"THAT blonde woman from the Women's Coalition." This is how many people refer to Monica McWilliams, the main public face of the party which does not have a formal leader.
If this month's referendum on the Belfast Agreement is passed, the party will be working hard to turn such vague recognition into votes for Ms McWilliams and up to five other candidates in the election to the Northern Ireland assembly in June.
The flood of congratulatory cards and phone calls from well-wishers to the party's south Belfast offices attest to the fact that it is at the peak of its popularity in the wake of the agreement - but it is also at its most vulnerable.
It is facing its fourth costly election campaign in two years, as well as the very real possibility that it will not get a candidate elected to the assembly to implement the peace agreement in which it had such a valued hand. Ms McWilliams says she was "gutted" when the SDLP and the UUP rejected a "top-up" or list voting system to the assembly which would have guaranteed the Women's Coalition a seat. The system, which would also have secured one seat each for the UDP and the PUP, had been on the table until 6 a.m. on the day the agreement was finally signed, she says.
It was the use of a different type of top-up system at the 1996 forum elections which gave the Women's Coalition two seats at the talks table with only 7,000 votes.
"I didn't think that it could have been so difficult," says Ms McWilliams, sitting at the dining room table of her south Belfast home eating bread and pate.
"Decommissioning was getting resolved, prisoners were getting resolved, the voting mechanisms in the new assembly were getting resolved, but the one thing that they could not give on was the election system which would have created a more inclusive assembly.
"I began to think: `Is it that we are such a threat? Why is it that they are so determined to exclude the very people who made this thing work?' It wasn't just about us; it was also about the loyalist parties, but I do believe it was truly about us too; that they had had enough. We had done a good job and made the project of the negotiations our job and would we please just quietly go away."
The upshot of the PR single transferable vote electoral system finally agreed for elections to the assembly is that Ms McWilliams and her party colleagues will be "competing for crumbs from the table" with parties such as the UDP, the PUP, the Green Party, the Workers' Party and Democratic Left.
Ms McWilliams says her party is determined to turn around this setback and "convince enough people who feel as strongly as we do that they want to create a different type of assembly to give us their first-preference votes".
It is considering fielding up to six candidates in the 18-constituency elections, provided it can raise enough funds to support their campaigns. Ms McWilliams will contest South Belfast while the party's only local councillor, Ms Anne Carr, will contest South Down.
Ms Pearl Sagar, Ms McWilliams's colleague in the peace talks, is also likely to stand, but the constituency has not yet been agreed. No firm decisions have been made on the other runners.
Out of all the candidates, Ms McWilliams has the best chance of success. If elected, she says her priorities would be to "bed down" the agreement, try to make the assembly as stable as possible and forge alliances. She is at pains to point out that if she is elected, she would be only the public face of a group of skilled backroom workers whose diligence and dedication she praises highly.
She is candid about the difficulties facing the party in the months and years ahead. If it does not secure any seats at the assembly, she says it will remain as a lobbying organisation and will contest further local elections.
Sinn Fein's negotiator, Ms Dodie McGuinness, says the assembly would be poorer if the Women's Coalition did not secure a seat. "They would be missed," she says. "They worked hard at trying to be positive and it would be a pity if they didn't get in."
She hopes the Women's Coalition, if not elected, would have influence through the Civic Forum, a consultative body to the assembly made up of representatives of business, trade union and voluntary sectors.
There have been attempts, both tentative and not so tentative, by other parties to poach members of the Women's Coalition. While a member of the Women's Coalition could "partially find a home", in all the other political parties, she says she feels it would be unfair to "pluck them" at the moment. "We are in transition and the Women's Coalition is of its time and that time isn't over and it needs to live out its potential and it will know when to abolish itself or stand down and that time isn't now." "In fact, if ever it was needed more it's needed now. Because we've got an agreement, people shouldn't think that the resources should disappear. They should be- come even bigger now because we need support . . . it's a dangerous enough time because after conflict, in history women have been told to go back home, that they've done their job. But it's an unfinished business and we haven't got there yet and we'll know when we have. And that's not a threat to men and other parties, it's an offering, a gift, an opportunity."
In two months Ms McWilliams will either be a member of the new Northern Ireland assembly or will be preparing to return to her job at the University of Ulster from which she has been on leave of absence for two years.
She was recently promoted from senior lecturer in social and community studies to a professorship. "It would be a huge difference for me to have to go back, open my office doors and start again, but that's OK. Everybody starts again. It was a big risk that I took two years ago in running for the forum in the first place, so that's fine."
The party launches its Yes campaign for the referendum on Friday. It plans to bring a referendum bus, decorated with balloons, to towns around the North to hold meetings and distribute "fact and myth" leaflets on the Belfast Agreement. The party is proud of its input into the agreement, which includes gender-proofing it and ensuring the recognition of the rights of victims and women.
"One of the things we couldn't do," explains Ms McWilliams, "was change the Secretary of State being referred to as a him in the agreement, because we were told that there was some 16th-century statute that decreed that all government documents referred to him, not her. We couldn't get them to change that, no matter how much we told them that it was ridiculous."