On September 12, 1997, the day of her departure from the presidency of the Irish Republic, Mary Robinson was in her element.

She had chosen to make a tour of a social housing project in Smithfield, Dublin, her last official public act before departing that afternoon for Geneva and her new post as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Her trip to the development was both a fitting end to her presidency and start to her new job. Ever since Robinson first entered politics as a Irish senator almost 30 years ago, her career has been motivated by compassion for the disadvantaged and a strong commitment to human rights.

Robinson, who will give the keynote address at today's Commencement, will devote her remarks to commemorating the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which forms the centerpiece of her agenda at the U.N.

Robinson has followed a remarkable path to fame. Rising from the youngest professor of law ever appointed to Trinity College, to the first woman Irish president and finally to U.N. high commissioner, Robinson has become one of the most powerful and fearless voices for human rights in the world.

Now she faces an uphill fight against the entrenched bureaucracy of the U.N. and the restrictive protocol of international diplomacy, but if her record of overcoming obstacles is any indication, it is a fight she is up to.

Campaign

Mary Terese Robinson was born May 21, 1944, in Baline, County Mayo, in western Ireland. Both her parents were doctors.

She attended Trinity College in Dublin and came to Harvard in 1967. She received a masters of law degree in 1968.

After leaving Harvard, Robinson returned to Trinity to become a professor of constitutional law.

At 25, she was the youngest law professor in the university's 400-year history.

But Robinson faced--and overcame--barriers in her academic career from the outset, says Dick Walsh, political editor of the Irish Times.

"She took on her male colleagues and competed and never sought any concessions," Walsh says.

She won election to the Irish Senate representing Trinity (universities are represented in the upper house of the Irish legislature), a seat she held until moving on to the presidency.

While at Trinity, Robinson became a vocal advocate for human rights, fighting in the courts for the rights of women, married and separated couples, children, the handicapped, homosexuals (who were subject to life imprisonment under an obscure 19th century law), the poor and the unemployed.

She twice ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the lower house of parliament and was instrumental in a failed 1983 campaign to legalize abortion.

But she developed a reputation for honesty during this time, Walsh says.

"It was unusual for somebody in politics to have pursued those views," he says, "but I think that because she didn't attempt at any time to bow to popular pressure, the people respected her integrity."

In 1990, leaders of the small Labor party convinced Robinson to take their party's nomination. No politician from an opposition party had defeated a candidate from the ruling party, Fianna Fail, since 1945.

Robinson started her campaign six months before the election, unusual in a country where elections are usually dispensed with in three weeks.

Thanks to her tireless campaigning, a scandal which discredited the Fianna Fail candidate, Ireland's electoral system of proportional representation and a fundamental change in the Irish electorate, Robinson prevailed in the November election.

Presidency

After her victory, the Irish Press heralded her election as a signal of "change in Irish society and a shift away from traditional attitudes and allegiances," evidence of a generational and ideological shift within Ireland.

Trina Y. Vargo, president of the U.S.-Ireland Alliance, says that "Ireland had, with its young population, changed so much that Mary Robinson could be elected president."

But Robinson, acutely aware of the limitations placed on the presidency by the Irish constitution, had to work around the restrictions of what was largely considered a ceremonial and symbolic office.

The Irish constitution requires that the president not take political positions. All of his or her public statements must be approved by the parliament, and the president cannot leave the country without the government's permission.

Traditionally, the presidency had been "almost a retirement home" for prominent politicians basking in the twilight of their careers, says Walsh.

But Robinson revolutionized the office.

Unlike her sedentary predecessors, she traveled throughout Ireland, at times fulfilling between 25 and 30 official engagements per week, exploiting the symbolic power of the office to its fullest extent.

She visited Ellis Island to commemorate the 500,000 Irish who passed through its gates and became the first Irish president to attend ecumenical services at St. Patrick's cathedral in Dublin.

While unable to actively direct the national agenda, Robinson used the prestige of her office to "signal issues of importance" with her presence, Walsh says.

She met with AIDS patients to draw attention to the plight of the virus' victims and attended the centenary of the Women's Suffrage Movement in New Zealand.

She was committed to the peace process in Northern Ireland, but raised a furor by shaking hands with Gerry Adams, the president of the Northern Ireland political party Sinn Fein, which has suspected links to the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

She did not confine her activities to Irish affairs alone. Robinson used the platform of the Irish presidency to advance her long-standing concern for human rights.

She was the first foreign head of state to visit Somalia after famine struck in 1992 and she was among the first to go to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide there.

But her first priority was always providing a voice for "those who might otherwise be marginalized from the mainstream of political, social and economic decision-making," in the words of one of her prime ministers, John Bruton.

And her efforts produced results.

In 1995, Irish voters approved a referendum to legalize divorce, winning over the opposition of the Pope in a predominantly Catholic country.

Her term also saw the liberalization of censorship laws and further separation of the Catholic church from the state.

While Robinson did not play a direct role in any of these moves, her leadership is credited with emboldening reformers.

"[Robinson] helped to lead a new and modern Ireland," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54-'56 (D-Mass.), an Irish-American.

But she decided not to run for reelection, telling RTE, the state-run radio network, that the office depended on vitality, and "I've given what I could."

She retired to approval ratings rising above 90 percent--noteworthy considering she had been elected without even a plurality of the first-choice vote.

Observers agree that Robinson left the office of president changed forever.

"It would have been unthinkable for some of her predecessors to go around talking to women in the very deprived areas of Dublin," says Walsh. "No one would have asked."

"She popularized the presidency within Ireland and made it something the Irish people could relate to and take pride in," says Vargo.

The Irish Diaspora

In her inaugural address, Robinson said that while she had been elected president of Ireland, she intended to represent "the extended Irish family abroad" as well.

By some estimates, there are 70 million people of Irish ancestry scattered throughout the world--only about 5 million of them in Ireland itself.

The creation of this diaspora, as Robinson calls it, began with migrations in the 17th century, and accelerated during the Famine of 1845-48. Subsequent years of economic hardship eventually forced about half the population of the island to emigrate.

In a later speech to both houses of the Irish parliament in 1995, Robinson related a story from her time at Harvard to illustrate the feelings of these "exiles" toward their homeland.

"I walked out one evening and happened to go into a Boston newsagent's shop. There, just at the back of the news stand, almost to my disbelief, was The Western People," she said. "I remember the hunger with which I read the news from home."

But the Irish government failed to perceive the deep affinity emigres hold for their homeland or recognize the diverse notions of Irishness which existed within the diaspora, Robinson said. In contrast to countries like Israel, which had successfully built ties with Jews abroad, the Irish government had not looked to "the array of people outside Ireland for whom this island is a place of origin."

Robinson made it a priority during her presidency to foster and cherish this diaspora and its inherent diversity, according to Vargo.

"President Robinson successfully reached out to Ireland's diaspora, as no president before her had done," Vargo says.

Robinson dedicated the first American memorial of the famine at Cambridge Common last summer, in front of about 3,000 of Ireland's diaspora.

During her travels abroad, Robinson made it a point to seek out Irish emigrants, from Poland to Tanzania.

"Mary Robinson became the embodiment of what Ireland represented for millions of them, as against green beer, leprechauns, or armed conflict," says Niall O'Dowd of Irish Voice, a newspaper in New York.

"She made it popular to be Irish," Vargo says.

The United Nations

Robinson moved to Geneva with husband, Nicholas, and their three children in September of 1997 after being appointed to the post of High Commissioner of Human Rights by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The commission had been created four years earlier but saw its credibility suffer through crises in Rwanda.

According to Joshua Rubenstine, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International, the previous director Jose Ayala-Lasso's response to the Rwanda genocide had been a "disaster." More than 500,000 people died in the spring 1994 slaughter.

Robinson came into office pledging to revitalize the agency and move human rights to the forefront of the international agenda.

"She wants to see the whole U.N. system driven by human rights, as it should be," says John Mills, Robinson's spokesperson in Geneva.

Since taking office, Robinson has traveled to dozens of hot spots around the globe, including Iran and Cambodia.

Observers of the United Nations say it is too early to judge Robinson's performance as high commissioner, but praise her for working to raise awareness for human rights issues in the U.N. as a whole, particularly on the Security Council.

Rubenstine says human rights are often low on the Council's agenda, but that Robinson had "given the issue greater credibility in U.N. circles."

But Robinson has been forced to change her approach to international diplomacy.

Robinson, who had a "lack of familiarity with diplomatic niceties" according to one European U.N. delegate quoted in the Irish Times, has had to tone down her criticism of individual countries' human rights situations.

Algerian diplomats in particular accused the commissioner of overstepping her authority after she called the human rights situation in Algeria "intolerable."

But that has not stopped her from "speaking candidly on human rights violations" from China to the United States, says Rubenstine.

Robinson has criticized the Chinese government for incidents of random detention and torture, and would like to visit Tibet in her upcoming trip to China in September. China invaded the territory in 1950 and has kept it under a tight grip since a 1959 rebellion.

Robinson also has not shied from criticizing the United States. She joined the Pope in pleading for clemency for Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer who was executed in Texas in February.

She also released a statement in April protesting the increase in the number of executions carried out in the United States.

Rubenstine cautions that while Robinson's reputation and personal credibility may help her force human rights onto the U.N. agenda, he doesn't know "how much to expect from her" given the U.N.'s institutional disposition toward realpolitik.

But Mills says Robinson has experience overcoming resistance and restrictions on her power, and that she can successfully bring a force to bear on world decision makers.

"Constitutionally, the high commissioner, like the president of Ireland, has few powers, but through a combination of leadership and moral voice she is proving to be a force to be reckoned with," he says.