The nomination of Prof Mary McAleese is a classic example of how media pundits can get it all wrong. When she announced her candidacy on radio on Wednesday last week, she was virtually ignored. A profile in this newspaper on Saturday said Fianna Fail did not see her as one of its own and that would be enough to ensure that she was not chosen as its presidential candidate. That was before the emergence of Ms Adi Roche as Labour's candidate, the refusal of Mr Ray MacSharry to allow his name to go forward for Fianna Fail, and the last-ditch moves by the Fianna Fail leadership to ensure that Mr Albert Reynolds did not prevail.
It is not the first time the Dublin media have misjudged the feisty Queen's University law professor and pro vice-chancellor. Her surprise appearance in the Catholic Hierarchy's delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984 has made her something of a bete noire for the Dublin media ever since.
The distaste has often been mutual. Referring to her brief second career as an RTE presenter and reporter, she said her presence beside the bishops meant she was perceived as "having broken ranks with the trendy image of the journalist into which I had been pigeon-holed by people who don't know me".
She is a devout Catholic who is able to talk unself-consciously about her "spiritual and prayerful side". She says her religion enabled her to overcome the despair and anger of seeing her family put out of their home by loyalist gunmen and her deaf brother beaten senseless in a sectarian murder attempt.
Those experiences made her into that rare Northern phenomenon, a pacifist. However, in other respects, when she talks about Northern Catholics, she could be speaking about herself. "Mainly on account of people having suffered a great deal, their devotion is enhanced. But the world changes: openness on sexuality, women, the breakdown of the class structure, have all affected the way people look at the church as well."
That sentence should be a caution to anyone trying to caricature Prof McAleese as "the thinking person's Dana". Within the church, she is known as a courageous critic of the injustices of a hierarchical power structure and a strong advocate of women priests. She is widely admired by Catholic women - and others - for her thoughtful and outspoken feminism.
She is also a convinced ecumenist. A leading Protestant layman who worked with her on a groundbreaking inter-church report on sectarianism says: "She is no triumphalist Catholic wanting to stick people's noses in the dirt. She can be a tough cookie but she strikes me as the sort of person who would strive to be fair and understand other people's point of view, particularly those of Protestants."
Her nationalism is similarly sophisticated. She remembers the New Ireland Forum as being the point when "nationalists started to get their voice back". Up to then they had been ground between the "revisionists saying nationalism is dead and gone" and "the Provos saying we are supernationalists, the true voice and the only voice".
The forum planted the seeds of nationalist flexibility, she believes, allowing for the first discussion of joint sovereignty and leading to the historic developments of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration and the current peace process.
As an outstanding and outspoken representative of the rising Northern nationalist middle-class, she arouses strong feelings among unionists. When she left her job as Reid professor of criminal law at Trinity College Dublin to become director of Queen's University's Institute of Professional Legal Studies, she ran into a storm of controversy. Questions in the Commons about her suitability were couched in language which only barely covered their sectarian undertone.
Unionists are not the only people who don't like her. Southern liberals continue to view her as a conservative, anti-abortion Catholic. Many of her fellow Northern academics dislike her brashness and occasional abrasiveness. They resent her obvious ambition and "can-do" self-confidence.
She is superbly articulate, the kind of Northern straight-talker who makes many Southerners feel uncomfortable. She is a fighter; when attacked, she defends herself with a mixture of the rapier and the bludgeon.
If she does not allow her natural combativeness to be curbed by her Fianna Fail handlers, her involvement in the presidential campaign will add greatly to its liveliness and will do much to raise its intellectual level.