The election candidates couldn't wish for a better PR machine than the one employed by The Supreme Master Ching Hai.
Her glossy flyers and posters were all over the capital at the weekend and it's a sign of the times that her slogan "See God while living" attracted around 1,000 people to her lecture at the RDS in Dublin yesterday.
Ms Ching Hai is a Vietnamese-born woman who, according to her biography, separated from her German husband to become enlightened in the Himalayas and now spends her time travelling the world teaching a meditation technique called the Quan Yin Method.
The RDS had never looked like this. Entrance to the hall (the one used annually by Sinn Fein and the Charismatic Movement, spookily enough) was through a black tunnel structure where oriental men in suits and with ear-pieces gave plausible impressions of spiritual mafiosi.
Inside, the place was festooned with flowers, pot plants and fluorescent crepe paper. Along the walls were hung sparkly dresses and jewellery that wouldn't have been out of place in the late Princess Diana's wardrobe. There were no price tags but the items, all made by Ching Hai, were for sale. Even a Supreme Master has to pay the bills.
The free lecture, part of a European tour that ends in London tomorrow, began with the testimony of a Dublin man called Billy. He almost broke down as he told how he believed that reading Ching Hai's book The Key of Immediate Enlightenment had cured him from a life-threatening cancer.
Then the woman herself appeared. Dressed like Evening Gown Barbie she wore a white fur stole, blue silk frock and glittering jewellery. Her first words from the stage decorated like the Garden of Eden pressed all our national buttons. She spoke of property prices, The Corrs and, as she quaintly put it, our "blooming" economy.
There was standing room only but when she kindly invited the seatless ones up to sit on the stage she didn't count on a rather large man, who said he was a sailor, parking himself beside her on the pink sofa. Popeye (not his real name) proceeded to fall asleep and when he woke up asked incomprehensible questions even the enlightened one couldn't understand.
From that point on questions were written down by the audience and passed on to her. They were interminable. You can listen to questions like "Why do we exist?", "Are we entering a new era of collective consciousness?" and "Does alcohol slow down the spiritual path?" only for so long before you begin to crave a gin and tonic and start thinking extremely nasty karmic thoughts.
After 11/2 hours that made RTE's Questions and Answers appear riveting, the initiating period began. For the uninitiated, and there were many, this involved being instructed in the Quan Yin meditation technique. Those who took part in the full two-hour initiation had to promise never to eat meat again and not to divulge the instructions to anyone.
The basic goal of the technique is to communicate with God so that He appears to the meditator in various forms including the physical or as light or sound.
It was all a bit too much like instant soul food for some people's liking. "I mean, how can you become enlightened in two hours?" asked one disgruntled attendant afterwards.
A young woman called Debbie said she found Ching Hai "patronising". Her male friend said the Master lacked the spiritual persona of people like the Dalai Lama and the Maharishi.