To be out of the country when the Fianna Fail presidential candidate is selected means that you get the story in truncated instalments. There's the phone call the night before that tells you there are two major meetings going on, involving virtually all parliamentary party members and "the word is" the leader is going to tell everybody to vote for Albert. There's the news bulletin. You hear about the first count. The next bulletin gives the second count. Later (in my case, more than a day later) you see the pictures.
It was the pictures that stopped me in my tracks. The photographs of Albert Reynolds, frozen in place like a man struck dead. The triumph of experience over hope. The pictures established the duality of the story. It may have been Mary McAleese's triumph and Michael O'Kennedy's defeat, but it was Albert Reynolds's tragedy. And I'm not sure it was a great week, either for politics or for Fianna Fail.
I was once close to Albert Reynolds and was thrilled to be picked by him for his Cabinet. The closeness deteriorated after the events which led to the fall of the government in 1994. In the intervening years, encounters between us have tended to be brief but civil. But this week I grieved for a good, misguided man subjected to a public humiliation he would never have believed possible.
Albert Reynolds never saw it coming and the reason he never saw it coming has been produced as justification for what happened to him. It has been suggested that he drew it on himself, that he never learned from past mistakes and, therefore, repeated them. There is some truth in this.
For some reason, election campaigns have always brought out the worst side of the man, rather than his better aspects. Elections have always presented him with irresistible cameras and microphones, and have always provoked him to talk, talk, talk, using the electronic media to state and restate his view of himself, without influencing or changing the view of him held by key sections of the public - or in this case, the parliamentary party.
This time around, it was exacerbated by an old-fashioned campaign which smacked too much of calling in favours, pressing people to make public declarations despite the secret ballot at the end, claiming personal endorsement of the party leader where something short of personal endorsement had been given. It ignored the problem of a by-election and it ignored the issues which would inevitably have been reheated by the campaign.
Albert might nonetheless have made it if Dick Spring had not moved when he did. Spring's public presentation of Adi Roche changed muttered doubts within Fianna Fail into out-loud certainties. The central one was that if the party was to have any hope of beating the charismatic campaigner from Cork, it was going to have be someone other than Albert.
Mary McAleese would seem to have a lot going for her in this situation. She is confident, but keeps it within bounds. She looks, sounds and carries herself in a way appropriate to a President. Yet her name, added to the equation, did not create major ripples in Albert's camp or in the outside world.
The story is now told that Albert's first realisation that he was finished came before the first vote, when his party leader, close to him at the ballot box, opened his paper to show Albert that he was voting for him. All of Albert's long experience told him that this was the equivalent of a steak dinner, readying him for execution - or so the insiders say.
They may be wrong. I hope so. Because the last week does Bertie Ahern no favours. His spinners are between a rock and a hard place. Either he dithered on the sidelines of an issue vital to the party's parliamentary numbers and public perception, allowing nature to take its course, or he facilitated the shafting of the former Taoiseach. There may, of course, be a third possibility, and we may hear it in the next few weeks.
What there can be no argument about is that party members who had told Albert Reynolds they were voting for him voted for someone else; without telling him.
Albert Reynolds is no longer in a fool's paradise. I never thought I could be so sorry for him. Except that he is not, now, in the worst possible position. Someone who has achieved what he achieved in Northern Ireland doesn't need to cash in on it. The former US President, Jimmy Carter, has established himself as a substantive figure in personal commitment to causes and as a fairly successful roving diplomat. Albert will not spend the next six weeks defending himself against beef tribunal questions and references to the Sunday Times. The evidence of widespread, shocked sympathy for him may dilute the bitterness and allow him and his family to plan a different future.
The episode hurts politics in general. A couple of years ago, politicians got so concerned about their lousy image that they decided to take action. They appointed a PR person in Leinster House. I'm sure the person works hard, but there's nothing they could achieve on the positive side that could outweigh the negatives reinforced by the last week.
THE public have seen, yet again, politicians lying (for a change, this time they were lying to each other) doing fancy footwork and (in John Bruton's case) being snide about people inside and outside politics.
They've also seen that, for the first time, out of four candidates, only one is a politician. The message would seem to be that the political parties now know that politicians don't sell, so they're diversifying: giving us, instead, uninvolved stars of stage, screen and nuclear activism. It will be interesting to see if this move provokes a high or low voter turnout.
It would be wonderful if the worst were over, but I doubt it. First of all, I anticipate a lot more of the crude anti-feminist comments we've heard and read so far, which seem to be provoked by a panic on the part of men that four women for the first time in some way upsets the balance of nature. To quote Una Claffey: Now they know how it feels.
The other thing I dread is the language of the campaign. Please, could we have a moratorium on vision, outreach, embrace (in the widest sense) and empowering?