Thirteen years ago Charles Haughey described her as "just out on her own" and his party colleague Mary Harney said she was able and willing. Six weeks ago most people knew her simply as the woman who was pulled from a hat to oust Albert. Now Mary McAleese is President-elect of Ireland.
Before she was nominated, the 46-yearold lawyer and academic complained that she was "pigeonholed by people who don't know me". Over the weeks, she told dozens of rooms filled with supporters that she wanted them to "get the measure of me".
Mary McAleese measured seven pages in a CV supplied by Fianna Fail packed with qualifications for the big job. Her role in the peace process as a member of the Redemptorist Peace Mission was not in the CV. Its drip-feed revelation over two weeks in leaked of Department of Foreign Affairs documents prompted bitter exchanges.
Impatient with questions about her role, she called the issue the "single transferable question".
The refusal of "the Sinn Fein thing" to go away pushed the many other aspects that make up Mary McAleese firmly into the background.
She was a strident campaigner for women priests and a strident opponent of contraception and the granting of an abortion to a 14year-old girl who had been raped. She has spoken against integrated education for Catholic and Protestant children and supported the reform of the law on homosexuality.
The committed Catholic who spoke loudly and often about her faith resigned from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties after it opposed the abortion amendment. In 1983 she criticised publicly the judgment of a High Court judge in less than lawyerly terms. The following year she clashed publicly with a well-known barrister over her views on divorce.
Mary McAleese, the mother of three children, was born Mary Leneghan in Belfast in 1951, the eldest of nine children. Her father Paddy Leneghan from Croghan, Co Roscommon, had moved to Belfast at the age of 14 to find work. By 1972 he owned two pubs, one off the Falls Road. Her mother, Claire, was from Co Derry.
Education was important in the Leneghan household, and she is described by her family as ambitious from an early age. At St Dominic's High School on the Falls Road she was head girl in her final year and chairwoman of the school debating team.
During the campaign, she spoke of the importance of one teacher who knew her difficulties at home where study for her A-levels was disrupted by a busy household of younger children. The teacher drove her to and from school, saving her several bus journeys, she said.
She graduated with an honours law degree from Queen's University Belfast in 1973. While she was at Queen's, her family moved to Rostrevor, Co Down, because of sectarian attacks on the family home and pubs.
She studied at the bar for a further year and was apprenticed to barrister Peter Smith, chairman of the South Belfast Ulster Unionist Party branch, now a QC. She dealt mainly with criminal and family law cases. After a year of practice, she succeeded Mary Robinson in 1975 as the Reid Professor of Criminal Law in Trinity College Dublin.
Much was made of her similarities with Mary Robinson during her campaign. Swooning supporters and party faithful murmured how much she was like the former president. But while their career paths may have converged, the two women were very different.
One of the controversies of Mrs Robinson's presidency surrounded her meeting Pope John Paul II without the regulation black mantilla. From a story related by Mrs McAleese to Fionnuala O'Connor for her book In Search of a State the President-elect appears to have more traditional views of traditional religious garb.
"On a visit to Paris, Mary McAleese was invited to a reception to meet the man due to take over as rector in Ardoyne: she looked in vain for someone in black and was introduced instead to `an extremely handsome man in double-breasted French suit, a soft greyish-blue, Italian shoes, perfectly coiffed, with a wee discreet cross. `I'm Father Eugene,' says he.
" `You're what?' says I. `Are you the one's going to Ardoyne tomorrow? I hope to hell you've a black suit - I hope you're not going in that there.' The man was mortified, he said he hadn't had a black suit in years. . .and what did he meet when he got to Ardoyne? Two and a half thousand people just like me. He had a tough time."
Her attitude "wasn't just brute ignorant prejudice on my part," she said. "I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I took a great pride that our priests could walk freely through Ardoyne, wearing their clerical garb, and that it was a kind of witness."
In 1979 Mrs McAleese joined RTE as a journalist and presenter. She speaks about that experience with disgust. The bitterness may explain her fury in the past weeks at what she saw as a witch-hunt.
"That bit of the Republic I found very hard," she said of some of her colleagues in RTE. "I think that almost created the syndrome of the apologetic Northern Catholic: the atmosphere in which if you did not become apologetic about the IRA, you were in serious danger of being written off as a Provo."
It was after she returned as Reid Professor in 1981 that Mrs McAleese became the subject of newspaper reports. In 1983 at one of her first public seminars, she lambasted the prison system and criticised petty disputes of prison officers. "It is hard to find sympathy for a bunch of men who are incredibly well paid for a job which requires so very little aptitude," she said.
In an article in the Dublin University Law Journal the same year, she savaged the judgment of the man who will swear her into office, the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Liam Hamilton, then a High Court judge.
"Not only was the interpretation of the few authorities he [Hamilton] did consider open to serious question, but his failure to consult Withers, the leading English authority on the subject, was simply inexplicable."
The criticism of such a senior figure raised some legal eyebrows, especially in its language. "The decision is, in thoroughly non-legal parlance, likely to give academic criminal lawyers a severe case of the screaming abdabs," she wrote.
A few months later, Mrs McAleese was part of the Catholic bishops' delegation to the New Ireland Forum. Later she would say it was because of her public alignment with the church that her membership of the National Union of Journalists was withdrawn. The NUJ argued that it was because she was double-jobbing as a journalist and academic.
Her role at the forum went against the grain of the "trendy journalist", she said.
Her submissions to the forum presented the progressive side of the church, especially on the question of the separation of church and State. "The church does not want a Catholic State for a Catholic people," she said.
"The church believes in marriage as a sacrament, as an indissoluble union, as a contract for life. It is entitled to hold that view and to preach that view to its flock. Its sole jurisdiction is in relation to its flock.
"It does not seek to have any jurisdiction beyond that. It is not entitled to, nor does it seek to, tell any government that the Catholic view of marriage should be enshrined in legislation because it is the Catholic view."
The church had the right to comment and state its views, but not to dictate.
Asked about the response to the 1981 hunger-strikes she said: "The single most frightening factor to emerge in recent times, which is a good indicator of the alienation in the North, is the fact that 100,000 people saw fit to vote for Sinn Fein. . . That is a factor that we must worry about because, as I have said, many people who put their vote in the box for Sinn Fein did not give their vote to violence but gave it out of a sense of frustration of the small person against the big system by which he is oppressed, a way of telling people `I am fed up; do something for me'."
Answering a question from Senator Mary Robinson on the rights of minorities, Mrs McAleese said there was a suggestion this referred to the constitutional ban on divorce.
"It is a pity that civil and religious liberty almost invariably revolves around solely the question of divorce because certainly if divorce and contraception are to be seen as the hallmarks of a liberal society then Northern Ireland was a very liberal, pluralist society a long time ago."
Her most dogmatic statement was her opposition to interdenominational schools. "The notion that consensus comes from contact or even that understanding comes from contact is wrong. It is a dubious and simplistic notion. . . I myself lived in an area, which is often described as a flashpoint area, known as Ardoyne. It was a mixed area as I was growing up. I had tremendous contact with Protestant neighbours, played with them. They were in and out of my home, but it did not stop one of them from becoming a member of the UDA and now doing a life sentence for killing five Catholics."
A Catholic education "arises in the context, not out of a desire to create a sectarian education system but out of a genuine desire to extend the home vision, the vision of a Catholic way, the way of life simply to the school," she said.
"I have very grave doubts from my own direct experience about the ability of the school to break down sectarian prejudice."
She repeated this view last year in an interview with the Redemptorist magazine, Reality. It was "quite dangerous", she said, to integrate Catholic and Protestant children in schools. "Until the adults in this community are capable of relating to each other, it is actually quite mischievous, if not quite dangerous, to insist that the children should integrate."
Interviewed in February 1984, she said she was not interested in a career in politics at that time because it would mean putting her family life on hold. Speaking about her husband, Martin, she described him as "a very calm person, whereas I'm a bit fiery. We're a good match."
In a further interview, she was asked about her admiration for Charles Haughey. He had described her at a Fianna Fail national women's conference a month earlier as "just out on her own," and she was widely seen as the darling of a party leader anxious to be seen to be promoting women.
"I admire in him predominantly his staying power and the ability not to cave in in the face of the relentless pursuit of him by the media," she said.
She said she was opposed to contraception, and she and her husband had used the rhythm method. "I don't want to ram rhythm down people's throats. I think it's a deeply private matter, but I do think it has the potential to enhance a relationship because it involves both partners."
Asked about her anti-abortion stance, she said she was against abortion for rape victims, describing it as "a rather primitive act of revenge or retribution vented on a foetus."
However, her strict Catholicism was not easily pigeonholed. She supported David Norris in his High Court case to have the legislation on homosexual conduct declared unconstitutional.
In an interview in 1984, she said about her religion: "I hate the idea which some people have that if you're a Catholic you can't think for yourself, that you think exactly what the bishops tell you to. I see the Catholic Church as something which is moving and dynamic. The core of belief obviously remains the same, but I feel that I belong to a vibrant church, one that is capable of learning and of developing."
On other issues she was more dogmatic. She wrote a stinging response to barrister Adrian Hardiman, who had paraphrased her views on divorce in another newspaper. "Mr Hardiman believes passionately in divorce. There are better ways of converting others to his view than by bludgeoning them with his vitriol or accusing them of dishonesty," she replied.
She scripted and presented a 52-minute Veritas anti-divorce video which went on sale in May 1986. And in November of that year Mr Haughey added her to the Fianna Fail ticket in Dublin South East. She was defeated in the election that followed in February 1987.
That year she also took part in a Catholic church video opposing in-vitro fertilisation. In the video, she interviewed an Australian Anglican priest who said 90 per cent of women who use IVF treatment because of blocked or damaged fallopian tubes had caused the damage themselves through abortion, sexually transmitted disease or the use of the IUD contraceptive.
She did not challenge this claim and asked the priest: "Is this apparent compassionate technique actually dangerous and subtle?" She also asked: "What kind of dangers are there, especially for children?"
In April 1987, as chairwoman of the Constitution Rights Campaign which lobbied against the Single European Act, she said the Act would threaten the constitutional right to life of the unborn and Ireland's neutrality.
Her stance on abortion was clearly spelt out in a letter to the Irish Press in October 1992, which she signed with the anti-abortion campaigners Patricia Casey, UCD professor of psychiatry, and Cornelius O'Leary, political science professor at Queen's.
The letter, urging a Yes vote in the abortion referendum, criticised the Supreme Court decision in the X case.
"The Supreme Court decision in the case of the Attorney General versus X contradicted the express will of the Irish people as well as decades of medical and legal practice by permitting the direct abortion of the unwanted child.
"Since that decision many voices have argued against another constitutional referendum, claiming that the matter is too complex and divisive. They have stated their preference for dealing with the matter by legislation, even though to do so would enshrine the X judgment in Irish law, thus making for easy access to abortion.
"In spite of such opposition, the Government has courageously chosen to provide the Irish people with an opportunity to overturn the Supreme Court decision. We particularly welcome the government's recognition that threat of suicide provides no medical justification whatever for abortion."
At a meeting organised by the group campaigning for women priests in 1995, Mrs McAleese said the introduction of altar girls was "a small first victory for Christian feminists within the Catholic Church, among whom are a highly educated generation of young men and women who will not suffer sexist fools gladly."
She said she had difficulty with the idea of "a God who for reasons which look suspiciously like dressed-up misogyny has confined priesthood to men."
In one of her most trenchant criticisms of the status quo in the Catholic Church she wrote in the Tablet this year about the change in the "dynamics of the priesthood," and the role the Irish mother played in promoting an all-male hierarchy.
"Women have observed the enormous drain of heterosexual males from the priesthood and the growing phenomenon of gay priests. They are quietly asking what is happening at the core of the call to priesthood that attracts homosexuals in much greater numbers than their population distribution would explain.
"These questions are not being raised in any homophobic way but are among the raft of questions bubbling to the surface as we struggle to come to terms with the manifest demise of the model of priesthood on which the priest-mother alliance was once founded and is now foundering."
Mary McAleese's opinions have been strongly held and loudly voiced. Much of her life has been based on saying what she thinks and criticising those she believes are wrong, no matter how powerful they are.
Earlier this month she told The Irish Times that, as President, "those views will be of no more value than those of any private citizen." It remains to be seen if Mrs McAleese will be happy to put the expression of her views and beliefs on ice for her sevenyear Presidency.