`Are you here to see Adi Roche?" the cashier asked me. No, I said, I was here to buy shampoo. "Here" being the Jervis Shopping Centre on Thursday.

"There they are, going up the escalator," the cashier said. "Adi Roche and Dick Spring." I stood behind a display of potted plants and watched as the procession came back downstairs and across the ground floor, the candidate going over and talking warmly to people sitting on benches, the musicians dutifully keeping their tune going, the rest of the procession walking leadenfooted, with grim expressions.

"Look like they're at a funeral, don't they?" a shopper muttered to me. "They are," I said, and she laughed.

I wasn't joking, however. I believe this presidential campaign is no triumph for anybody, but it is a tragedy for the Labour Party candidate and for the Labour Party leadership. It is politically naive to believe that fame centring on a single issue can be spread out by a political party to embrace the whole nation.

Adi Roche became the Angel of Chernobyl through obsession with a single issue. She did it through impulsive force of personality. Even in the small charitable organisation within which she worked, that force of personality was too much for some people, who left rather than continue to work with her. But she drove towards that single objective with huge success.

The impulsive personality which was Adi Roche's greatest asset before the campaign became her greatest liability during it. Personal beliefs, honestly stated, became lethal boomerangs.

Within weeks of the opening of what she had predicted would be "a fun campaign", we watched her on The Late Late Show, rigid with tension, sounding like a learner politician as she "welcomed the opportunity to clarify" issues like halting sites and cattle exports.

If the Labour Party leadership had a conscience, it should spend the next few weeks examining it thoroughly, starting by asking how much damage has been done to a nationally admired individual by the exploitation of her naivety, and how much permanent damage may be done to the prospects of her charity. But the examination of conscience should go deeper than that. Time was when we were told the Labour Party stood for the marginalised, not the popular, when it represented the unknowns; not the household names, when it believed in growing its own; not grafting on outsiders who might (or in this case might not) share Labour Party beliefs and policies.

In an earlier column, I suggested that Dick Spring's latter days in the leadership of his party might best be summed up in the phrase "hunted heads are soon forgotten", since the failure of the Orla Guerin and Adi Roche headhunting expeditions not only underline the fact that he simply got lucky with Mary Robinson, but also underline his continuing contempt for members of his own party.

Those members - like Michael D. Higgins - may have done the dog-work for years, but they're not the elite from which the leader and his adviser choose candidates.

If the sound of exploding myths can be heard all around Adi Roche's campaign, the same noise is still echoing from the Derek Nally camp. Another of the people whose reputation is largely based on claims to have invented Mary Robinson developed a "strategy" for Derek Nally, and when Nally wouldn't follow it, called him a cheapskate.

It's a new marketing approach this, for an adviser: attack whom I tell you to attack, eat porridge and remind yourself on a daily basis that you're a cop, or I'll thump you in the media. The John Caden/Eoghan Harris episode probably didn't do Derek Nally any good, but it didn't do him any great harm, either.

The well-placed leaks may have done Mary McAleese more good than harm. It wouldn't be the first time that an elaborate stroke left more of a bruise on the giver than on the receiver.

Certainly, meeting Fianna Fail activists over the last 48 hours, the message coming through was that people who were less than enthusiastic about the way she had been selected, and who were, as a result, not pushed about working for the campaign and perhaps not even pushed about voting for her, were galvanised into solidarity by John Bruton's attempts to capitalise on the leaks.

The first effect of the way the leaks were orchestrated was to drive the McAleese camp briefly into siege mentality. Watching that night's TV coverage would have made any floating voter feel they were seeing a revival of the worst side of Fianna Fail over the past 20 years.

Noel Dempsey coming out with his hands up the day after was a wise move on a number of fronts. It indicated that the refusal to answer questions had not been driven by arrogance on the part of the candidate. But it also indicated a younger approach: a realisation that it does nobody any good to circle the wagons around a misjudgment.

Let nobody doubt, however, that the wagons have now circled around a candidate against whom disreputable tactics have been used, and that the end result of this too-clever tactic is a hardening of Fianna Fail support behind Mary McAleese. By literally one stroke she has been moved from a "blow-in" to "one of our own". And Fianna Fail is good at supporting the latter.

Mary Banotti, meanwhile, is like someone suffering panic over an exam she doesn't have to take. On The Late Late Show her head darted this way and that as if she didn't know which side the killer attack was going to come from.

The reality is that the only damage done to her candidacy so far was done by the dig taken on Questions & Answers about Northern origins. All she has to do to maximise first preferences and transfers is to stay out of controversy and look a lot less anxious.

Short of a miracle, Dana will not be our next president. The Late Late Show forced many people not only to notice her for the first time but to admire the sparky resilience of a woman so firmly centred in real convictions that she could relish the arguments and display an admirable sense of humour under pressure.

If you compare the two younger women in this campaign, one of them started with popular views and reputation, a big machine, a big bus and all the campaign expertise she could need, whereas the other started with an outdated fame, unfashionable views, no machine and demonstrably no campaign expertise.

Yet the first looks defeated long before polling date, while the second looks like a winner. Anyone trying to call it at this stage would be missing the significance of two pockets of potential secret votes. There may well be large numbers of men who, although they wouldn't tell an opinion poller about it, are going to strike a blow for the brotherhood by voting for Nally.

Just as likely, if not more likely, is that there are many voters out there who are not currently advertising their intention of making the "uncool" gesture of voting for Dana, but who will do the deed on the day.

If both of those pockets are sizeable, the randomness of the ensuing second preferences could play hell with reasonable expectations. But, at this point, reasonable expectations would have Mary McAleese as our next president, with Mary Banotti in a better second place than might have been expected.