Felicitations to President Higgins. Today, for the last time, he will blow out his birthday candles in Áras an Uachtaráin. It will need to be a big cake to fit all 84 candles, but blowing them out should prove an easier task amid all the hot air that is circulating about who might replace him in the Park next November. The fact is that Michael D is irreplaceable, because whoever made him broke the mould. That is how it should be for any president. The job requires a maverick. Had AI been asked to choose the ideal candidate for the Park, the Bull McCabe would have stood a better chance than an ex-Hot Press columnist with hippy ideas and bloated vowels. “Make babies not bombs” could have been Higgins’s campaign slogan. Anti-war and pro-justice, his passport had amassed exotic travel stamps from his activism in Nicaragua, East Timor, Chile, El Salvador and just about anywhere a tin-pot dictator was to be found. Throughout three decades as a TD and a senator, he managed to keep one foot in the establishment while kicking it with the other foot. Therein is the secret to a successful presidential candidacy. Fine Gael seems not to have learned from its 87-year-long failure to win a presidential election that finding someone who is the personification of Official Ireland can be the kiss of death. It was not due to his dexterity with a knife and fork or his first-name terms with statesmen that Higgins made history by breaching one million votes at his re-election in 2018. The three incumbents in the last 35 years have had the electoral cachet of having been part of the establishment but not quite of it. In her work as a senator and a lawyer, Mary Robinson frequently went to battle against the State on behalf of its victims. Mary McAleese had the blessing of the ruling Catholic Church during her legal career and rose to the top of Irish academia but the Belfast native found the Republic to be a cold place when she worked in RTÉ and when the voters of Dublin South-East resoundingly rejected her in the 1987 general election. Until 1990, the body politic treated Áras an Uachtaráin as a trophy home for its grandees. The occupants were distinguished men who had done the State some service and were not expected to do much more besides welcoming new ambassadors and planting saplings in the garden. The president’s presence in the public consciousness was confined to the occasional appearance of a gentleman in a top hat and tails being corralled from the hoi polloi by other terribly important men. That culture was turned upside down with the arrival of Robinson, the first woman and the first leftie to occupy the Áras. Since then, the three presidents have made the role more relevant to the life and values of the country. Robinson exploited the symbolism of the office with her candle in the window for the diaspora and by visiting the marginalised and oppressed, whether in women’s refuges or the Somali famine. McAleese got inside the people’s heads when she spontaneously expressed the collective shock and horror after the Real IRA bombed Omagh and after the planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York. Higgins has pushed the boundaries out farther with speeches and remarks that have robustly challenged the status quo. Each of the three enjoyed vertiginously high ratings in opinion polls and yet each shaped the presidency differently. Robinson was formal. McAleese was folksy. Higgins has inspired tea cosies. They have been presidents for their times. Because times change, presidencies must too. The one thing that should remain the same is that the president, as the first among equals, stands with the people. There are some who would have preferred if Robinson had meekly obeyed taoiseach Charlie Haughey or McAleese had not invited loyalists to tea in the Áras or Higgins had not discomfited the government by calling the housing crisis “a disaster”, but, if the polls are to be believed, far more people approved than disapproved. That potential to go over the head of the establishment and connect directly with the people is a president’s greatest power. We got a glimpse of it at the Ireland-France men’s rugby match in Dublin last month when, having watched Higgins laboriously juggling his two walking sticks while shaking the players’ hands, some of the Irish team stepped out of the line and walked up the red carpet to meet him. It was a poignant illustration of the empathetic relationship that can exist between a president and the people. Ireland’s population has grown significantly in recent years but the country has not lost its intimacy. We are all links in the chain of one chance encounter and the next passing stranger. One of the challenges for the next president will be to nurture that intimacy while also reflecting the new diversity and all its vibrant promise. The best presidents do not simply reflect Ireland; they present the best Ireland can be. That calls for an inspirational head of State. Higgins continues to inspire. He inspires confidence that advanced age and ill health do not have to stop the clock of life. Within eight days of suffering a stroke last year, he was back in the public eye casting his vote in the family and care referendums. But what his presidency will be remembered for is the audaciousness of his speeches, which – though verbose – have abided by the constitutional limits. You don’t have to agree with his views on the housing crisis, EU austerity, Israel’s aggression in Gaza or his decision not to attend the Armagh service marking the foundation of Northern Ireland to recognise that they found substantial and appreciative audiences. Expect some sharp observations in his Famine commemoration speech in Kilmallock next month about the use of starvation as a weapon of war and ethnic cleansing. [ What kind of president do voters want when Michael D Higgins' term ends and who might run?Opens in new window ] Higgins has made errors. The most harmful one was when he reneged on his 2011 campaign promise that he would be a one-term president. His decision to go again in 2018 tested the people’s trust in him. Like Ireland, he isn’t perfect. If he was, he wouldn’t be blowing out his candles in the Park today.