Either a Mary, a Mary, a Rosemary or an Adi will follow the previous Mary to what is now becoming not so much Aras an Uachtarain as Aras Bhean a' Ti. One of the Marys even had the foresight to change her name to sound like the house where she now hopes to live, and long before women presidential candidates were popular or profitable. If Mary Banotti does make it to the Park she will be the first Fine Gael President ever, though certainly not the first with a Mediterranean name.
But this is the year for presidential moulds to be broken. Of the 2,688,316 voters in the Republic, only two have been endorsed as candidates.
One of them works in Brussels, the other is famous for her work in the Ukraine. The other two candidates are from the United Kingdom, where one of them lives. The other lives in Alabama.
Mary Robinson's candle for the exiles, which has been burning in the Aras for the past seven years, has been extinguished. No wonder. A good part of the Irish female diaspora appears to be trying to muscle back into the old viceregal lodge.
Residency in the park for the next seven years will depend on a contest between four mna na hEireann, and all four of them can make out strong cases in the morality stakes.
Mary McAleese, the Queen's University pro-vice-chancellor who was yesterday named as Fianna Fail candidate, is perhaps the first presidential candidate to have talked about her family planning, a subject on which Eamon de Valera, Douglas Hyde and other male candidates were curiously reticent.
She once told an interviewer that her husband Martin had great self-control. Good man, Martin.
Both of them dislike contraceptive tablets, pills and devices, she once said, preferring - for themselves - `natural' methods. But she added: "I don't want to ram rhythm down people's throats."
If she did there'd always be Martin to remove it, if need be. He is a dentist who seems to dislike the press. One wonders if he has many journalist patients.
Like the competition, she is a remarkably single-minded woman, as a bruised and astonished Albert Reynolds can this morning testify. She followed Mary Robinson through the Reid Professorship of International Law at TCD, before more recently being appointed pro-vice-chancellor at Queen's University.
Mary Banotti was born Mary O'Mahony, and acquired her current name from an Italian doctor who is now lost to the mists of history. It is one of the curious new conventions of Irish political life that a woman's past remains there. Would a male politician so easily escape inquiry about a missing spouse?
Like the first Mary, she has a long record in active feminism, and also in social work, where she first became eminent. Bhean na Ti used to have a huge carved wooden phallus on her mantelpiece at home.
Rosemary Brown, who became famous 27 years ago as Dana but who is known privately as Rosemary Scallon, is, like Mary McAleese, strongly anti-abortion. She seems to be under the impression that the Constitution outlaws abortion, an opinion the Supreme Court does not share with her. Her opposition to abortion seems to be her reason for seeking a home for herself and her husband Damien in the Park.
Damien penned the song Totus Tuus for a visitor whose presence in the Park was slightly more fleeting than she hopes hers will be - Pope John Paul II in 1979. "There's nothing in the Constitution to say I can't sing as President," she has already warned the Irish people.
The fourth woman in contention for the presidency, in common with Mary McAleese at Trinity, follows in some footsteps of the former incumbent. Mary Robinson won the Irishwoman of the Year award, as did Adi Roche - before going on to be named European of the Year.
She had already been named Carer of the Year, for her work with the child-victims of Chernobyl. She was before that active in the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Is the nomination of these four women, only one of whom has ever stood successfully before in an election of any sort, a sign that the presidential race is becoming a morality contest, with a publicly visible Ability To Care the prime requisite for our prime citizen?
Following Mary Robinson's espousal of the Fifth Province of Tolerance and Empathy, Mary McAleese is promising a Presidency of Embrace and A Caring Outreach.
Quite.
There are other requirements, over and above conspicuous virtue, which the inhabitant of the Aras must possess. But conspicuous virtue, and caring womanhood, are what the four candidates have in common. It sounds oddly like politically correct gender stereotyping for the 21st century; sexual Arasment, if you like.