McAleese offers her heart and mind

The party faithful came to listen yesterday, and Mary McAleese boiled down her CV to two nuggets to be carried to the doorsteps. In their battle for hearts and minds, she told them, she had both heart and mind.

The organised love-ins could not have run more smoothly, with the well-oiled party machine working like a dream.

In Carrick-on-Shannon one party figure said he had received three phone-calls from headquarters about the meeting.

So they came and they liked what they saw. Three miles from the townland where her father was brought up she spoke of roots, childhood memories and the "aching hearts of mothers and fathers" whose children were forced to emigrate.

And lest anyone gag on that she lobbed a love bomb back at her rival Mary Banotti and those who balked at the language of the campaign so far.

She was "appalled when people run away from words like love," she said. So we had better get used to it.

Hers would be a Presidency about "captivating and holding in its embrace the large, colourful family that is the Irish people," bathing the whole meeting in a verbal waft of warm apple pie.

Her father Paddy Leneghan said it would be "powerful" to see his daughter in the Aras, but he would have a fair job mowing the lawns and taking the bins to the gate.

In Cavan town an elderly man struggled up the courthouse steps for the civic reception. Was she worth the climb? Absolutely, he said. "This is our new president, you know."

Accompanied by the Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, she told the urban and county councillors they "embrace the spirit of the nation beautifully" because they gave each candidate a civic reception.

She told them she would be an ambassador they could be proud of, she told them.

"I'm an Ulster woman and I'm an Irish woman," she said in Irish to the people from the Cavan cumann. "I think those are two very important credentials."

She wanted the 80 or so people in the room to "go away with a passion about me as a person". She would be an "antidote to cynics," a "shop window for Ireland and the personification of Ireland abroad". They stood up from the seats and clapped her loudly.