Heather Humphreys is standing in the paddock of a farm in Slane, Co Meath, recalling a visit “to a lovely restaurant in Singapore to promote Irish duck”.
“The best duck in the world, in my view,” Humphreys tells a handful of bored reporters.
Over her shoulder, in the field behind her, one amorous bovine mounts another.
A rabble of Fine Gael farmers stand with Heather stickers on their lapels, ready to clap.
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It feels like a Fine Gael event rather than a campaign one. Among supporters such as these, no votes will be lost, but no votes will be won either.
Elsewhere, a presidential campaign for the remaining 80 per cent of the electorate is taking place.
In the mire of its 1990 presidential election, where Fine Gael came last of three candidates including a Fianna Fáil tánaiste who was sacked mid-campaign, some in the party decried a campaign that sent Austin Currie out to “shake hands with Ireland”.
This time around, the Humphreys campaign against Independent rival Catherine Connolly seemed to focus on sending her out to shake hands with the roughly 20 per cent of Ireland that already votes for Fine Gael.
The narrow focus appeared to cost the party dearly as early tallies from the counting of votes on Saturday showed that Connolly was on course for a resounding victory over Humphreys.
During the campaign, there were entire days when reporters following Humphreys wouldn’t see her encounter a single undecided voter.
At what felt more like Fine Gael events than general campaign events, Humphreys would meet people who had decided long ago they were voting for her and were wearing the campaign stickers to prove it. The campaign rarely gravitated far from the comfortable terrain of events of Tidy Towns and credit unions.
Spontaneous encounters with the electorate became rare. In a breakneck walkabout of Grafton Street in Dublin, the Humphreys campaign took the busy thoroughfare at a canter – effectively meeting no voters at all before retreating into Bewley’s cafe, where supporters waited.
On the very last day of the campaign, watching Humphreys charm a delighted crowd of 500 at the Irish Country Living women and agriculture conference in Sligo, her team started to regret that the public still had not seen “the real Heather”.
Even before polls had closed, Fine Gael argued Humphreys had been plunged into the bruising election at late notice.
But revisionists of the very recent past omit to mention that Humphreys was swept into the race on the crest of an organic wave of support from TDs.
Many within the party were so convinced of her broad appeal, they thought they had a better candidate than Mairead McGuinness, the party’s original candidate, who dropped out of the race due to ill-health.
On the windy prom in the middle class area of Blackrock, Co Louth on October 1st, former Fianna Fáil TD Declan Breathnach happened to show up to endorse Humphreys in front of the media.
Humphreys’s cross-party appeal in the Border counties was never in question. What will be scrutinised now is if it was ever developed beyond.
In 1944, the American journalist Franklin P Adams wrote that elections are won “chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody”.
By the final week of the campaign, a pessimism had calcified within the Fine Gael parliamentary party that this presidential election had become a referendum on the Government and so Humphreys’s candidacy as a former minister was doomed. A minority within the party say their impression was more “genuine disinterest” from the public.
Fine Gael’s ground war spent a lot of time trying to make a virtue of Humphreys’s tenure at the cabinet table, with the campaign mapped around projects Humphreys had supported.
The internal schedule used by the campaign team often had a note beside each location of how much government funding the venue had received under Humphreys’s tenure as minister for community development. Fine Gael tried to ensure that the proverbial eaten bread was not forgotten.
As Connolly’s lead grew, so did Fine Gael’s frustration with the coverage of their “Teflon” rival.
“If Heather had been repossessing houses and meeting warlords, we would have had to pull out of the campaign,” one source said.
Humphreys’s own media performances could be ropey. She was not prepared for questions about her husband’s former membership of the Orange Order and was hurt by them.
Some in Fine Gael feel that there was an immaturity whereby some people failed to grasp that it would have been unusual for a Monaghan Presbyterian family at the time not to have some links with the Orange Order. The presidential campaign was said to be the first time Humphreys had real experience of social media abuse. There were a couple of occasions when it really got to her, according to campaign aides.
On the margins of the RTÉ Prime Time debate, the last of the campaign, an adviser sighed in despair: “The same questions again.”
Entire days on the campaign trail had been written off by the demands of media debates and interviews. Everyone in the campaign accepted that when the camera was on, their candidate’s personality was off. Her uncertainty fared poorly when compared with Connolly’s assured performances.
Senior Fine Gael figures blame the departure of Fianna Fáil’s candidate Jim Gavin for sealing their defeat, and denying Humphreys transfers. Allies are deeply disappointed with Fianna Fáilers who couldn’t countenance supporting her even when their own candidate wasn’t running. Within the Humphreys campaign some called these diehard party members “Black Fianna Fáilers”. With some exceptions, Fine Gael felt its Coalition colleagues were lethargic in their opposition to Connolly.
As polling day drew nearer, Fine Gael TDs were fielding more and more complaints from supporters who wanted to know “why our posters aren’t as good”.
By Friday, Fine Gael was stressing that Connolly had enjoyed the financial backing of Sinn Féin, “the richest party in the State”.
It was only in the final week that Fine Gael started to truly appreciate that its one party press office was competing against the five party press offices supporting Connolly.
One night in the second last week of the campaign, a gloom descended on the campaign. Details of The Irish Times/Ipsos B&A opinion poll the following morning had started to leak: Connolly was close to lapping Humphreys at 38 per cent to 20 per cent, the poll showed. Febrile panic was followed by cold certainty: Fine Gael had to arrest Connolly’s momentum.
And so came one of the defining moments of the campaign, when a now infamous attack video was released that accused the left-wing candidate of hypocrisy for her role acting as a barrister for banks in repossession cases.
[ The three viral moments that swung the election campaign for Catherine ConnollyOpens in new window ]
Senior Fine Gael figures outside of the core campaign were somewhat mystified by the decision to focus on repossessions rather than compiling a video of things Connolly has said about the European Union.
The video was accompanied by a front-page story in the Sunday Independent, where Humphreys implied that Connolly had made money “out of people’s misfortune”.
It didn’t work. And it pushed Humphreys into even more uncomfortable terrain. In the last week of the campaign, what should have been a strong press conference surrounded by independent supporters such as Independents Michael Healy-Rae and Marian Harkin became one of Humphreys’s worst.
Asked about her comments just days previously, she tried to resile from them: “No, I did not say that. I did not say that ... no, please, I did not say that.”
This weekend, Fine Gael consoled itself by comparing this outcome with the nadir of its presidential elections: the 6.4 per cent result for Gay Mitchell in the 2011 presidential election.
Some of Humphreys’s team were emotional on Friday, from the bittersweet cocktail of pride and disappointment.
Most people emerge from presidential campaigns destroyed. Her allies at least feel that Humphreys has lost with grace.
“She can leave it with her head held high,” one friend said.
