Prof Mary McAleese detects a kind of view here that if you offer yourself for leadership you are somehow lacking in humility. "The truth of the matter," she says, "is that to offer yourself for public leadership takes a lot of effort. "You put your head above the parapet and you get it cut off immediately by a journalist or by somebody writing you off as a selfish politician. I have enormous admiration for people who are prepared to make that kind of sacrifice."
Talking to Prof McAleese, the presidential candidate for Fianna Fail and the PDs, you know that - barring the accident that she fears or the spillover of the shenanigans in Fianna Fail - she expects her sacrifice to pay off. Above all else, she doesn't want to be pigeonholed into her past.
She likes to show her skills on the constitutional questions. All of the candidates are presenting themselves as clones of Mary Robinson. What would she do differently?
"I believe it is wrong to suggest that people will clone Mary Robinson. In some senses, it is an ironic thing because Mary herself was regarded as having brought such unique skills to the office.
"I think it is true that the role does wrap itself to some extent around the personality of the person. It is very wrong to suggest it is cloning. Mary Robinson's Presidency was texturally different to other Presidencies."
Prof McAleese believes that there are many things that she can do differently. There were many groups, for example, which felt for the first time that a spotlight had come on them - areas of disability, areas of care, more obscure minority areas. They are entitled, she says, to feel they will lose nothing from the incoming President.
There are other groups, in her view, who may have felt during Mary Robinson's Presidency that they wanted to be involved. It was not possible to get around to everybody, even in the seven years. "There remain groups which still want to be included. I want to do that.
"One thing I didn't hear Mary Robinson talk very much about and I feel very strongly about is the culture of cynicism," she says. "It robs people, particularly young people, of the right to feel confident and hopeful about their country." She would particularly like to engage in a two-way dialogue with the young people of Ireland. She wants to set up a Website at the Aras to permit "a very technologically-literate generation" to have direct access to the President. That, she opines, would be qualitatively different. She says she is very comfortable around the best of modern technology, having been in charge of the development of the Website at Queen's University.
She agrees that the material she would put on the Website would have to have the approval of the Government. "You are absolutely right. It is not possible for a President to act without the approval of the Government and it is very important that that dialogue would be fairly within the four walls of the Constitution."
She is thinking of providing a virtual tour of the Aras. It would give access globally to the Irish abroad, whether first or 10th generation, who want some point of connection.
"I think it is also important to have a facility for open-ended dialogue. I said to the students in UCD that I believe in upward appraisal. I believe in opening dialogue and listening. So I would like to be able to use the Web. I would have to be very careful about doing that so that one doesn't appear, at the end of the day, to be talking over the head of the Government."
She hasn't a clue, at the moment, who will be her adviser, her Bride Rosney. She hasn't given the remotest thought to that. But it will be the best person for the job.
She is circumspect when asked if she could envisage any circumstances in which she would exercise the President's one absolute power, under Article 13 (ii), to refuse to grant a Taoiseach a dissolution of the Dail.
"I think it would be entirely wrong for anybody seeking the role of President to now, at this stage, back themselves into a corner and prescribe a way forward for a situation which, if it were to happen, would be a fairly unique and rare event. "If that unique and rare event were to happen, I think that you would expect that a President would act, rather than referring back to a determination made years earlier, but would actually look at the circumstances that operated on the day and would exercise the absolute calmest of wise judgements and make the right decision on the day."
When it is pointed out that there never was a determination made on this Article, she responds: "Yes. You have to have an open mind. To try and restrict one's mind now would be entirely wrong-headed."
Would she always accept the Government's advice on other matters? The President is obliged to accept the Government's advice on, say, signing legislation, promulgating legislation, making judicial appointments or appointing Government Ministers, she explains.
In relation to other matters, say, a visit abroad where a President might want to do a particular thing, Prof McAleese would expect, as a professional person, that if you had a view you could talk to the government of the day and come to a common way forward. "It wouldn't be a situation where you would be challenging the government but, rather, that you would work towards a consensus that everyone would be happy with."
She holds the firm view that there is nothing that obliges the President to take the Council of State's advice on the referral of Bills to the Supreme Court. The President consults with the Council of State but, ultimately, it is the President who makes the judgment call.
"That is the lonely part of the office. That is where the buck stops. That is why you choose a person of a particular calibre with a certain background of making wise judgments, with a certain degree of skills in making these judgments."
She asserts that it would be entirely wrong to say, at this stage, that a President would always accept the Council of State's advice - "to do that would make a President impeachable actually, because the Constitution says very firmly that the President consults but then the President alone decides".
As a bridge-builder, she would like to be able to have cross-representation on the Council of State. She would like to see young people represented, not by an older voice, but somebody who is credible to them in their own voice and their own language. She agrees that it would be important to have Northern representation, though "not necessarily in the plural". Given the range of bridges she has talked about - north/south, east/west, young/old, modern/traditional, urban/rural, - she would love to be able to find a mix of people who would be genuinely representative of all these diverse strands. One person might represent two or three strands.
The candle in the window is seen by Prof McAleese as one of these desperately simple things which has struck a chord with people. One exile told her that he came home and stood in the Phoenix Park and that he cried when he saw it.
She intends to use a tilly lamp given by Davy Hammond, a well-known folklorist, writer, musician and film-maker, to her children some months ago "to light their dark paths on the highways and byways of Roscommon".
That lamp, she says, comes out of a deep friendship across the traditions in Northern Ireland. She would view it as both a symbol to the emigrants abroad and to the unionist tradition in the North.
There are a number of places where she would like to travel, places that she has not been, places where the Irish have flourished and places where the name of Ireland is still relatively unknown. She would like, in particular, to bring a flavour of the young people of Ireland to China, the Far East and the Middle East.
Prof McAleese, who held such strong views on the social issues which divided Irish society in the 1980s, is adamant that she does not want to be "pigeonholed". She has to be challenged to explain, if she was "pigeonholed" in the past, where she stands now. She was in favour of putting the so-called "prolife" clause into the Constitution in 1983.
"I voted in favour of that amendment. I took no hand, act or part in the debate publicly. I worked in RTE during that campaign."
She says that she has always had, and maintained, a very strong commitment to the right to life of the unborn. It is a commitment that is no different from that of the vast majority of Irish people. It is a mainstream view "so how it can be regarded as being right, left or in the middle I find difficult to understand".
But looking at the evolution of the X case, would she now be in favour of another referendum to ban abortion in the Constitution? "One thing that is important to say is that I am not crusading on any of these issues now," she responds.
Q. I accept that. I just want to know where you are coming from.
A. "Where I am coming from is that my view on abortion remains the same. I still have exactly the same commitment to the right to life of the unborn that I always have had. That has not shifted one whit. How one protects that, what wording you use, what shape you put on the protection of that, well, there are a whole range of views out there."
Going back to the 1983 referendum, she explains, everybody who voted that day in favour of it was absolutely morally certain that they were copper-fastening it. Then along came the X case and we realised that when you copper-fasten something, you don't necessarily nail it shut forever. She thinks people are entitled to a range of views about how you protect the right to life of the unborn. "There are many, many people who share exactly the same perspective on the sacredness of human life and its right to be protected and, yet, debate and dispute whether legislation can do it, whether another referendum is needed, whether another referendum can do what everybody thinks it can do. My view of that is very simple. I am not in the business, either as a President or as a presidential candidate, in advising the best way forward," Prof McAleese continues.
If her aim was to copper-fasten a ban on abortion in the Constitution, does she regret the X case?
She doesn't believe that when the decision was taken in 1983 that anybody envisaged a situation like the X case arising.
"That just goes to show you how little any of us enjoy the gift of prophecy and how we do have to cope with changing circumstances and how we do have to say that what we thought we were doing at that time, what we thought was very correct, actually didn't produce the result that we thought.
"I could say to you, but I don't intend to, that I think the following wording could do the job because I can't be sure," Prof McAleese says. "I am not running for the Dail. In due course of time, people will think out these views and bring forward legislation or referenda with appropriate wording but, by that time, my fervent hope is that I will be President. And insofar as I have private views, those will remain. Those views will be of no more value than any private citizen."
Except that, in her case, as President, would she have any personal problem of conscience in signing abortion legislation into law? She responds: "I think if a person felt there were likely to be issues coming forward which would present them with personal difficulties, they should not be running for election."
Turning to divorce, she says that it is some time since she took part in a referendum on divorce. It goes way, way back to the 1980s. She did not take part in the recent referendum. The Irish people very cautiously adopted a very limited form of divorce "and I, as a President of Ireland, have to honour and abide by the decision of the Irish people. That decision is now made." Q. I heard you saying on radio that your role in the In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) video was as a journalist? A. That's right. Q. Is there not a difference? That video was made by Veritas Publications, which could be called a propaganda arm of the Catholic Church. Wouldn't you have to share their views?
Prof McAleese maintains that it is irrelevant what her views were. They weren't being asked or offered on "the IVF thing", she states. "It is important to say something about that.
"At that time, I didn't know anything about IVF. I don't think anybody did. We were all hearing it for the first time. This thing is donkeys years old."
She returns later to her part in the video. "First of all, I was not in that video. Whether I was a good journalist or a bad journalist is neither here nor there. I am prepared to accept that I may well have been a bad one. I wasn't trafficking my own views. We were all at the bottom of a learning curve about IVF.
"I think it was entirely right that a body like Veritas - actually it was the Catholic Communications Institute for whom I worked at that time - raised questions at a time when, perhaps, other people might not have raised them. I don't think I have anything to apologise for there. All of us, 10, 12 or 15 years later, know a lot more about it now."
What does she think now of Mr Charles Haughey, who added her to the Fianna Fail ticket in Dublin South-East in the 1987 general election? "Very disappointed", is her straight answer. When she came to Dublin as a young academic lawyer, she says, she started looking at legislation and every time that she saw something innovative or imaginative, his name was at the bottom of it. "I didn't know much about him, to be honest, coming here. I was intrigued by his creativity and imagination. I was very impressed by him. I think it is important to give him credit for his accomplishments. Like a lot of people now, I know what was also going on a parallel track. To say that I am disappointed would probably be an understatement."
She is careful to stick rigidly to the Fianna Fail line on Mr Ray Burke's resignation. She hopes that people now allow due process to take its course. She doesn't like trial by media. She doesn't like trial by innuendo. There is enough of the human rights activist and the lawyer in her, she adds, to be worried about a situation where we have trial by newspaper and trial by gossip.
"I know that he must have lived through very difficult times but I think there's something really rather tragic about a man, after long years of public service, at a time of great grief and tragedy in his personal life with his brother dying and very serious family illness on top of them as well, where he felt that he could not continue, not just as a Minister but even as a member of the Dail," she says.
She hopes now that he will be given peace and space for the tribunal. That tribunal will painstakingly and in a scholarly way present us with the truth "and when that truth is known at the end of a process of due process in which everybody's rights will be meticulously given space and credence and vindicated, I think it will be time enough then to make up our minds about these stories."
Q. Would you accept £30,000 in a brown envelope towards your campaign?
A. From an anonymous source?
Q. From anybody.
A. From anybody? I'd be very wary of it, I'll tell you the Lord's honest truth. I certainly would. In a brown envelope? The rules are there. Anything from a corporate donor over £4,000, you have to have the name and you have to publish it. Anything over £100 anonymously, you have to give straight back to Government. You'll be delighted to hear that nobody has offered me £30,000 in a brown envelope or any other envelope for that matter.