TOTAL shock. Waves of empathy and a deep personal sense of disappointment That's what I felt standing in the kitchen yesterday morning hearing on the news that Maire Geoghegan Quinn - that female colossus on the Irish contemporary political scene for over 20 years - was packing it in.
The disbelief was because of the sheer scale of the woman, her huge ability and comparative longevity in public life. To a generation now in its mid 40s - like herself - she had begun to take on the patina of having always been there a part of the political furniture of Irish life. How could she vanish without warning on a cold, winter Monday morning?
This was a woman we'd seen develop from a typical young Fianna Fail TD coming in on her late father's coat tails who seemed to swell and grow before our eyes into the fiercely capable woman we've all got used to seeing nightly on the TV.
When, most recently, as her party's spokeswoman on health she lashed out about a State agency's involvement in the infection of hundreds of people, mostly women, with a deadly disease and spoke with compassion of victims like Brigid McCole, their lives ended prematurely and painfully by hepatitis C, she spoke with passion for many members of the public not as articulate as she.
And her conviction came across all the more sincerely because this was no political radical to start with. This was a girl for whom life choices were preordained. Making political speeches for Johnny Geoghegan at 15 in Carna, taking over the Galway West seat after his sudden death in his 50s, and holding Government portfolios and babies in the palm of her hand before maybe even she knew what had hit her.
She had a great "fine girl y'are" aspect to her way back then, breastfeeding her babies in ante rooms and State cars, but she also grew in time to be a fine woman. You didn't have to share her politics or agree with all she said to see that.
The surge of sympathy was to do with her reasons for going. This is a woman who has seen it all. Obscene phone calls to her home during the rod licence dispute, allegations of political corruption and plenty more. But it was when one of her children had to take the flak and pay the price that she acted swiftly and shouted stop. "I will not serve," she said in yesterday's statement in her usual, no frills attached way.
When she added that the decision was irrevocable you knew she meant it. Though her teenage son had obviously only been involved in an all too familiar school drama, the splashing of it across various newspapers understandably hit the family hard. And just as she has fought like a tiger at the hustings and in public office, this time she felt immediately and instinctively that now all those formidable energies must be used to shield those she loves best.
The disappointment on hearing of her plans to go was because each time public life loses a woman as capable as this it dents the confidence of many women. Although not in her professional league, these women believe in their hearts that you can be a working mother, performing a useful service in society, being a loving, good parent - and, yes, be personally fulfilled. Though such women now fill the workplace in great numbers it can in some ways still be a fraught experience. We need all the icons we can get. But who would ask her to go on being one if the price for her and her family is as rough as was outlined yesterday?
This was the woman who in those both tiring and wonderful years when one's children are small, drove across the country for long Dail sittings, missing midweek nights with her family. She worked all those extraordinary hours politicians do, dashing back to the west at weekends to "have my tea, check the homework, put the kids to bed" before heading more often than not back out on the road into the wilds of pitch dark Connemara to attend a meeting in some farflung part.
It seems so ironic, so unfair, that now after working 50 hard on all those fronts she believes she has no choice but to walk away.
Whether she ever privately felt like packing it in before to stay at home fulltime with her children we don't know. Though some working mothers seem certain of the course they're on, others agonise over it constantly. Do their children suffer? Are they giving as much as parents as they could or should? In the past it used be called guilt. Now many working mothers know it's just part of the deal. You work, you make the best arrangements possible for your children and inevitably you have them and their needs in your head all the time.
And which of those women would have it any other way? Whether working fathers with or without full time partners in the home are the same, who knows? One way or another it's all part of the transition period men and women are going through currently on every front and which at time is fascinating, at other times, frazzling.
The notion of this, the first woman in Ireland to win a government portfolio since Countess Markievicz, getting used to life outside the fray is hard to gets one's head around. For God's sake she's only 46 like Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. Her description of her leavetaking as infinitely painful rings totally true. As she says herself there has been fun as well as challenge and she will inevitably miss both immeasurably. "Once the bug gets you it's hard to get rid of it," she once said of politics and she had the bug bad.
She needn't feel timid about her suggestion that she broke new ground and contributed to the emergence of a more confident, more broad minded Ireland. It's true. To give just one example, who would have thought 20 years ago, given her traditional Fianna Fail background, that this would be the politician who would decriminalise homosexual acts?
The only pity is that as a confident woman in full flight she had, one felt, so much more to offer. Interviewing her in the mid 1980s; I remember her saying that she'd like to retire at a reasonable age. But what was reasonable? It turned out to be somewhere around 60 years of age. Sadly, in national politics anyway, that's now not to be.