The election of Vicente Fox as Mexico's new president will have gladdened the hearts of many people, not least we (fighting) Irish. To start with, it is always pleasant to see dictatorships toppled, and the laughingly named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico, which governed for 71 years, was for all purposes a dictatorship - regularly buying votes, fixing elections and running an entirely corrupt patronage system in the civil service and state enterprises, while at the same time doing little to ease Mexico's huge problems of poverty and drug addiction.
But it is the person and personality of Vicente Fox himself which have provided much of the cheer and the freshness. At 58, Senor Fox is a fine figure of a man, standing six feet six inches tall, dwarfing most of his compatriots. They literally look up to him. He is notoriously brash, not to say downright rude: early in the campaign, he described his main opponent as a cissy, a shorty and a transvestite. He is an outgoing rancher who likes to wear cowboy boots and ride to political rallies on horseback. He is refreshingly honest about his personal situation - he is a divorced churchgoing Catholic with four children, but claims he has "52 million girlfriends" - the female population of Mexico.
What's more, he's Irish. Well, not exactly. But he has Irish blood. He is not one of the Attymas or Ennistymon Foxes, but his grandfather is Irish. One of nine children, Vicente is the grandson of an Irish immigrant who bought the family ranch in Mexico in 1913.
During the election campaign, it was also one of Vicente Fox's proudest boasts that among the five candidates, he was the only one who had milked a cow.
There must be lessons here for Irish politicians. Not necessarily for presidential candidates of course: in Mexico, the president is the head of government, while our own beloved President holds "merely" a titular position. It would probably not have gone down well if Mrs McAleese, during her Presidential campaign, had referred to any of the other candidates as cissies, shorties or transvestites. It might have backfired on her. On the other hand, if our attractive President had taken to the campaign trail on horseback, wearing cowboy boots, with perhaps moleskin trousers, a denim shirt and a fringed suede jacket to complete the ensemble, it's hard to imagine what the effect might have been - anything from mass male sexual hysteria to a resurgence of the terrifying line-dancing craze, no doubt.
However, it is the "ordinary" Irish politician, perhaps this moment nervously contemplating chances of re-election (if De Wurst comes to De Wurst) who might learn most from Vicente Fox's success. It has become tediously fashionable for our elected representatives to present as "modern" a front as possible: we are supposed to be impressed that they are "looking towards Europe", that they take a vaguely ecumenical view towards matters religious and moral, that they clearly believe our historical past to be a largely embarrassing affair which we would do well to forget. We are supposed to regard them, in short, as a group of sophisticated, sharp, wine-drinking, suave, literate, multi-cultured, articulate, multilingual forward-looking visionaries who know better than we do ourselves what is good for us.
God help their innocence. Most of us know that this view of themselves is complete nonsense. We know where they came from. We know where they grew up. We will make no arse-out-of-trousers comments, but we know exactly how many of them prefer, with their dinner, a couple of pints of stout to a bottle of wine. We know that if some of them entered a Protestant church they would be itching for the rest of the day.
That is not to say we are begrudgers. We recognise ability and achievement, but regret that it is so often accompanied by preening and pretentiousness. We would be quite happy to accept most of our public representatives just as they are, if they would only stop pretending to be something else. And we don't all automatically bow down in awe before some vague pan-European cultural ideal.
If they want to be taken seriously, let them follow Vicente Fox's forthright example and tell us exactly who they are. We know that many of our representatives probably have had good experience of milking cows - and of snagging turnips, planting potatoes and weeding onion patches. That is something to be proud of, so let them turn it to good use. They can even be divorced, though they might not necessarily want to let us know that they have 1.5 million girl-friends.