In what was clearly a reference to Mary McAleese, the left-sponsored presidential candidate Adi Roche last week described the prospect of a conservative president as "frightening" and likely to result in the liberal agenda being "sidelined and marginalised".
Since Ms Roche has declared herself opposed to abortion, the only element of the "liberal agenda" which remains to be implemented, this doesn't make much sense. It does, however, draw attention to what is the subtext of this election and the imminent election of Mary McAleese: the beginning of the end of Irish pseudo-liberalism.
What we call liberalism is actually reactionary. It values things which so-called conservatives regard with suspicion, and precisely for this reason. It does not propose an ethical programme for the replacement of what it calls tradition, but rather a piecemeal supplanting of certain selective elements. When was the last time you heard a liberal answering questions about how society might function following a liberal triumph?
The great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas once noted ironically that the proper politics for a conscientious artist was "left-wing under a right-wing government". The same paradox applies to what we call liberalism. Because the so-called liberal outlook is concerned mainly with legitimating individual behaviour, it relies for its limits on values it rejects.
If I wish to pursue a permissive lifestyle, it is infinitely easier to do so in a society in which such behaviour is not pervasive. If everybody is doing the same thing, such activity will not provide me with the same sense of freedom I would enjoy by being one of a small group of "permissives" in an oppressive society.
Moreover, the quality of my "freedom" would depend on other people's "tolerance" and on their agreeing not to exercise their own right to similar licence. I would depend on the cohesion provided by the alleged conservatism of others. If everyone decided to become equally selfish, the result would be a moral and social meltdown.
AND SO, when we speak about a "liberal society" we invoke something that is not just impossible but a contradiction in terms. Irish liberals have never acknowledged this paradox, because they believed the "forces of reaction" would hold the line, relatively speaking, and that they would always be beleaguered voices in an inhospitable regime. What the post-Robinson landscape suggested was that they had a chance of succeeding. Only then did the limits of liberalism become an issue.
Unknown to her pseudo-liberal sponsors, the Robinson presidency raised complex questions in the Irish subconscious. Her campaign of 1990 was highly effective, primarily because it reached out to people with a different outlook. One of her election team afterwards compared it to a train in which each carriage was filled with a different type of voter: one carriage had liberals, another conservatives and so on.
Following her inauguration, there were assiduous efforts to reinterpret her victory as emblematic of a narrow range of orthodoxies. When the writers arrived from Time and Vanity Fair, they were facilitated by Robinson proponents in writing simplistic analyses about a country which had four years earlier rejected divorce but had had a sudden and dramatic change of heart. We were ready to join the modern world.
What this ignored was that most of the people on the train espoused a multiplicity of complex and often contradictory views about everything. Some of them, for example, had no problem with divorce but abhorred abortion. Some were plain sick of party politics. Some were men who thought that electing a woman president would be a good way of rebutting charges of traditionalism or male chauvinism. Some were chauvinists of the female variety. And so on.
Precisely because she was such a perfect president for the moment in which we elected her, we gloried in the extent to which Mary Robinson represented the limits of our desire to have it both ways across a range of issues. Just as her attitude to Northern unionists provided the right antidote to Southern guilt about Provo atrocities, her attitude to the "liberal agenda" gave us a chance of proving our "modernity" in other ways.
The problem was that, although liberals saw her as the start, in the real world she came to represent the outer limits of liberal possibilities. She was so nice, so presentable, so careful, so intelligent, that she took the embodiment of liberal ideas to the limit of our capacity to imagine them.
By electing her, we made a mark to remind ourselves where the dangerous depths of change might begin. We liked the idea of having a president who represented liberal ideas without having the right to express, still less implement, them. We welcomed her necessary fudges and her enforced silences because they allowed us to postpone having to imagine the unimaginable.
But she also exposed the limits of the agenda which her followers proposed, and posed serious questions about our willingness to follow a road without signposts. She represented our unspoken desire to be perceived as liberal without surrendering the fabric of our existing society to a process of unravelling for which there seemed to be few rules or principles. Above all, she posed an unspoken question: what comes next?
This election, for all that the politicians attempted to deliver to us a choice between different variations on the Robinson theme, has subverted the ambitions of pseudo-liberalism. What Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left were suggesting was seven more years of running on the spot. But the Irish Zeitgeist had different ideas, and utilised Fianna Fail's confusion to maximum effect.
The circumstances of Mary McAleese's nomination may have been unsavoury and unfortunate, but the reality of her candidacy has about it an element of synchronicity. President McAleese will reflect the complex, mix-and-match nature of Irish society much more effectively than did President Robinson. She is a nationalist, a Catholic, a feminist and an intellectual, and rightly sees no contradiction between any of these.
In short, she is a free-thinker who does not fit into a neat box. She represents us as we are rather than as we are told we should be. When Dick Spring said she had been on the opposite side from Mary Robinson in many of the great liberal debates, he was replicating the mistake made by John Bruton in relation to Prof McAleese's attitude to Sinn Fein. Both tactics drew attention to aspects of Mary McAleese that the electorate had already comprehended and welcomed.
Her election will throw both the neo-unionist front and the pseudo-liberal consensus into possibly fatal confusion. There will be attempts to suggest that we will have taken a retrograde step; in truth, we will have taken the first tentative steps in a different direction into the future.
But what on earth are we going to say to the woman from Vanity Fair?