(Jude Collins, Irish News)

I don't like Hillary Clinton getting an honourary degree in Derry, because giving out free degrees is a stupid custom which devalues the years of study that undergraduates put in. But I do like Hillary Clinton.

Who couldn't but respond to the gutsiness of a short girl with fat legs and weird hair who translated herself into a woman so attractive, when she visited Dublin in the late 1990s, some of the Dublin wags leaning over the crush-barriers whistled their admiration and asked her if there were any more like her at home.

There's also something very attractive about a smart, strong-minded woman who, questioned about her attitude to her husband's infidelities, declared that she wasn't going to take a Tammy Wynette-Stand-By-Your-Man stance and she certainly wasn't going to return to the kitchen and bake cookies. The cookie-baking brigade and the C and W crowd never quite forgave her for that one.

She also showed imagination and courage with her plans for a nationwide health care scheme in the US. The fact that she was defeated by the interests of the insurance companies who couldn't bear the thought of losing even some of their massive profits, takes away nothing from the quality of her efforts.

And wasn't she simply heroic, when Bill was going through that Monica Lewinsky phase? When he was doing all that 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman' stuff, and all the right-wing neo-cons and the righteous people of the US were declaring how horrified they were at the idea that their president might not be a model of sexual propriety and should be turfed out of office. Hillary's response combined saintliness with hard-headedness. Bill's philandering and 'bimbo eruptions' might have been caused by childhood abuse, she suggested; at the same time, he certainly was "a hard dog to keep on the porch."

On the other hand (there's always another hand), she remained undisturbed when her husband proved his political virility by allowing an Arkansas prisoner with a mental age of 10 to be executed. She didn't yell and scream when Bill cut welfare programmes throughout the US, making life even more appalling for the have-nots so his economic boom could develop . And when George Bush wanted backing for his assault on Iraq, she stepped up to the plate and cast her vote in favour of that cruel, cynical war. And there are those in the US who believe her protestations of support for John Kerry ring more than a little phoney, since her presidential ambitions require the Democrats to be defeated in November, so she can get a clear run as Democratic party candidate when Bush has completed his eight years.

Complicated? You bet – that's how people are. Like her husband, Hillary has a particular interest in Ireland. That's why she's in Derry today and Bill's in Belfast (no it's not their book sales – in the global scheme of book sales, Ireland is strictly peanuts). But like her husband also, Hillary can scheme and manoeuvre, be ruthless and support ruthlessness, right down to the loss of human life, if that's what it takes. It's true that Ireland owes the Clintons, and if something other than the awarding of a daft free degree could be arranged, most of us would applaud it.

But listen to her speech today, read the reports of it in the paper tomorrow. One thing it will not contain is a call on the British government to fulfil its Good Friday Agreement obligations. And it will also be free of any whisper of support for an adult Ireland that organises its own affairs, free from colonial control. No, what we'll get is a version of Bill's famous caricature of politics here: the two drunks (Catholic and Protestant) who really need to sober up, stay out of the pub and get along together.

Yet despite her flaws and his, nationalists have open hearts for the Clintons and welcome them back here today. There's a mature awareness that every person is flawed in one way or another, and politicians have flaws in places ordinary people don't even have places.

It's that same maturity which operates when we consider Peter Robinson. Even though Mr Robinson is a convicted criminal because of acts performed against a terrorised village in the Republic, we don't hold that against him. He's a man of talent and if the DUP want to put him forward, that's OK. As David Trimble himself put it: because someone has a past doesn't mean he can't have a future.

Welcome Bill, welcome Hillary, welcome Peter.

This article appeared first in the August 26, 2004 edition of the Irish News.