Our choice of President says something about us: not quite what we said in the general election - yesterday's result was more emphatic - but pointing in the same direction.
The formidable Mary McAl eese has achieved not so much an about-turn in Irish politics as a lurch to the right, towards what some now hope will turn out to be a degree of stability.
For 20 eventful years, the electorate has had to face novelty and change: the end of Civil War politics, core values abandoned, new parties and new alliances formed; referendums first affirming, then rewriting, old rules; tribunals with their alarming insights into public life.
With the blessings of Fianna Fail and the political nous of the Redemptorists, Mrs McAl eese stands for certainty in an uncertain world. Her views could be summarised as Faith of Our Fathers.
She was, beyond doubt, the most highly qualified of those who contested the Presidency: someone whose academic record is matched by a manifest ability to hold her own in debate. Her ambassadorial qualities were cited in the opinion polls as a reason for supporting her.
If there were occasions during the campaign when it was hard to tell where she stood - and she can be extraordinarily evasive - it didn't much matter. The Government and commentators who supported her took her on trust.
Bertie Ahern and his colleagues in Fianna Fail knew that their choice of candidate - and how she fared - was bound to provoke strong feelings in Northern Ireland; they obviously decided that it was worth the risk. Mr Ahern has always believed in taking each day as it comes.
The electorate, too, was ready to take the risk even when reminded of it by Gerry Adams's support for Mrs McAleese; by John Bruton's reasonable intervention in the Dail and by Pat Cox's claim on Questions and Answers that Mr Adams was attempting "to colonise the Presidency".
Mr Bruton's intervention wasn't popular and he's still being accused of using the leaked papers against Mrs McAleese, which isn't true. This helped close ranks in Fianna Fail.
But, in common with the rest of the opposition and most of the commentators, the Fine Gael camp paid little attention to the second, significant source of support for Mrs McAleese.
As I write the results from the constituencies are still trickling in, but it's becoming clearer by the hour that she has had more than the support of reunited Fianna Fail or, as one reporter believed in Kerry North, of FF and Sinn Fein.
Mrs McAleese and Dana Rosemary Scallon seem to have scored most heavily in the same areas. And Dana's rise in the polls clearly continued to the end of a campaign in which she won friends and admiration, even among many who had little time for her nostalgic attachment to "traditional values".
No doubt the votes of Mrs McAleese are even now being added to Dana's to show that "the people of Ireland" or, at least, a majority of those who turned out on Thursday, are in favour of rolling back the progress made here in the last 10, 12 or 15 years.
What form this resistance will take isn't yet clear, though the campaign for another referendum on abortion is already under way and any further progress towards the separation of church and State will be sternly opposed.
One of the features of the lurch to the right has been a succession of assaults on the so-called liberal agenda and, as its critics claim, its representatives in the media.
The object is to put a stop to modernisation, in the hope of returning to that golden age which preceded contraception, divorce and other social changes recognising that this isn't - and never was - a homogenous unit.
But, for politicians, prelates and presidents, the rights of minorities (of all persuasions) are challenging. The point was well made after the Catholic bishops, accompanied by Mrs McAleese, made their famous presentation to the New Ireland Forum in the 1980s.
Sean Mac Reamoinn wrote a commentary then which has now been included in Laylines 1980-1986, a collection published by Dominican Publications.
The bishops had spoken of the rights of minorities, in the North and "under new constitutional arrangements". But, as Mac Reamoinn noted, there remained an area of ambiguity: "While the rights and liberties of `Northern Ireland Protestants' would be persistently defended by the Catholic bishops in any new constitutional arrangement, the full extension of such rights and liberties to Protestants in the Republic - or indeed to other dissident minorities here - would not necessarily be so championed."
Mary McAleese will now have time to reflect on how this and other issues may be approached during her Presidency. Meantime, the parties will brace themselves for the Dublin North and Limerick East by-elections; and strategists will no doubt resume their reviews of the general election - interrupted by the Ray Burke affair and arguments about tribunals.
The most memorable feature of the general election was the sense that we were being invited to take part in a replay of Britain in the 1980s: "It's Payback Time", as the crass slogan went. Now, we must add the peculiarly Irish ingredients of Northern policy and the question which keeps recurring about the distinction between the roles of churches and the State.
The Presidency has no tax deals in its gift, and efforts to fasten attention on the candidates' attitudes to social affairs were dismissed as boring by some of those who ended up complaining at what a rough ride it turned out to be.
On the left, Labour, Democratic Left and the Greens, with the few independent souls who completed the People's Alliance, miscalculated in their choice of candidate.
Adi Roche was, in a sense, the right candidate, young, able and idealistic, in the wrong election: someone chosen to meet the version of old Ireland that Albert Reynolds or Michael O'Kennedy represent; unprepared for the fiercely competitive new right of Mary McAleese.
Mary Banotti was accused of representing the party system, as if to be in or of a party was suspect from the start - a view trotted out by Gay Byrne in some of his regular whinges about taxes - but to be Fine Gael was worst of all.
Dana and Derek Nally reached the anti-party line from different angles: he with an arguable case based on the corruption that has just come to light, she with the claim about the electorate being abandoned by the Government, the Dail and the media.
For the parties at least the by-elections should be easier.