If this was her pedigree, no one could have expected the saga that has followed. One of her first acts upon assuming office was to discontinue the practice of her predecessor, Ecuador’s José Ayala-Lasso, who used to meet with both the UN regional groups and the Israeli ambassador to discuss human rights matters. As the only member-state not a member of any regional group, Israelis could only obtain information from the HCHR on this basis. These were later resumed only with tepidity and reluctance.

A portent of things to come was evident in Mrs Robinson’s response to the so-called Naqba riots in the West Bank in May 1998, coinciding with Israel’s fiftieth anniversary. The UN has never treated Israel impartially, because it is the captive of an overwhelmingly hostile membership of states. Nonetheless, the current Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has distinguished himself for depoliticising his office where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned, realising the abysmal indignities to which politicisation has taken the world body. Annan carefully avoided a political statement, making no snap judgements or laying of blame and calling for restraint. So did the Security Council, whose job is acting to secure international peace and security. Robinson, in contrast, pioneered a new definition of the concept of peaceful assembly and the identification of victims of human rights abuses. It boiled down to this: Jews under assault at religious sites are not victims; only rioters who attack them and are killed and injured by police are.

"I have learnt with deep regret of the incident which took place yesterday," said the High Commissioner, "during which at least eight Palestinians were reported killed and several hundred injured by Israeli forces during demonstrations in the Occupied Territories. I remain profoundly concerned by the continuing deterioration of the human rights situation in the occupied territories and call upon the government of Israel to respect the right of peaceful assembly, to avoid the excessive use of force and ensure the full compliance of its police, security and military forces with the Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 and with United Nations guidelines on the use of force and firearms by law enforcement officials. My thoughts today are with the families of the victims."

Robinson thus follows a time-honoured practice of regarding all Israeli preventive or retaliatory action as equivalent or worse than the violence that prompts it, in the odd case (of which this is not an instance) where the original violence is acknowledged to have taken place.

There are various ways of accounting for the peculiar standards to which Israel is held by the UN, most coming down simply to the Arab parties and their allies having the numbers in the quasi-representative General Assembly. There is a further aspect where Robinson is concerned. Her positions are predicated on a doctrinaire assertion, virtually amounting to an article of faith, that Israel is, or should be subject to the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 regarding occupied territory. Israel’s High Court and many international law experts have always rejected this proposition since both the Gaza and West Bank were captured in defensive wars from illicit occupiers with no recognised claim to the territory, Egypt and Jordan respectively. Such territory belongs to no existing state and so the occupation of foreign soil is not deemed to be at issue. But that has not cut ice with Mrs Robinson.

A further sample of what treatment Israel and Jews could receive from the High Commissioner occurred last year when the reactionaries who dominate the Iranian government arrested a number of Jews on charges of espionage for Israel. The accused were subsequently convicted by an in camera tribunal, utilising nothing other than forced confessions and the verdicts in the main upheld by an appeal court. The charges were both spurious and absurd, unless one believes that shoe-makers and school teachers from a persecuted minority in a tightly controlled society have access to government secrets.

Mrs Robinson at first took an interest. However, once it had been put to her that the arrest and trial was an internal Iranian matter, not a politically inspired piece of persecution, she accepted the Iranian position thereafter without demur. It was hard to elicit a statement from her in the wake of the predictable guilty verdicts. Charged with overseeing human rights by member states, Robinson declined to send observers to the appeal trial, nor would she recognise it as a genuine issue of Jewish concern.

She sought to paper over this startling omission by recourse to the general human rights situation in Iran which, she admitted, involved a number of persecuted groups: not only Jews, but Bahais, democrats and trade unionists as well. Mrs Robinson seems to be saying that, since her secretariat is doing precious little about Iranian Bahais and trade unionists, it simply follows it should be similarly inert where Jews are concerned.

Moreover, while Nelson Mandela likewise criticised Western expressions of concern, Mandela subsequently had the good grace to admit that the assurances of a fair trial which Teheran conveyed to him personally, and on which he based his stance, were dishonoured. Mrs Robinson remains unapologetic.

Mrs Robinson also revealed a biased hand in the matter of the Geneva Conference of High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention. This august body has never been convened in its history other than in June 1999 when apparently the Israeli construction of apartment blocks on empty Jewish-owned land in east Jerusalem was apparently deemed as a threat to international human rights unprecedented in the history of the UN. The Conference was curtailed almost upon convening when saner minds prevailed and its convenor, Switzerland’s Walter Gyger, counselled restraint and adherence to non-politicised terms of reference. The High Commissioner, represented by a subordinate, flouted the terms of reference in the following fantastic statement.

In other words, the High Commissioner called for the imposition of sanctions and measures of collective self-defence (in effect, multilateral military intervention of the kind authorised by the Security Council against Iraq). Furthermore, it was added, trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity "remain an option for serious consideration".

The audacity of this statement was equalled only by the disingenuousness of her response to censure from the Swiss and many other quarters. Her letter to the Swiss chairman, combining legalism and pique in equal parts, defended the statement on the ground that the terms of reference were unclear and the participation of her office could not have taken place without reference to the resolutions of the General Assembly (which are wholly non-binding and have no legal force).

Any doubts that Mrs Robinson is mired in partisanship were dispelled earlier this year when she appointed Mona Rishmawi to a senior position within her Commissariat. Rishmawi has likened Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza to those of Nazis and is a long time activist of al-Haq, the Palestinian advocacy organisation promoting a Palestinian agenda couched in terms of human rights.

Then came November’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority during the riots that even Palestinian officials now admit are orchestrated. She went, by her own admission, to "hear" the Palestinians but to "put points to [the Israelis]." These are the terms of someone who has clearly made up her mind before arriving. Mrs Robinson then brazenly impugned the impartiality of her high office by surrendering to Palestinian demands that she cancel meetings with Israel’s democratically-elected opposition figures, a decision so fawning and delinquent that other Israelis, including acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, declined to meet with her.

Her report on her visit might have been dictated in Gaza. Mrs Robinson assumes Israeli aggression and wrongfulness in the spate of violence, but she has been saying things like that before she ever set foot in the country. Large sections were given over to regurgitating Palestinian grievances, no matter how subjective, including anger at those who have dared to allege that Palestinian children are deliberately dispatched to scenes of violence. The stoning of Jewish worshippers at Jerusalem’s Western Wall and the destruction of Joseph’s Tomb and a Jericho Synagogue receive barely a reference, but after meeting with Moslem and Christian clerics, she called on Israel to respect and protect religious sites.

But, for those who have followed her progress, none of this is any longer a surprise. From the outset, Robinson has politicised human rights issues in the Middle East with a convert’s fervour. In meetings with officials of UN Watch, a respected body monitoring UN adherence to its own Charter, she is stand-offish, circumspect and correct.

Each and every complaint submitted to Robinson has been rejected. Quizzed, for example, on the reference to Palestine as a state amongst many she has visited, Robinson dismisses this as convenient short-hand. By this yardstick, Robinson’s next visit to Lhasa (assuming she is ever allowed in) will be described as a visit to the sovereign state of Tibet.

UN Watch’s Michael Colson opines, "She does not exercise the kind of restraint the Secretary-General exercises. Mary Robinson, as far as I am concerned, has come close to violating the Charter." Even the "surprisingly even-handed" speech she recently gave outlining the actual chronology of the Palestinian violence, which demonstrated that Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount did not originate it, seems to have been a one-off. Rumour has it that the speech was the brainchild of a previously undetected impartial staffer.

I wonder what the Jewish community of Dublin think of her now.