I'm getting a bit sick of the presidential thing. It has provided an opportunity to see how some of the feelings which swirl around in the national psyche, but can't be properly expressed through party politics, sort themselves out.
The environment doesn't turn all that many people on: abortion isn't the huge issue it once was; the North can still be relied upon to awake passions, and they will polarise where they can along Civil War lines.
That's it so far. But the election story by now is running out of substance. It has become a typical Dublin insider media-people-and-politicians event, full of characters most people in the country never heard of.
What the Presidency is for and what the frontrunners might do with it has come to sound like babble, while the real macho action is on the level of one hard man demanding apologies from another.
The sooner the whole thing is over and someone is comfortably ensconced in the Park the better.
At least then there will be a chance of getting attention back to what is wrong with the Republic of Ireland and to what a President might do about it.
And what is wrong has nothing much to do either with Northern Ireland or with Europe, the arenas where the two front-runners in the election have gained most of their public experience. What is wrong is our own native failure.
This struck me last week when the thought occurred that the next President won't be the only Irish woman (presumably) taking up residence in a period building on Dublin's northside to be kept at some expense by the taxpayer.
The women now filling their wing of Mountjoy Prison to the rafters have that much at least in common with their Head of State.
I went to talk to them the other day. They are symbols of the ethos of this society just as the President is.
Their condition is as expressive of Ireland as who we choose as President.
It is how we treat our nobodies that tells the real story about us, not how well we do a State inauguration of a President.
And the nobodies supply a useful perspective. They are stolid witness to the meaninglessness of the kind of politico-journalistic furore we've been seeing in recent days. No government, no President, makes much difference to them. Far from it.
Mountjoy women's prison is in ways identical Exactly as when Ireland was governed from Westminster.
The only difference the passage of time has made to them is that it has brought them heroin instead of gin and laudanum.
Look at the women candidates in this election. What able and strong women they are, each in her own way, and how resourceful in grasping the opportunities their times have presented them with. These sisters of theirs in Mountjoy have grown up on the same island but are as remote from their existences as if they had grown up on a desert on Mars.
So far this year, 630 women have spent time in Mountjoy. In 1990, the last time there was a Presidential election, the figure for the year was 345.
I'd count more than the 630 if I was counting victims. Over in the men's part of Mountjoy, it was visiting time. There were the abnormally clean and fit-looking young men prisoners, light on their feet in bouncy trainers. There were their girls coming in to see them. Not fit looking at all. Thin and tense under their make-up as they dragged the infants up on visiting-room tables to give their fathers a hug.
Count the young women, or at least the children - the tiny little girls in top-knots and the little boys with their Gazza haircuts.
And count the children of the women in their wing.
"I have five, Miss." "Five."
"Well, four were planned, Miss, but the fifth one - I fell for her by accident, like."
Planned. The woman looking up at me with a drug-gouged face might have been Housewife of the Year - she said "planned" with such pride.
You all know the score. You've heard it 100 times. These jailed women come, with few exceptions, from a handful of extremely disadvantaged inner-city areas. Their parents weren't skilled in parenting. They're not skilled. They have no education and no job ambitions outside child rearing. Their mothers were subject to their fathers. They are subject to their men.
Shelf after shelf in the prison "library" (where two prisoners are living because of overcrowding) have the label "Love Stories". Love. The girls are made vulnerable by the children they have at the earliest opportunity. They have none of the resources of the middle-classes - they don't, for example, get barring orders against violent partners.
They shop-lift, solicit, deal drugs, carry drugs, steal drugs. "I do have family problems, Miss," a sad-eyed beauty says. "When I have drugs, I don't have worries." "Everyone in here is a junkie, Miss," one girl says. Another rounds on her. "We're addicts, not junkies," she says with dignity.
You all know what is needed. Mr John Lonergan, the governor of Mountjoy, spells it out at every opportunity. What is needed is a longterm plan, one that might not show dividends for 12 or 15 years, to intervene in these communities and attempt to transform them.
It calls for a longer forward view than a politician, intent on the next election, will take. The time-scale is presidential. It would take the commitment of a President who has it in her to stumble out of Mountjoy women's prison in tears.
Because the heart-breaking thing about the place is not the little home-made decorations in the cells, or the kindness, like one girl trying to comfort another crying for psypheptone.
It is that this place is good for them. They get peace here.
"You want for nothing, only your freedom."
"It's like a five-star hotel."
They haven't a clue what a five-star hotel is like. But they know they get loving care in Mountjoy.
The governor says: "We could have 100 women in here if I had the space, and 100 who would benefit from it."
Think of that as you go to elect the Head of State. The State she'll be head of is one where the typical woman prisoner is more fortunate to be in jail than out of it.
What kind of State is that?