The Presidential candidate Prof Mary McAleese has been praised as someone who would genuinely like to build bridges and as "a person who is open to other people's religious and political views" by a key member of the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland.
Dr David Stevens, a Presbyterian layman who is general secretary of the Irish Council of Churches, the umbrella body for all the main Protestant churches in Ireland, worked with Prof McAleese over a two-year period in the early 1990s on an interchurch working party on sectarianism.
He was secretary of the group, which Prof McAleese co-chaired as a representative of the Catholic Church.
Speaking at the weekend, Dr Stevens said he believed, however, that it would be "very difficult" for any Northern nationalist to build bridges to unionists.
"I think that what has been going on here over the past 25 years is a renegotiation which involved the Northern nationalist Catholic community asserting itself and the unionist community being frightened by that. Mary McAleese is a very bright, determined, strongminded, up-and-coming Northern nationalist, and in that sense she embodies some unionists' worst nightmare", Dr Stevens said.
Prof McAleese "was caught up in that and limited by it" in terms of what she could do, "but that was not so much a statement about Mary McAleese as a statement about Northern Ireland".
Dr Stevens pointed out that even Mrs Mary Robinson, "who had everything going for her in terms of resigning over the AngloIrish Agreement", had run into problems with unionists over her handshake with the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams.
Prof McAleese had much more controversy to deal with. "But I have no doubt that, personally, she would like to be a bridgebuilder. I have found Mary as a person to be open to other people's religious and political views. She never had any hesitation in expressing her own convictions, but she certainly wasn't dismissive of other people's views. I feel she listened and understood the concerns of others.
"I don't see her as being involved in any Sinn Fein or violence agenda. I see her as a person who would want to reach out to other people, but that is probably limited by the circumstances in Northern Ireland."
Dr Stevens said that he was airing his views on Prof McAleese because he was "concerned about fairness". He added: "I can describe how I found her over a twoyear period; if that is a defence of her, so be it."
Meanwhile, the SDLP MP, Mr Eddie McGrady, yesterday publicly endorsed Prof McAleese for President. Condemning the leaking of confidential Government documents, he said it could never be sustained that Ms McAleese was "a proponent of any extreme political viewpoint, much less a proponent of violence".