I heard Eamon Dunphy say on radio last week, about the smear campaign against Mary McAleese, that behind our proper facades we were all really falling around laughing at the whole thing. But I haven't been laughing. I think that's because I've been around this very course before. I was around for a campaign of smearing Mary McAleese before. Towards the end of the 1970s, I worked for RTE in a minor capacity. The glamour programme was the current affairs programme and its presenters were stars. Mary McAleese was a presenter. But she wasn't there for long. Word filtered down that she was "soft" on the North - in largely unspelt-out words, that she was a raving nationalist and probably a Provo sympathiser.
In fact - I was told after she left - all she had wanted was for RTE to pay serious, committed journalistic attention to Northern Ireland, which was then, during the dirty protests and coming up to the hunger-strikes, in a state of crisis which threatened the whole of Ireland. It is agreed even by itself that RTE failed, utterly, in terms of broadcast journalism, to cover the story of Northern Ireland at that time and for years afterwards.
Whether there was any connection between that and a woman of the ability of Mary McAleese leaving the place, I don't know. Messrs Harris and Caden would know: they were big fish in the little pond of RTE then, and people took them seriously and they, in the mad pursuit of state socialism for this island, were keen monitors of nationalist sentiment in the workplace.
I don't know Mary McAleese. I've never spoken to her. I don't want her to be President. But even back then I recognised a smear campaign when I saw one. And watching Derek Nally on television last Monday raise questions about her relation to violence, while invoking on the same subject brave gardai murdered in the line of duty, I felt the whole thing beginning to stir again.
I also asked myself, for the first time, why Derek Nally had entered the presidential race at all. He hasn't and had not the slightest chance of winning. Did he do it just to act as a spoiler against Mary McAleese? And if so, can he rely on our ignorance and fear of Northern Ireland in our response to the insinuations which he left in place when he "backed away" from the subject?
He probably can, as a matter of fact. One of the problems for a Northerner who chooses to expose themselves to southern scrutiny, as Mary McAleese has done in pursuit of the prize of the Presidency, is that they will constantly be misunderstood. No matter how Northern friends may rage and moan when it is said: the North is different from here. How long is it, to take a little example, since any of you bought a Belfast Telegraph or an Irish News? The two places are not familiar with each other. We cannot read the nuances of political position there as we can here.
Most of us run a mile from the very words "Sinn Fein" and are incapable of imagining the context - a peace initiative towards Sinn Fein conducted by a trusted cleric, when hope of a second ceasefire was not impossible - within which Mary McAleese was acting when she was being used by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, most of us, if we were Belfast Catholics, would not have conducted ourselves for the past 25 years with the shrewdness and circumspection with which she appears to have conducted herself.
Speaking for myself - if my home were burnt out and my brother beaten senseless just for being Catholic, I'd have found it hard to cling to constitutional ways. We've had it easy down here. She and her like have not. I say this though I won't be voting for her as President and I'd rather not see her in the Park.
I've had my candidate from the start. I like and respect Mary Banotti very much, and I believe that she would make a splendidly energetic President, and a warm one, and it is a President's role in the smallest and most humble events in our community that I most value, which is why I most value a President's warmness. I like it that Mary Banotti gives the impression of being confident without being self-satisfied. I feel that she has something to gain from being President - as Mary Robinson had - whereas I can't imagine Mary McAleese's sleekness being permeable by experience.
The personal beliefs of a President specifically don't matter: the office has been designed to render them irrelevant. But the style of a President matters, and I much prefer Ms Banotti's style to Ms McAleese's. However. I have to thank the smearers for this - that they have reconciled me to the President I am likely to get.
If it is Mary McAleese who wins I will now cheer her on. Because yet again the anti-nationalists will have failed to ruin her, yet again they will have got things wrong, yet again they will have accomplished nothing but to bring the standard of democratic debate here down to their own abject, obsessed level. And for what? If they had wanted to stamp out the republican virus in Ireland they would have been better employed addressing themselves to the seemingly endless supply of Irishmen willing to hide guns and explosives in their slurry-pits, than to throwing verbal mud at people a good deal more honourable than themselves. Even the most disciplined nationalists have been hounded by them. And they have never prevented a single murder. Nor have they lifted a hand to bring about peace. If Ms McAleese becomes President, the people will have told the noisy little claque of anti-nationalists - and I presume they knowingly took this risk - to get lost. As usual, they will have garnered a lot of publicity for themselves. But if they were serious about the cause of southern neo-unionism they won't just have failed their cause: they will rue the day they set all this up. The kind of comments John Caden made about Mary McAleese in this paper last week and that he and Harris made on radio have left no room for compromise. We will know what such people think, when and if we choose to place our X beside her name in the privacy of the polling booth. We will have chosen to confer the dignity of the Presidency on the target of their abuse.
If Mary McAleese had had an easy run at the position - with Fianna Fail, like any Irish dysfunctional family, rowing in solidly behind her once the internal power-struggle was decided - then there would be nothing much to say. A person with a northern accent had got what we thought of until now as a southern job. But now we have been made conscious that the candidate Mary McAleese is a Northerner by difficult experience as well as birth, and a Northerner who has had a serious hand in Northern political actions.
If such a person - whose Northernness is undiluted by the cosmopolitanism of John Hume - is voted in as head of State by us, then a respectable nationalism will have survived even the worst the IRA did. And that's the Southern neo-unionist's ultimate nightmare.