The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, has said the more difficult encounters with Taoisigh during her tenure as president were with Mr Charles Haughey.
Referring to her relationship with Mr Haughey during a lengthy interview on the Pat Kenny radio show yesterday, she also said he had failed to defend the presidency during the controversy involving staff at Aras an Uachtarain.
As far as she was concerned, it was important that the president get on well with the leader of government. The more difficult encounters inevitably were with Mr Haughey. He had "a strong sense of being Taoiseach".
Prior to that, the office of president had been very important in ceremonial and representative terms, but it had not been one which was looked to for fulfilling important engagements or delivering lectures.
Mr Haughey had initially tried to stop her delivering the Dimbleby Lecture in London. Even as she went to London in April 1990 as the first president to visit Britain in an official capacity, he did not want her to go and "made it clear I must not meet emigrant groups on that first occasion".
There were battles, "understandable battles", and Mr Haughey had his side of the story to tell also, she added.
Meanwhile, Mrs Robinson said, she had not handled well the domestic problems that arose with staff at Aras an Uachtarain after she took office.
"It was very sad for me, and obviously sad for those who were working there, and I did not handle it well in that sense because I did not anticipate any problems of the kind that emerged. I had been clear that one of the priorities would be to transform the Aras as well as the presidency into a happy, receiving place," she said.
Newspaper reports of "sackings before Christmas" at the Aras had distressed her because she was not employing or sacking anyone. Following rumours and "untrue newspaper reports", she spoke to Mr Haughey, and was told not to worry - "The Taoiseach defends the President".
"Then," Mrs Robinson added, "there wasn't any defence coming. I think that was the very distressful time because I felt both for those who were involved and I was aware at an official level that it was being dealt with, but I didn't know the details."
When she visited the Aras for the first time, as president-elect, she was very warmly received by the outgoing president, Dr Patrick Hillery. There was "a sense of the place being out of the mainstream altogether . . . very, very isolated in that way."
"I was encouraged by Charlie Haughey as Taoiseach, and in the sense that this was very normal that you would put your own stamp on a place and that part of that would be to have the possibility of both training and encouraging people to have a different approach . . . to do everything differently," Mrs Robinson said.
Declining to comment on the physical nature of the place, she agreed that the image of dead bluebottles on a window ledge was a good metaphor for the neglect suffered by the Aras. It was "politically neglected", but those who worked there were doing more than their best.
She admitted that on taking the job as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva at the end of her presidency she was taken aback at the lack of efficiency of the UN system and what it meant to work through a multilateral bureaucracy. It sometimes took eight months to fill a vacancy.
The post of Commissioner for Human Rights was created five years ago in order that an official would be charged with enhancing and protecting human rights around the world.
She had discovered that when it came to "shaking the tree" of change there was, in fact, "a huge forest . . . the biggest forest you can imagine".
One could not solve problems of international human rights but could make a difference in the way they became known and were addressed on the ground.
Expressing particular concern about trafficking in women and children, she said this was an issue of modern slavery. The situation in the Russian Federation, for example, meant more women would be driven into the sex trade.
When she arrived in her new post she found a situation of low morale and under-resourcing. The main job was to engage in "invisible mending" within the office in Geneva. With great support from the Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, her office had helped put human rights at the centre of the UN's work. "For a long time it [her office] was being discussed, and there was not the political will to create it . . . There are regimes that do not want to have more focus on their human rights record. We have very real problems and many of them caused by governments and by regimes that have a practice of torture, a practice of disappearances, of suppressing freedom of information," she said.
The fact that the UN had an office focusing on human rights, with its own premises, was a very big step forward.
She was always prepared to stand up to bullies. It was necessary to be firm but to maintain a dialogue. Part of her mandate was to work with all governments and with people she knew had violated human rights.
Asked about the circumstances in which she shook the hand of the Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, Mrs Robinson said this was "a little different" because she was in a receiving line and believed he was not about to turn up for the event.
"I was president, guest of the Chilean nation and of their president. I shook hands but no more," she said.