Banotti says some of her rivals are hiding their pasts

Presidential candidate Ms Mary Banotti has accused some of her rivals of hiding their pasts for the purposes of the present election.

In Waterford at the weekend, she said it was "amazing" that what had happened to some candidates before they ran for election was "disappearing out of the discussions."

Ms Banotti said that, in contrast, she would bring the "sum total" of her own life and experience to the job. She had a long track record on many of the issues to which Mrs Mary Robinson devoted her time, she told a Fine Gael fund-raising dinner.

"It's a futile exercise to try to clone Mary Robinson. I'm bringing my own record to this election. But I'd be interested to hear what contributions the other candidates made in their lives."

The Fine Gael candidate was resuming her canvass on Saturday after a two-day break because of the road accident in which her entourage was involved in Co Tipperary last week.

On Friday evening Ms Banotti attended the removal of the elderly local woman who died in the crash.

Speaking in Waterford town hall, she said the past week had been a momentous one: "We have to keep going, with sadness in our hearts but also with optimism."

She was "immensely buoyed up" by the support she was getting, she told the Lord Mayor, Mr Tom Cunningham.

On the streets, many shoppers took the time to sympathise with the candidate over the crash. Dressed in a bright yellow jacket and refreshed from two days' rest, Ms Banotti ploughed her way enthusiastically through the shopping malls and rain-drenched streets.

Her decision not to use posters won praise from Mr Cunningham, who pointed out that Waterford was aiming to win the prize of a £1 million advance factory in return for becoming a litter-free city.

The Banotti campaign now has its own bus, which carted the candidate and local TDs through the city, at one point squeezing past a group of students on a sponsored bed-push for Chernobyl Ambulance Aid.

At the regional hospital, the former nurse toured the neo-natal and paediatric wards with Ms Margaret Spencer, who works with children with AIDS in Romania. The two women first met in 1991, when Ms Spencer needed political help to overcome local bureaucracy and looked up the MEP in Strasbourg.

"Mary was fantastic. She put on the wellies, came over to us in three feet of snow, and set up meetings with the politicians and ministers in Bucharest," said Ms Spencer.

Throughout the day, Ms Banotti returned to now-familiar arguments: her concern that the office of President was being trivialised; the President's responsibility to "maintain the Constitution" rather than changing it; the importance of her experience in representing Ireland as an MEP; concern about the growing divide between the haves and have-nots in society.

But she admitted to an Italian woman journalist that the "caring" word was becoming debased. And, unexpectedly, she revealed that she shares with Dana a career in the Catholic media.

Apparently, Ms Banotti worked for Vatican Radio during her time in Rome in the mid-1960s.

"I worked on programmes broadcast to Africa at the time of the war in Biafra. I always felt they could have done more to assist at the time; they certainly had the network."

Rome was a beautiful place then, she reminisced. "I still love it, even if my marriage there did not survive."

Campaign manager Mr Phil Hogan TD claimed she has clocked up 6,500 miles so far, compared with 1,500 by Prof Mary McAleese.

With a large, possibly sincere, smile, he exclaimed: "We're at where we would like to be. Only earlier."