutely no inhibitions whatever about wearing them. I wear a mixture of long skirts and trouser suits and I think trouser suits are incredibly smart. It's a matter of taste, isn't it?"

She remembered, she said, the first time she wore trousers and thinking that the ground was going to open up and swallow her into a black hole, never to be heard of again. They had been told in school that it was the express wish of the devil himself that women would wear trousers.

"I have a sneaking suspicion about the people who have those kind of inhibitions . . . are they in the real world? I would say to those people: `Ask yourself why you are asking these questions. What's inside you that's gnawing at you that you really haven't redeemed inside yourself yet?' "

She takes the role of President very seriously and believes that "appropriate dress" is very important. She wants to represent Ireland very well, she said. "I go to a lot of trouble to ensure that in so far as I am able to I support Irish designers, who design the most wonderful clothes. And among them are smart trouser suits and I'm delighted with them."