THE fact that Mary Robinson, has decided not to seek another term as President of Ireland shouldn't really be a surprise, and yet somehow it is. For me personally there is an added poignance in the fact because I am in California not Ireland, at Stanford and not in Dublin. Some part of me feels that if I could see rowan trees instead of eucalyptus and the Dublin hills instead of the hazy mountains around Palo Alto, I might be able to locate her decision more easily in the local and actual.
But I doubt it. If anything, distance gives me the chance to reflect on what her decision changes, as well as on what was changed by her earlier decision, more than six years ago, to seek the Presidency. I should also say from the start of this piece, that since her friendship has been one of the central reference points of my life since we were both teenagers, I am unlikely to have any of the distances of the historian or any of the wisdom of the sociologist.
I just have a personal sense of something important passing, a private conviction that something magical and confirming will now go out of Irish public life. In that I am sure I am part of the majority of Irish people at this moment.
I have a crystal clear memory of Mary Robinson and I sitting in the Buttery in Trinity College when we were students. I suppose we were both 20. I was a poet and an erratic student. She was a star law student with a great interest in poetry. She was talking to me about a paper she was going to give to the Law Society. The topic I can't remember it exactly - was something to do with a change in family law. She was definite and clear and insistent that the paper should be given. But I remember thinking, in some unformed way, that it would get her into trouble although, knowing nothing about the law, I wasn't sure with whom or about what.
She, on the other hand, was oblivious to the trouble, and only conscious of the need to state the case.
The reason I remember it so clearly is that it was probably the first time I, began to understand something about", her. I had no words for it then, so I will provide the words I have for it now. I began to realise that there was some unusual and seamless connection between her character and her intellect and her conviction. That her beliefs would always be close to her thoughts. That she would always act on her beliefs. That the space she made for her beliefs, thoughts and actions would always be essentially the same space: They would not be fractured into speculation on the one side, or caution on the other.
And if I thought it was unusual then, I know now that it is unique.
WHEN she was President, especially in the first year, I would have a sense of incongruity when I went to visit her. The vistas, sunshine, aspects and expanse of Aras an Uachtarain seemed a surprising place to be continuing our conversations. But as time went on, it seemed less surprising. I began to think that the Presidency, in some elusive way, was entirely in character for her.
Somehow the person and the occasion had found one another. What's more and this was what was so hopeful they had been brought together by the imaginative choice of the Irish people themselves. That quality of thought and belief, of conviction and action, translated powerfully and unforgettably into the office she had been elected to.
Wherever she went in those first years and of course since, but the beginnings were particularly striking she brought a quality of presence with her, which enabled her to return with a new and original narrative. If that sounds far fetched, it is nevertheless true. She visited parishes, communities, job centres. She opened sports halls and hospital wings. She heard songs and recitals and watched performances put on just for her.
Listening to her talk about her busy, generous days, always full of affection and respect for whatever she'd seen, was like suddenly having been given a new and beautiful text of Irish history. Here, all at once, was a changed and illuminating version of, who we were and what we could be. And I who had always believed that the Irish past and Irish history were not the same thing, could never be the same thing, and that the second had in some way suppressed the first, began to believe that Ireland had at last found someone who honoured both and whose roots were deep in the silence of the one and the structure of the other.
I will miss her being President. I will miss the knowledge that it is she who will represent Ireland, not only abroad, not only at a State dinner, but on an unlikely afternoon in a small town, where her presence confirmed the dignity of some hidden effort and made an invisible achievement or endurance suddenly visible. I will miss her dignity and courage and originality in the public life of a country which needs all three. As a poet, I will miss her eagerness to hear about the newest book or the latest poem. As a person, I know I will always have her friendship. But as a citizen I will never have it again in the same way.
But one thing I am still convinced of. There has been, and there still is, nothing unilateral about her Presidency. Something about her rare connection with her own country suggests something about that country's connection with itself. She always liked Yeats's phrase from his essay The Galway Plains which spoke of a community and its imaginative resources. In fact the exact words are "There is still in truth upon these level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions.
To maintain that belief in public office is not easy and yet she has done it. But what seems to me much more poignant than even the words, or the resonance she found in them, is the fact that as she quoted them and thought about them she had so little awareness of the fact that she herself had become one of those imaginative possessions. And Irish history, whose version of events I have often suspected, gains a new lustre in my eyes because it will have to record that.