McAleese avoids drink from Fijian chalice

There was a tense moment during Mary McAleese's visit to the Columban Fathers' Open Day when, touring the multicultural exhibit of the order's work, she came to a stand representing Fiji. The Fijian representative was inviting visitors to taste a native drink, an offer which Prof McAleese's guide assured her "you may not refuse". Made from the pepper plant, the drink could be described as "interesting" in appearance, and Prof McAleese clearly found the idea hard to swallow.

"Oh God," she was heard to say, perhaps adding under her breath: "let this cup pass from me". But, sensing her discomfort, the Fijian woman did not formally offer the potion, and a diplomatic incident was avoided.

It was a small incident in the course of the day, but an instructive one. Presidential candidates are invited to sip from a lot of chalices during a month-long campaign, and some of them are bound to be poisoned. With the polls suggesting she will win barring an accident, Prof McAleese is being ultracareful with her diet.

She took time out of the visit to the order's Navan headquarters to clarify confusions arising from an interview yesterday on RTE's This Week programme and a report in the Sunday Business Post.

No, she had not voted in the North's local elections, because she was "away on extremely important university business" and failed to make it home to in time. She had, however, voted in the May 1st elections.

Marrying her comment on RTE that how she voted was a private matter, to her reported comment to the Sunday Business Post that she supports the SDLP, she said: "I have always supported John Hume and the SDLP". She continued: "It is utterly inappropriate that people should be asked how they vote in the privacy of the polling booth, but I worked for Eddie McGrady in the election campaign, so you can probably judge for yourself."

On the newspaper's report - citing a Department of Foreign Affairs memo of a conversation with her last January - suggesting she had no interest in participating in the forthcoming elections in the absence of an SDLP-Sinn Fein joint platform, she said the quote had been "totally denuded" of its context. That context was the Redemptorist Peace Initiative led by Belfast priest Father Alex Reid, which was "actively working to create a situation in which a ceasefire could take place".

There were an estimated 2,000 visitors to the Columbans' Open Day and a high proportion of them managed to shake hands with the candidate. But she extricated herself long enough to tour the order's visitor centre, to sign a petition for the cancellation of Third World debt and to receive a brief lesson in Chinese.

This came from Father Tom Murphy, who has worked for the order in Taiwan. He taught her one character, which the Chinese use to describe their own country and which means - more or less - "middle ground". The lesson was probably wasted: the mandarins in Fianna Fail know more about the middle ground than any Chinese, and Prof McAleese has been occupying it solidly since the campaign began.

Everywhere she went yesterday, people said: "we'll pray for you." Once, a woman identified the sole journalist in her entourage and added, with feeling: "We'll pray for you, too."