Whoever wins this squalid and increasingly divisive election, the real losers will be all those people who have worked to build a relationship of trust and mutual respect between this State and both communities in Northern Ireland.
I am not referring here to the leaking of Government documents. However, it must be stressed that in changed circumstances - a return to violence in the North, for example - such a breach of confidentiality would put lives at risk. One thinks of the contacts which the Department of Foreign Affairs has among loyalists, or of civil servants and senior figures in the legal system who have been highly critical in the past of the administration of justice and how they must be feeling about the possibility of further revelations.
More immediately, however, let us consider the choice which now faces the voter in next week's presidential election who has a modicum of concern about the impact which the result will have on opinion north of the Border. If, as seems likely, Mary McAleese wins, her victory will be seen by very many unionists as deliberately ignoring the worries about her candidacy that have been expressed by leaders of their community.
These criticisms of Ms McAleese's political record and of her style have not come from David Trimble or the Rev Ian Paisley. The most serious concern has been expressed by the likes of John Alderdice, who has no need to prove his commitment to promoting the interests of peace on this island. Geoff Martin, the notably brave editor of the News Letter, is another example. On the BBC's Spotlight programme he said there were unionists who liked Ms McAleese, but he had yet to meet one who wanted her to become President. "They think she will cement barriers rather than build bridges," he commented.
Yet if Ms McAleese is defeated the effect on Northern nationalists will be equally traumatic. They will believe she has been rejected by voters in the Republic because she is a Northern Catholic who has expressed the views of her own community with great honesty. The damaging row over her attitude to Sinn Fein will be cited as evidence of a wilful ignorance and/or lack of sympathy on the part of citizens of this State for the life experience of Northern nationalists.
Certainly her views on, say, the political success of Sinn Fein reflect exactly those of many moderate, middle-class nationalists, particularly in the wake of Drumcree 1 and 2. To present her as a Sinn Fein supporter on this evidence is absurd, a point well made by an Irish News cartoon which showed the candidate being cross-examined by a posse of Southern critics who were asking the question: "Ms McAleese, are you now or were you ever guilty of being a nationalist?" A telephone poll of the paper's readers showed 84 per cent favouring Mary McAleese for President. Her nearest rival was Dana at 7 per cent.
Like it or not, Mary McAleese is the Northern naionalist candidate for the Park. This goes a long way to explain what may well turn out to be the much more serious fallout from the leaked documents.
Here are a few fragments. For almost 30 years John Hume has remained determinedly aloof from the party politics of this State. Even when his name was canvassed for the Presidency he made it clear that he would only go forward as an agreed candidate. His task in life has been to achieve a lasting settlement in the North and for this he has needed the support of the government of this State, whatever party was in power. Now he is widely perceived as endorsing the Fianna Fail/PD candidate for the Presidency.
The SDLP leader will doubtless dispute this interpretation, say that he has been solely concerned to defend the Redemptorist Order's work for peace against the outrageous attacks that had been made on it. But Mr Hume is an enormously skilled and wary politician. He must have known that his intervention would be seen as a vote support for Ms McAleese as the candidate who best represents the interests of Northern nationalists.
Brid Rodgers, whose comments in one of the leaked documents gave a perfectly reasonable assessment of the political rivalry between Sinn Fein and the SDLP, has also been dragged into the controversy, to defend the absolute purity of all those involved in the Redemptorist mission and, by extension, to commend the credentials of the Government's candidate for the Presidency.
When Ms McAleese was first selected by Fianna Fail I wrote in this space that I was "frankly shaken" by the depth of hostility with which unionists regarded her. It is the combination of her strong nationalist attitudes with support for conservative Catholic attitudes that they seem to find most threatening. "Rome rule wrapped in a green flag," one unionist friend remarked.
They also find it difficult to understand why Dana is grilled so vigorously on her supposedly fundamentalist defence of Catholic values, while Ms McAleese has hardly been questioned on her very similar views.
I've been asked why the story in last Sunday's Observer, which highlighted Ms McAleese's criticism of the Supreme Court's decision in the X case as "contradicting the express will of the Irish people, as well as decades of medical and legal practice, by permitting the direct abortion of the unwanted child", has not been followed up by the Irish media.
What has been so dispiriting about this campaign, on both sides of the political divide, has been the fact that the party leaders seem to feel no responsibility about what impact this election will have on attitudes in the North. Bertie Ahern must have known there was a considerable risk that Mary McAleese would prove to be a divisive candidate.
In the past Fianna Fail has always been extremely careful to ensure that any Northerner appointed to the public life of this State would be a bridge-builder, capable of reaching out to both sides. In this instance it simply suited the party's immediate short-term interests - the swift and efficient dispatch of Albert Reynolds - to select Mary McAleese as its candidate for what we are constantly reminded is the highest office in the State.
John Bruton's conduct during the course of the election campaign has been, if anything, even more depressing. The former Taoiseach has learnt the hard way about the subtle ambiguities within Northern nationalism. He knows that the attempts to smear Ms McAleese as a supporter of Sinn Fein were, at the very least, a gross distortion of views attributed to her in the various Department of Foreign Affairs documents.
His insistence on pursuing this line of attack has now opened up tribal divisions, in this State as well as the North, which most of us had hoped were a thing of the past. He has done Mary Banotti no favours in pitching the campaign at a level which has now branded her as a "partitionist" candidate.