Roche and team play a game of presidential catchup

"Joy comes into it, too. I want this to be fun," the fledgling Lab our nominee said happily a few weeks ago. "God, that all seems like 10 years ago," sighed her sister just a week later in Clonmel. On Wednesday, as an Irish Times poll suggested Adi Roche had slipped from first to third in the polls, Senator Pat Magnier still managed a smile: "My heart is fine, thanks. Candidates aren't led by depressives."

The tension in the team was discernible, however, as she rose to deliver her lengthy speech at the campaign launch in Jurys. As she spoke, in the process revealing a new gravitas and a more presidential pace and tone, they began to breathe again. As she closed, Fer gus Finlay exchanged a smile with fellow campaigners, lit a cigarette and took a long drag. They were, it seemed, back in business.

Only three weeks have passed since Roche said Yes to Labour. At the time, it seemed that the one to beat was Albert Reynolds, and the mood was relaxed and upbeat.

Yes, her speaking style needed to be reined in; yes, she needed to develop a more presidential demeanour; yes, she needed space to develop a concrete sense of what she could do with the office and transmit that without further alienating media criticising the saccharine tone of the campaign.

"She is who she is, and no one will try to change her," said a senior campaign member at the time. "What we will try to do is bring out the whole of her." What she needed crucially was time. The selection of Mary McAleese rocked them, but Finlay remained doggedly convinced of the "worthwhileness" of the campaign.

"I don't want people who admire Adi to be afraid of the fact that she's not serious enough. We believe her to be extremely focused and intelligent." They never got the time. The front-page "exclusives" leaked to three Sunday newspapers by disaffected former colleagues saw to that.

While the other three candidates had the luxury of easing into gear and concentrating on the monumental task ahead, Roche and her team were engaged in desperate damage-limitation. She took its advice to "ride it out" and earned the accolades describing her as a "tough cookie".

Since then it's been a game of catch-up amid a lingering odour from the allegations whose instigators have melted away. Labour old-timers shrug and claim they saw a lot worse during the Robinson campaign. By this stage in the campaign, however, Mary Robinson had been on the stump for months. The candidate herself, however, has clearly paid a personal price. It was a much more subdued Roche who took the podium in Jurys this week, but there was a hint of the old defiance.

Her advisers' gut instinct must have been to steer well away from notions of opening the "president's house to the children of Ireland" or "tossing ideas around with Bono" about music in the Aras. But she repeated the first proposal in her speech (90 per cent her own work, according to one source) and dealt firmly with a question about the second.

Afterwards, hard-bitten campaigners were clearly exasperated at the tone of some of the questioners. "I'm astounded by the reaction to the proposal about the children." said one, "It surely says more about the questioners than the proposer. I think we're all a bit middle-aged; it shows up in the poll. Her support is high among voters up to 34 and then falls away."

The sense still is that this campaign will be won or lost on the stump. Observers believe that McAleese is much too clever to bare the sharp teeth she undoubtedly has, but Roche's camp lives in hope. If she shakes enough hands, smiles enough and issues frequent reminders that beneath the attractive package and tarnished halo is a sharp brain, they believe she can swing it.