Suffering like an Anglo-Irish house on the edge of a republican village

Last Friday, on RTE's Prime Time, John Bowman asked me if I felt "humbled" by what had happened to me during the presidential election. Humbled is not the word. Horrified is the word. And I am not being sensitive.

Normally I think that things said in the course of an Irish election come into the same category as a crime passionel in France - a burst of blood to the head which should be forgotten after the final count. But it seems to me that the abuse I got after attacking Mary McAleese was something special.

Kevin Myers put it plainly in this paper, referring to phone calls on Radio Ireland about me. "Killers do not earn such obloquy," he wrote. And it strikes outsiders as abnormal that so much abuse should be directed at a single individual.

An American journalist told me that in his society a political strategist, working alone, who set the agenda for a national election, would be a national hero. Welcome to the real world. But it still strikes them as strange. Bloomsbury wants me to write a book about it, Swedish journalists want to write feature articles about it. Channel 4 wants to make a documentary about it.

But I couldn't be bothered. To me it seems clear that the Irish intelligentsia - people like John Bowman and Prof Anthony Clare - have plunged heavily on Mary McAleese and fear that I might be talking the market down. (I think their theory that it stitches Sinn Fein into the process is flawed. It merely makes Sinn Fein press for more.)

But it's sometimes salutary to see ourselves as others see us. American writers ask me questions which I cannot really answer concisely: "Look", they say, "you're a nutter with no status or standing to speak of, and your reputation is in ruins - so why do they spend so much time attacking you?"

Can't say in a single sentence. But they're right about my reputation. Since I became a revisionist I have suffered as much abuse as a minor Anglo-Irish house on the edge of a rabid republican village.

But now it seems that some pundits want to flatten me like Bowenscourt. The current image of me, carefully cultivated by Sinn Fein and its supporters in the media, and backed up by a band of begrudgers, is a complex conflation of four conflicting, selfcontradicting and completely false smears - that I leaked a Foreign Affairs document, duped Derek Nally, advised John Bruton to attack Mary McAleese, and blew the election for Mary Banotti, who would otherwise have won. Each and every one of these charges is a complete fabrication.

First, not only did I not leak the document - the gardai never even thought it worth their while calling on me - but I have always taken a strong stand against the leaking or publishing of sensitive State documents on Northern Ireland. So much so that I was seriously out of step with my colleagues when I criticised Emily O'Reilly for publishing a leaked Foreign Affairs document in 1994.

But once a document is in the public domain things are different. David Quinn, the editor of the Irish Catholic, said on Questions and Answers (echoing Prof Ronan Fanning) that it is perfectly legitimate to make political use of a document in the public domain to challenge the curriculum vitae of a candidate for high office. Which is what I did, and in a democracy I should not be denounced for doing so.

Second, neither John Caden nor I duped Derek Nally. Pat Cox, his campaign manager, said so on The Week in Politics last Saturday. But of course the damage has been done, the mass media move on, and leave lawyers to pick up the pieces. So since RTE has, in my view, not given me an adequate right of reply, let me set the record right, for my sake and for the sake of common decency in Irish politics. My lunch with John Bruton was simply a social occasion, but it left me open to subsequent suspicion of double dealing.

So did my advice to Derek Nally to put pressure on Mary McAleese about her attitude to Sinn Fein. This was the best way to maximise Nally's vote. But it was also the best way to maximise Banotti's vote. And while I cannot pretend the thought did not cross my mind, we were all prisoners of the statistics of the situation.

Third, I did not advise John Bruton to buttonhole Bertie Ahern about Sinn Fein's support for Mary McAleese. But had I been acting as his adviser I would have done so. ein or it is about nothing. It is dishonest begrudgery on the part of political correspondents to pretend that Bruton's strategy backfired. McAleese was always going to win.

But by turning the election into a plebiscite on the peace process Bruton made sure that Banotti, who was effectively standing on an antiMcAleese ticket, got Fine Gael its biggest Dublin vote since the glory days of Garret FitzGerald, got most of the middle-class vote, and after transfers beat McAleese in Dublin as a whole.

Finally, I feel I have not done too badly for a "self-appointed" person, working alone, in putting pressure on McAleese to pay at least lip-service to pluralism. All symbolic stands against ambivalence strengthen our society and signal to Sinn Fein to cut out the constant pressure for more concessions that will end in civil war.

As for being a self-appointed spin doctor, all moral acts are acts of arbitrary authority. You can't apply anywhere for the job of saving a person from a mugging or your country from civil war. And a society which scapegoats people who perform such acts is a society taking the first step to fascism.