Some 10 years ago, I did an interview with John Hume for a magazine "down here". The line I took could be described as a crypto-republican position, the essential analysis being that Mr Hume was a misguided reformer who, by his intervention and appropriation of the nationalist agenda, might be said to have stymied the revolutionary energy of the civil rights movement and the consciousness it had created among Northern nationalists.
The article attracted an extremely trenchant letter to the editor, excoriating my views and mounting a strong defence of Mr Hume. It was written by Mary McAleese.
In retrospect, Prof McAleese was right, at least more so than I was. But that is by the way. The most salient point about the letter was that it demonstrated something that has never really been in doubt: that Mary McAleese is a moderate constitutional nationalist, whose views are virtually indistinguishable from those of John Hume and the SDLP.
Of course, everyone involved in the politics of the Republic already knows this. Two months ago, to have attempted to smear Mary McAleese as a crypto-Provo would have been to attract universal condemnation. The kind of "evidence" so reprehensibly leaked into the system in the past week would, outside of the context of partitionist political expediency, have been seen in no more sinister a light than if the same things had been said by John Hume.
It may have slipped the attention of some of our more Southern-fixated politicians and commentators, but the context of the situation in the North has altered radically in the past few years. Even the most moderate of nationalists who live there have come to see Sinn Fein, and in particular Messrs Adams and McGuinness, not as the bogymen of Section 31 Ireland but as the purveyors of hope and the possibility of peace.
Viewed from this perspective, even the most paranoid reading of Mary McAleese's reported remarks could not result in their being interpreted as other than thinly disguised satisfaction that republicanism was finally being brought into the constitutional arena.
But this whole issue is not about honesty or moderation. It is about cynicism, opportunism, sleeveenism, cowardice, stupidity and ignorance. It is about a willingness to jeopardise the peace to forestall the death of Fine Gael.
Let us be clear: if Mary McAleese was a Protestant, there would not be a problem. If the words attributed to her had been uttered about the PUP, they would be seen as signs of "inclusiveness". The attacks on her, in the context of her alleged private remarks about Sinn Fein, are therefore sectarian.
Over the past 25 years, we in the Republic convinced ourselves that there was only one kind of sectarianism: that of nationalists towards unionists. So anxious were we to dissociate ourselves from this that we became oblivious of the beam in our own eye.
Our bending over backwards to recognise the unionist position itself resulted in a form of sectarianism just as corrosive as any other: a sectarianism directed at our fellow Irishmen and Irishwomen in the nationalist community across the Border. Through our elected representatives and media mouthpieces, we adopted an attitude to their nationalist aspirations indistinguishable from that of unionists or the British government.
It can plausibly be argued that our partitionist mentality is primarily what isolated Northern nationalists and drove them into the arms of violent republicanism. If one wished to be kind to John Bruton by interpreting his attitude as the result of a faulty political analysis, one might point out that the central flaw in his approach to the North has been that he believed the Irish government had a duty to reach out equally to the unionist and nationalist communities. This fallacy was the main source of his failure as Taoiseach to come to grips with the peace process.
The primary duty of the Irish government and the people of the Republic is to reach out to Northern nationalists. It is to create, once again, some semblance of an Irish nation, which, by its confidence, cohesion and spirit, would eliminate violence from the process of pursuing the case for Irish unity. Once that has been set in train, all nationalists have a duty to reach out to unionists. But we cannot reach out to unionists having first of all waived our own birthright and that of our fellow Irish citizens. In the light of the progress since the change of tack initiated by John Hume, Gerry Adams and Albert Reynolds, it is not difficult to see how our previous withholding of solidarity from Northern nationalists helped to drive them into the arms of the IRA.
By the same token, once violence is removed from the equation, it should not matter what anyone believes, how extreme their views, how irredentist their position: all that will result is dialogue. That the Irish nation has resumed the pursuit of republicanism will convince hardline republicans to leave down their guns. The advancement of the Irish nation, far from being an obstacle to peace, is therefore an absolute prerequisite for it.
And this is why the attacks on Mary McAleese's nationalism are not merely sectarian but actually stupid and counter-productive. If the best way of ensuring that republican guns remain silent is to restore the collective solidarity of the Irish nation, what better way of doing that than by placing at the head of that nation a President who is an unapologetic nationalist?
To put it another way: what is the objection to Mary McAleese by those who have sought to discredit her? She is, they say, "an unreconstructed nationalist". What is the problem with this? The problem, they say, is that she will not appeal to certain strands of unionism. What sort of unionism? Unreconstructed unionism. It is all right, it seems, to be an unreconstructed unionist. Only unreconstructed natonalists are a problem.
This raises an interesting question: why do we in the Republic not raise such questions about the credentials of leaders in either Britain or the unionist community in the North? Why, for example, was there no outpouring of concern when Tony Blair pronounced himself a unionist? It would, of course, be as ridiculous for us to object to this as it is for unionists to demand that we elect a President who would advance their viewpoint.
It would be strange indeed if either unionists or the British people were to elect someone who was prepared to sell out the Union before entering into any discussion.
And so we find ourselves at a moment of truth. We can choose to return to the darkness of Section 31 Ireland, with its McCarthyism and paranoia, or we can take our courage in our hands. We can complete the surrender of the Irish nation, or we can choose Mary McAleese. One thing is sure: as a result of this past week, we cannot afterwards say that we made our choice in the dark.