McAleese employs pincer movement in Garda bedrock

In a neat pincer movement yesterday, Mary McAleese invaded the two constituencies closest to Derek Nally's heart; first, by infiltrating the bedrock of the Garda Siochana itself at its training college in Templemore, and second, by promising in a statement to "hold out a hand to the victims of crime".

Meanwhile, she kicked into touch a question on the decriminalisation of prostitution or cannabis. "It's not a subject on which I would have chosen to have a discussion at all," she said sweetly. "I haven't heard his [Mr Nally's] explanation for his argument at all. I'd be interested to hear it."

For all their apolitical public stance, they looked mighty pleased to see her in Templemore.

They escorted her down the halls of the bright, beautifully refurbished building (where a succession of Maire Geoghegan-Quinn pictures suggests that she's a bit of a pin-up); into the mock courtroom where the rookies learn their batting skills, into the gym where the lads (and lassie) were practising lifting techniques for unco-operative prisoners and people "in trouble"; down into the audio-visual studio where they learn their media skills; into the library where the learned ones were perusing fat legal tomes.

The lawyer-candidate ran a practised eye along the shelves and noted the lack of a Wylie's Irish Land Law. She fingered Russell on Crime, and for just a microsecond there was a faraway look in her eye: "Oh, Gawd, I'll be traumatised if I don't get out of here."

Introduced to a room full of training officers as Mary Banotti, she left them laughing with the retort: "No, I'm Derek Nally. The Mary Robinson clone". And Supt Pat Murray treated her (and us, thank you) to the kind of lunch fit for a growing boy. Bacon, cabbage and boiled potatoes for some of us, a huge dish of chicken vol au vent for the candidate.

Dressed in a slender burgundy trouser suit, she engaged the young dining recruits in conversations about healthy meals and left an impressed little gang in her wake.

"She has presence," agreed four young fellows. She knew her territory. She had been a guest lecturer in criminology here in the early 1980s.

Outside Hayes Hotel in Thurles, some 250 ardent Fianna Failers waited patiently. They milled around to shake her hand, exclaiming at how "pretty" she was, how tall she was, how all-round Mary Robinsonesque she was.

Karl Daly from Limerick - "The family was FF but I'd go for the person rather than the party" - seemed a tad starstruck.

"She has the Mary Robinson thing about her, the aura, the delivery, the looks. Very similar stature. But she's a better walker. Mary Robinson was a bit puppetised," he said.

Perched high up on the steps of her campaign bus, she delivered her familiar stump speech, viz the "cool head/warm heart . . . sound capacity for wise judgments. . . giving you a chance to get the measure of me. . ." speech.

The woman who, like Charles Haughey, always manages to discover a link with the place she finds herself in, this time found it through "a great old mate of ours", Father Martin Hayes, whom they had come to see in Thurles for many "memorable" holidays.