It is difficult to say with clarity what effect the election of Mary McAleese will have on either the Irish body politic or the wider society. For all the hyperbole about the Robinson Presidency, it really only drew attention to things that were going on anyway, and to a certain degree it led to these being misinterpreted.
Moreover, its impact on Irish politics was virtually nil. To varying degrees, the political parties paid the obligatory lip-service to the Robinson phenomenon, but none of them took any steps to adapt themselves to the new reality they kept telling us about. For the past seven years, albeit through no particular fault of her own, Mary Robinson allowed Irish politics off the hook, by embodying the kind of values she did, and functioning as a talisperson for pseudo-liberal ambitions. Contemplating her Presidency, those who supported such ideas as a way of appropriating the political and cultural discourse tended to see her as sufficient evidence that Ireland had changed for all time.
Those who instinctively opposed such ideas were able to mouth the question: "What more do ye want?" One side rested on its laurels, the other was happy that the liberal monster had been fed. And reality went its often less than merry way.
NONE of the political parties afterwards acquired any of the sensibility which really enabled Mrs Robinson to win the 1990 election. In his infamous and brilliant campaign blueprint, Eoghan Harris urged her to offer a democratic rather than a liberal Presidency, and this is what she did.
She won on her willingness to go out and meet and listen to the forgotten people of Ireland. In both her campaign and, to a lesser extent, her Presidency, she reached out to people in a way that mainstream politics has consistently shown itself incapable of doing.
Many politicians displayed a private scepticism, even a cynicism, about the relevance of the Robinson phenomenon to mainstream politics. In a certain sense, given that Mrs Robinson represented an idealisation of the liberal ethic without having to deal with its practicalities, they were right to do so.
It is interesting to observe the extent to which the values which Mrs Robinson utilised to get elected were present in the 1997 campaign, albeit in a much more fragmented manner. The opportunity to unite Irish society, under one democratic President, had evaporated for the moment, and partly, it must be said, because of Mrs Robinson's own failure to deliver a completely inclusive Presidency.
In retrospect, although Mrs Robinson maintained a fine line between her private views and her public stances, there was always a feeling that she was being used as a stalking horse for a narrow set of orthodoxies. Although this year's election began in a haze of cynicism, it turned out to be nothing like as uninteresting as many of us feared. The all-party thrust for another female Presidency created the likelihood of a fiasco, and the doings and utterings of the candidates were mostly every bit as banal as our worst nightmares might have led us to anticipate.
But underneath there was something more interesting going on. What happened in the end was that the Irish people, presented with a range of candidates of varying colour and personality, got a better chance of articulating something of the indigenous worldview than any of the political puppet-masters could have imagined. Instead of the idealisation of liberal and pluralist values which Mary Robinson represented, we got to choose from five different dimensions of ourselves.
Dana emerged first, as the candidate speaking for and about a constituency which had been abused, denigrated and condescended to for decades. This was the constituency to which Mary Robinson extended a hand of friendship in 1990, and which swung the balance in her favour, but which afterwards felt marginalised by her Presidency. Dana rang a few bells when she spoke of intolerance dressed up as liberalism, and relit a few of the lights of complex everyday life.
Derek Nally, too, spoke a little of the unspeakable when he made mention of the meaninglessness in the lives of many young Irish men. The fact that a great number of men felt alienated from the Robinson Presidency, despite having entered into it with a great deal of enthusiasm and hope, had a great deal to do with the decision of many men not to vote this time. Adi Roche was a victim of the cynicism of and about the Labour Party, but of herself represented a constituency which had also for some considerable time been shunted into a political siding: broadly speaking, the spiritual constituency of the late Raymond Crotty. The problem was that this constituency had found itself treated with less respect than ever during the recent period when Ms Roche's main political sponsor, the Labour Party, was in government, and its leader, Mr Dick Spring, held the critical ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was always inevitable that the election would come down to a two-header tussle between candidates representing stark cultural alternatives. As in 1990, it became a war between the legendary "Two Irelands".
WHAT annoyed the Labour Party guru, Fergus Finlay, I believe, was not the unsustainable idea that The Irish Times had ignored Adi Roche, but that, at a critical stage in the campaign, a minor error occurred which altered its drift. When one of the earliest opinion polls was misinterpreted to put Mary Banotti marginally in front of Adi Roche (it should have been the other way around), the effect was utterly disproportionate to the mistake.
What it did was suggest that Banotti rather than Roche would be the candidate of the Stop Mary McAleese campaign, in the way that, in 1990, Mary Robinson rather than Austin Currie became the candidate of the Stop Brian Lenihan campaign. Mary Banotti became the electoral antithesis of Mary McAleese, who made the running as much for her opponents as for herself. Mrs McAleese's unambiguous nationalism and Catholicism provided the sidewall against which the other candidates hopped what balls they had. The attempt to stop her was crude and disgraceful, but it did us a favour by drawing into the centre of the arena all of the factors at play in this election. What it has shown is that the values which have been denigrated for more than three decades can be the cutting edge of Irish modernity. The Dublin 4 viewpoint is old hat.
Mary McAleese's Presidency is therefore of potentially huge significance, which her critics and opponents will not now be in a position to deny. She will not, of herself, change Irish society, but what she can do is give us the freedom to be who we are, in as unapologetic a manner as she is who she is. This time, I'm not so sure that mainstream politics will be able to sing dumb.