I certainly opened my eyes with the Irish Independent on Monday, September 20th, when I went to buy the papers in Tipperary at a quarter to eight, writes Martin Mansergh.
The pile of broadsheets carried the headline "FG councillors boost Dana's presidential hopes". Side by side, the tabloid pile proclaimed the opposite, "FG pulls plug on Dana's hope of return to Áras race".
A few seconds reasoning by a sleepy head deduced which was the later edition to be purchased. The shopkeeper remarked that the paper must be covering all angles.
It was clear months ago that, despite all the efforts to talk up a challenge, the President, Mrs Mary McAleese, stood a good chance of being returned unopposed.
The primary function of the president is to be an anchor of constitutional stability, and a focus of loyalty and unity, transcending politics. The fact that this President has the active support of the main Opposition party as well as the Government bears witness to the success of her presidency.
It is not desirable that a president who has been above politics for seven years should be brought unnecessarily back into the electoral arena. To date, no incumbent president has campaigned for re-election, though in the case of Eamon de Valera in 1966, the only one to be challenged, that almost cost him the office.
This is not to deny the right of challenge. The Constitution is so framed as to ensure that only a public figure of experience, substance and achievement, with sufficient political backing to have some realistic chance of success, can be nominated.
Michael D. Higgins clearly satisfied those requirements, except the political backing, which was withheld by his party. It would have been extraordinary if Labour had then gone on to facilitate the nomination of an alternative candidate from the Green Party. The smaller parties and Independents are not a sufficiently cohesive force to launch a candidate on their own, be it an environmental campaigner or a left-wing internationalist.
The possibility of an election brings out a classic ambivalence towards the presidency. On the one hand, it is supposed to be strictly impartial, with any departures, however slight, liable to censure from some quarter. Contradictorily, it is suggested that particular candidates would be in a position to give a helpful push to favoured and often controversial causes.
Some commentary even implies that an angry president, a combination of John O'Shea in the international sphere and Father Peter McVerry domestically, is what this society badly needs. Consensus is particularly detested in the media. When Vincent Browne suggested that anyone, even "Slab" Murphy, would be better than a repeat of Mary McAleese, he was engaged, not for the first time, in an activity my father used to call, after Flaubert's Madame Bovary, "épater les bourgeois" (to shock the middle class).
The attempt to base a presidential challenge on presumed popular antipathy to the European constitutional treaty has failed. The referendum is the proper place to fight that battle. Parties are not morally obliged to give oxygen to more extreme independent political campaigns, with which they have little in common.
No president has been closer to people and community than Mary McAleese, without forfeiting her formidable intellect or moral leadership. She does not resort to lofty and impenetrable sociological jargon. Her presidency has been idealistic, not "neo-utilitarian", whatever the prefix is supposed to mean. She celebrates social inclusion just as much as economic success.
She has been President in the era of the peace process. She was recommended by Father Alex Reid of Clonard Monastery, with whom she had worked, in spring 1997.
This week, he was justly honoured in Kilmainham by the Higher Education and Training Awards Council, along with Carmel Naughton, who with her husband has contributed much to better North-South understanding, and Richie Healy, who, with the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, was part of a three-person Fianna Fáil delegation that secretly met the Sinn Féin leadership in Dundalk for the first time in 1988 through the mediation of Father Reid. The presidential election of 1997 became an election about the peace process and its critics.
Those ex-Workers' Party ideologues, who market themselves as having an unerring insight into public opinion and the North (Southern Protestantism is another area of vicarious expertise), received a resounding answer from the people.
They have graciously admitted their mistake with regard to the President, but remain largely unreconstructed in the Cold War fervour of the rest of their analysis.
To have a President from the Ardoyne, who at the same time knows and can work with people from all backgrounds in the North, together with her husband Martin, has been a major confidence-boost and contributor to better North-South relations.
The path was considerably eased by the Good Friday agreement and the constitutional détente that followed. The Belfast Telegraph has been warmly supportive of her candidature.
We cannot know all the challenges that will face us over the next seven years. Having a President of outstanding calibre and broad sympathies will stand to us in all situations.
The fact that no other champion has qualified to enter the lists only underlines the legitimacy of President McAleese's mandate going forward. She has all our best wishes.