Many women must have been highly entertained by some of the male reactions to the female slate of candidates for the Presidency. Clearly, a lot of men are very shocked at the effective exclusion of their sex from this contest - to the amusement of women whose gender has until recently been equally effective in excluding them from many positions of power and influence. For my part, as someone who 20 years ago initiated the process of facilitating the entry of women to the Dail in their own right rather than as widows of deceased Deputies, I am delighted with this development
But I am not sure that this outcome to the presidential pre-selection process is all that surprising. For, in a narrowly balanced Dail, no party is keen to risk losing a seat - and that went a fair distance towards ruling out many promising male candidates.
Even today, despite the initial breakthrough by Fine Gael in the early 1980s, women's access to national politics remains limited, with the result that many women of talent and energy have been forced to deploy these skills in areas outside politics.
Most notably, perhaps, they have taken a leading role in many caring areas - not just in the obvious ones such as nursing and primary teaching but also in many voluntary bodies operating in areas of social concern.
Given the enlargement of the symbolic role of the Presidency that was so successfully accomplished by Mary Robinson, politicians sensitive to the mood of the voters, and seeking attractive presidential candidates, were bound to look to people with a record of caring - and most of those publicly identified in this way are in fact women.
There is a danger that this understandable desire for a caring President could lead to an underestimation of the political aspect of the President's role, which it is difficult - although of course not impossible - to fulfil successfully without some experience of national politics. Much of Mary Robinson's success was due to the fact that as she pushed out the bounds of the office, sometimes against the wishes of Taoisigh and governments, her experience in politics helped her to judge how far she could go and when, on occasion, it was wiser to "back off".
Now I know from my own personal experience of five of our seven Presidents - four of whom I had dealings with either as Minister for Foreign Affairs or as Taoiseach - that even experienced politicians may find it difficult to judge how far it is wise for them to push their role in this office.
Thus, I recall a meeting with Erskine Childers some weeks after his election as President in 1973, when he asked me to remain behind to talk to him, after my attendance at the presentation of credentials by an ambassador. (I should say, perhaps, that we had earlier come to know each other quite well through his constant interest in the economic column that I had been contributing to this paper during the preceding two decades - about which he frequently telephoned me).
Now Childers was a man of extraordinary probity, with a deep commitment to the betterment of society through political action. So intense was this commitment that it sometimes blinded him to political realities: in fact he could be politically naive. And during his campaign, not only had he, as all presidential candidates feel compelled to do, promised to widen its role - he had also announced that he would establish some kind of think-tank to plan ahead the future of our country.
He was not a man to go back on his word - but when, after taking office, he had broached this proposal to the then Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, he had received a short answer. So, calling me into his office after the credentials presentation, he told me that he was going to have to resign because he was not being allowed to honour the promise which he had made in good faith to the Irish people.
I was naturally aghast at this announcement. The last thing our national coalition government needed after a few short months in office was a crisis arising from a presidential resignation. So I set about persuading him to change his mind. I was making little progress until I thought of what seemed to me to be a relevant analogy. What, I asked him, would be the reaction of the British government if the queen announced that she intended to set up a think-tank in Buckingham Palace to plan Britain's future?
At once he calmed down. He conceded that I had a point. When I left some time later the danger had clearly passed. Nevertheless, Childers continued to chafe at the restrictions on his actions imposed by his role as non-executive President. And while he was always very correct in the way he accepted the advice tendered to him as to what he might not do or say, his frustration was intense, and I believe almost certainly contributed to his sudden tragic death while attending a dinner of the Royal College of Physicians.
The truth was that, tragically, he was temperamentally unsuited to the constraints of the position to which he had been elected.
Shortly after the collapse, because of a leak of the proposal (for which Jack Lynch had agreed to seek Fianna Fail consent) that Erskine Childers be succeeded by Rita, his very able widow, Chief Justice Cearbhall O Dalaigh became an agreed candidate.
Now Cearbhall O Dalaigh was an erudite and charming man, but whereas Erskine Childers's political experience had ensured that he always eventually accepted, however reluctantly, the advice tendered to him by the government, Cearbhall O Dalaigh was temperamentally less disciplined. And his lack of political experience and occasional rhetorical self-indulgence caused some real problems.
Before I realised how difficult, and even eccentric, he could be, I proposed that during our 1975 Presidency of the European Community he should make an official visit to its four institutions - the Commission in Brussels, the Council and Court in Luxembourg, and the Parliament in Strasbourg, as I thought such a visit might enhance our standing in Europe. However, Cearbhall O Dalaigh insisted in addressing the first three of these institutions in a range of languages which pointedly did not include English. On our way by train to Strasbourg, my Foreign Affairs officials urged that I seek to persuade him to include one or two paragraphs in English so as to avoid giving quite gratuitous offence to our British partners. I did so, and to my great relief, he agreed.
But what I could not have foreseen was that, perhaps irritated at this unwelcome advice, in his address to the Parliament he departed from his multi-lingual script to explain how he had learnt French as a child from a book about a M. and Mme Perrichon and their dog. To the utter humiliation of the Irish delegation, and the dismissive amusement of the remainder of the audience, the dialogue between this couple, and their pet, was re-enacted verbatim from the rostrum, including repeated loud "woof-woofs" on the part of the dog.
There can, of course, be no excuse for the subsequent mishandling of the Donegan insult that led to Ceabrhall O Dalaigh's resignation, but some of the Government's unhappy experiences with this non-political President may help to explain why that matter was not dealt with more sensibly.
They may also explain why that national coalition then nominated for election as an agreed candidate a former Fianna Fail Minister, Dr Paddy Hillery, at that time Irish Member of the European Commission. The universal view as that Cabinet meeting broke up was that even a Fianna Fail politician was to be preferred to a nonpolitician as next President!
This may explain why during the campaign ahead I - and perhaps some Ministers and Opposition frontbenchers also - will be watching carefully to see how much sense of the realities of politics, and of the complexities of the relationship between Government and President, is displayed by each of the four candidates.
Some of the lines in this column in last Saturday's special editions were inadvertantly transposed.