The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr David Andrews, well reflected the gravity of the series of leaks from his Department when he spoke yesterday on RTE radio. It would be difficult to overstate the damage which has been done to the State's mechanisms for evaluating matters which bear upon its role in maintaining a manageable stability on the island. It is not simply a question of what has been revealed, for the details which have been dribbled out are relatively insignificant in themselves. Nor is it, as first appeared, an isolated instance of a sheet of paper going astray. It is the fact of supposedly confidential information being purloined in volume from departmental files. Dozens of sources, vital to Irish diplomats in the North, in Britain, in the US and elsewhere will have dried up. This is the perspective from which one must view the smear attempts. Whatever political advantage their authors sought to achieve has been bought at a high price. One has to wonder who, among politicians or officials, could be so callously indifferent to the national interest, who would play fast and loose with the peace process to swing second-preference votes. That Prof McAleese's electoral prospects have been damaged over recent days is hardly in doubt. That might not necessarily have been so after the first leak to The Sunday Business Post. But Fine Gael in particular has exploited the opening provided by Mr Gerry Adams's unsolicited declaration that if he had a vote he would cast it for her. Mr Bruton let himself down badly by choosing to ride on the coattails of Mr Adams's remarks, adding cynically to the smear on Prof McAleese.
For all the leaks, for all of Mr Bruton's doubtful tactics, for all the rantings of Mr Harris, Prof McAleese has no case to answer on the charges that she is a supporter of Sinn Fein. Not a single word she has spoken, not a single line she has written places her in that dubious category. She has taken no public stances, lent her name to no movements or petitions, marched not a single step in support of any one of Sinn Fein's particular demands or policies. On her own declaration, she has never voted for them.
She is a Northern Catholic with an instinctive Irish identity. She is the product of her genes, her tribe, her education and her environment. But nowhere is there a justification for attaching to her sinister terms such as "a green nationalist of the darkest shade" or "a strident nationalist". The SDLP's Mrs Brid Rodgers told a Foreign Affairs official that in her view Prof McAleese was following a Sinn Fein agenda. But Mrs Rodgers had the same view of the editorial policy of the Irish News, a journal implacably opposed to violence. In evaluating her opinion it should be borne in mind that she is also a member of a party which can only decline if Sinn Fein prospers. These are sensitive times for SDLP members.
Prof McAleese has created credibility problems for herself however. Her attempts to portray her candidacy as receiving widespread unionist support have unravelled. And her claims to have supported the SDLP appear to have been exaggerated. She is also on poor ground in her failure to come up front on her nationalist instincts. She speaks of building bridges. But she has been disappointingly silent on how she will do this. And to whom they will be built. If she has a vision of how a nationalist president can reach out the hand of friendship to those across the divide she has not articulated it. She has fallen into Fianna Fail's mould of being long on the rhetoric of the national destiny and short on how to show practical generosity.